Seating Arrangements

Two weeks before the wedding my mother and I sat down to plan out the seating arrangements. A process which apparently requires huge pieces of paper taped to the wall, countless sticky flags, markers, excel spreadsheets, and a lot of patience.

We made sure to call all parties involved in the wedding planning with questions about table companion compatibility and within a couple of hours we ended up with this

and this

After the seating chart was finalized I got to work on the place cards. My wonderful friend/coworker gifted me with her left over place cards (she lost them and then found them after her wedding) which I promptly put in a safe place, moved that safe place to my desk at work so I wouldn’t forget them, and then forgot them. I wanted to get the place cards done so I turned to option number two, the matching set that came with our invitations. The only problem was that they were individually printed with a design and had to be hand-written. I started writing names and table numbers just to see how it would turn out and before I knew it I was done.

I resurrected my dinner selection stamps and got to stamping. I referred to my food choice spreadsheet and divided the place cards out into ‘meat’, ‘crab’, and ‘veggie’ piles.

The stamping took no time at all and turned out great.

The whole place card process took just about two hours and is completely done!

Our Songs

Picking songs for a wedding reception is not easy. You of course have the first dance as a married couple, the father daughter dance, and the mother son dance. WHO KNEW there was more to it than that? You have to pick a cake cutting song, a bouquet toss song, a garter toss song, a bridal party introduction song, your introduction song, cocktail hour music, and dinner music. It’s massively overwhelming.

John and I both asked our mother/father respectively to pick out their top three songs for our dances with each of them, we narrowed it down from there.

For our first dance song we picked our top eight after a couple of hours on youtube and itunes listening, choosing, and narrowing down. We decided to pit each song up against another in a single elimination playoff type bracket (can you tell the groom to be was involved more than a little bit in this project?). We listened to the songs back to back picking our favorite (often times after some discussion about danceability, lyric choice, etc) and ended up with a championship round between two very different songs.

Then we decided to dance. And almost simultaneously decided to get some dancing lessons via youtube. The dancing experiment turned out a little something like this:

Bride: “No its back shift slide step”

Groom: “No, shift slide step back”

(More video watcing)

Bride: “HE CHANGED IT why is he doing something different?!!”

(Trial ballroom dancing)

Bride: “This isn’t right”

Groom: “BUT we look good!”

We “danced” to each song in the final and ultimately chose the one that had the better lyrics, was easier to dance to, and that we both loved.

Luckily having a playoff song series gave us seven other songs to use for things like cake cutting, tossing of both bouquets and garters, and intro songs.

We dragged it out much longer than we needed to but had an amazing night laughing, dancing, and youtubing together as a soon to be married couple.

Hair (mis)Trials

For some reason I took little to no interest in booking a hair and makeup artist for my wedding. So in early April I decided that I should probably start looking and possible set up a hair trial or two to find the right stylist. My ambivalence toward the process translated into a less than enthusiastic internet search and a hair trial appointment for April 18th. My mother accompanied me. I did the trial…my hair was weird, and my makeup was…interesting. Somehow the sweet-talking stylist convinced me that we could change everything on the day of the wedding and that I just needed to update her via email with any changes that I wanted made.

This is about where I should have been seeing the huge red flag and hearing warning sirens and putting on the brakes BUT instead I forked over the ridiculous booking fee and “reserved” my wedding date. My inexplicable lackluster attitude towards hair and makeup had just cost me a tiny fortune. Fast forward two weeks and there’s no sign of a contract from the company, I email and get a response days later with a completely incorrect and contradictory contract. It is at the point that I also learn that the stylist has booked another wedding on my wedding morning. The contract was missing half of the services that I requested, I learned there would be no makeup artist just my hair stylist doing makeup, AND that the booking fee was simply to hold my date and that no part of it would be applied towards the cost of my services.

WAIT WHAT?! I can’t even begin to explain to you how bewildered I was. I paid her to reserve my day exclusively, which she didn’t do, and to show up. That’s it?! Fast forward two weeks riddled with back and forth emails, unreturned voicemails, and a third draft of a contract that was STILL wrong, at this point we decided to kiss our non-refundable booking fee goodbye and move on.

My wonderful mother/wedding planner/amazing human being tirelessly researched local hair and makeup artists who would perform services on location, had wonderful reviews, and still had availability on June 2nd. Miraculously she found a hair and makeup TEAM and we book a trial for May 24th (as in 10 days before the wedding). The trial went perfectly, my hair was wonderful my makeup was flawless and I left completely happy with the results. The uncertain feeling about changing hair styles on the day of and having ridiculous makeup were completely absent from this trial. I left feeling good about EVERYTHING.

I literally booked my last wedding vendor a week before my wedding..yikes.

Bachelorette Parties

Yes, you read that right, parties. Logistically having two bachelorette parties made the most sense. One was a one night local event that occurred the night of my bridal shower and the other was a weekend out of town at the beach. My traveling out of town friends/bridesmaids could come to the local party without having to make travel arrangements into the area again for the beach party. It was the perfect plan, AND I got to be a bachelorette twice.

The first bachelorette party took place in Arlington. There may or may not have been dancing, drink, and an occasional nutella laced crepe at 3:00AM.

Apparently I was very excited.

The beach bachelorette party took place about a month later and was a fun filled weekend extravaganza in Ocean City. The first night we left the hotel with no real idea where we were going. I said ‘let’s walk left’ and as luck would have it there was a dive karaoke bar just a couple of blocks to the ‘left’. We of course dove right in and with the courage of alcohol performed many wonderfully off key renditions of all of our 1990’s radio favorites including but not limited to The Real Slim Shady (this happened more than once during the 3 hours we were there), Barbie Girl, and The Spice Girls.

There are videos which thankfully will never grace the presence of the world wide web. After getting our karaoke legs warmed up we decided that every single person singing at the bar would LOVE for us to back up sing/and or dance for them. I’m not kidding when I say we were on stage for a solid hour. It was hilarious.

Day two consisted of the cutest bachelorette party tank tops in the world, beach time, a trip to Seacrets (a wonderfully awesome bar serving drinks on the water) during the day, happy hour back at the hotel, and then back to Seacrets at night.

It was an amazingly ridicul

Our Final Walk Through

About five weeks before the wedding we met our caterer and lighting vendor at our wedding location to go over final details regarding the big day. We planned out table arrangements, arrival times, lighting design, and went over a rough timeline of events.

We walked the venue and mapped everything out, added a half-hour onto our rental to allow everyone enough time to set up without having to be in the same space simultaneously.

AND we saw some deer (I asked them politely to please not eat any flowers near the ceremony site)

It was an hour well spent and now we can do things like tape huge pieces of paper to the wall to finalize the wedding timelines.

Girly Bridal Things

And just like that the wedding is only one week away. It’s amazing how fast time flies in the final month.

Rewind one month and we’re at my glorious bridal shower brunch. I am obsessed with brunch. It’s weird, i know but brunch is hands down my favorite meal ever. Making my bridal shower a brunch theme at a brunch time was a no brainer for me and luckily my maid of honor happily agreed. I wasted no time pinning my little heart out on Pinterest with millions of brunchy ideas. The shower itself was seriously more than I could have asked for. Everything was amazing. There was champagne/mimosa bar:

Tons of delicious food:

GAMES!

And a lot people who I love and care about:

We did the whole present thing (don’t worry I sent out my thank you cards). 

And of course my seriously awesome artistic and crafty friends managed to take a million mismatched ribbons and make a rehearsal bouquet complete with ribbon wrapped stem. Unbelievable. 

I couldn’t have asked for a better bridal shower, my maid of honor is absolutely amazing. 

Crafts!

Round one of craft trials took place in August. Round two took place last week! I tried out some alternative methods for creating candle holders enhanced with lace and managed to produce some semi-adequate results. I purchased some 1.5 inch lace ribbon and glued it to the bottom half of the candle holder.

I tried hot glue first. It was a huge failure. The hot glue was visible through the lace and even more visible when the lights were off and the candles were lit.

My second glue attempt was with clear Tacky Glue. I applied it with a paintbrush It went on clear and was invisible with the lights on as well as with the lights off. One problem, it didn’t dry very quickly. I soon realized that leaving the lace Tacky Glued to the holders unsupervised and unsupported left them extremely prone to gravity and made them an overall failure as a project. I elected to loosely tie some extra invitation ribbon around the lacey area. This worked much better than my previous idea to remain constantly vigilant of any gravity induced slippage for the six hours while they dried.

I tried some different and “unique” approaches to enhance lace coverage:

But ultimately stuck to the original method to reduce seam visibility and increase consistency between candle holders. I made three, tied them up with ribbon, hoped for the best, and went to bed. To my absolute delight, I awoke to perfectly laced and DRY candle holders. Three down, 57 to go!

THE Tuxes

Remember back in September when we stopped by the tux store to make some preliminary tux color and style decisions? Well we hadn’t done anything remotely tuxedo related since then. John got all seven groomsmen and my father on board for a Sunday night party at Joseph A. Banks to knock out the measuring, down paymenting, and ordering of all of our ceremony tuxes. The Thursday before the tux extravaganza I popped over to J.A.B. to finalize the style, color and texture of every piece of the chosen tuxedo. When I got there I was handed this massively overwhelming gem:

I was told to flip through it and pick out vest/tie colors and textures. John and I had previously decided on having the vest match the coat/pants exactly to create a cohesive look with or without the jacket on (apparently boys don’t like to wear tux jackets in hot June weather). J.A.B. didn’t have a sample or a fabric swatch of the jacket available at the store and matching vest swatches to a picture of the tux wasn’t cutting it. They offered to have a sample jacket sent to the store (3-6 business days) but of course my procrastinating self had waited until the last minute AGAIN. I chose something that I thought might possibly match it and was told that when the sample jacket came in we could switch the order to something that matched better.

Unfortunately, I left the store in a semi-panicked state. After flipping through the swatch book for 40 minutes I was quite certain that they didn’t even offer a close to matching vest color and the thought of ordering something before I could see it in person absolutely terrified me (I’m wasn’t being dramatic at all THESE ARE TUXEDOS WE’RE TALKING ABOUT).

After talking to John about the tux fiasco we decided to head over to Men’s Warehouse to see if they had a sample jacket in store or had a jacket swatch or could get one sent over sooner than 3-6 business days. The next day we walked into MW and were blessed with this glorious sight

John was clearly thrilled.

Can’t you just see the excitement? I, on the other hand, was bouncing around in my chair absolutely thrilled with the existence of this jacket sitting inches away from me (seriously, it doesn’t take much). MW had all of the sample tuxes, vests, and ties on site. We picked all three out and got John measured.

Two days later all eight of the boys showed up on time to place their orders and get measured as well.

Two months out, and we have tuxes!

On a different note, the bridesmaid’s dresses came in! Here’s a sneak preview:

Navy and Gold!

Fitting #2

Only two months to the day until our wedding!

Last month I had my second dress fitting. The seamstress had starting working on the additions we discussed at the first dress fitting and had taken the dress in the appropriate number of inches (as measured in January). The additions were pinned on (nothing permanent yet) but they absolutely elevated the dress to a completely different level. I couldn’t believe how she had taken my, expertly articulated (yea right) description of what I wanted and translated it so perfectly into existence. The dress is truly one of a kind now.

My prancing a twirling had to be kept to a minimum due to the hundreds of tiny blood thirsty pins protruding menacingly from the dress, BUT I managed to celebrate my excitement over the dress’s beautiful transformation standing still and bobbing happily in place (I’m sure I didn’t look ridiculous at all).

The dress has to be taken in again (female readers will share in my absolute joy over this development) way to go half-marathon training, so my third and last fitting is scheduled for a week before the wedding. That’s only SEVEN days before actual big day. That makes me entirely and absolutely nervous but it’s the best and only way to ensure a perfect fit on the day of.

I WISH that I had pictures to share of the fitting but, alas, that would ruin the wedding day surprise. So instead I’ll leave you with this, an expertly cropped, ridiculously tilted picture of my dressing room door. You’re welcome.

You’re Invited

After literally months of receiving invitation samples in the mail, ordering more samples, and being extremely conflicted about making a final decision we finally ordered invitations. I originally wanted to go with letterpress invitations but when it came down to price there was no way that I could justify the extra expense (we’re talking THREE times as much as all of the other invitations in the world).

After a lot of back and forth and some frustration (I may or may not have threatened to not order any invitations at all EVER) we managed to sit down and make a decision. We ended up picking one of the styles that was in the very last batch of samples that I ordered at the beginning of February. Remember when I promised not to order any more samples back in OCTOBER? Apparently I have no sample ordering self control (and an extreme procrastination problem). We ordered and received our invitations from http://www.weddingpaperdivas.com earlier this month. We hit a small snag when the order arrived sans our chosen and paid for inner envelopes. A quick call to customer service, a transfer to a supervisor, and some extreme haggling later we had inner envelopes being overnighted and 10% off our invitation order. For envelopes a day late I’ll take it.

We got to work labeling the response card envelopes, and putting stamps EVERYWHERE. Our invitations required a lot of assembly which included the use of scrapbooking glue, ribbon, stickers, and our custom made rubber return address stamp.

It took two nights of solid invitation assembly but we got it all done.

The invitation fun didn’t end there. I basically guessed how many invitations we would need to send out. Sure I had an excel spreadsheet that told me exactly how many invitations I would need but during some momentary lapse of practical decision making, I placed our invitation order without double checking.

We knew that a couple of our guests had moved since we sent our save the dates out. It took us (read: me the procrastinator) two weeks to sit down and finalize the address labels for the invitations. So while they were assembled mid-March, they sat naked on our table without address labels until the end of the month. After finalizing all of the addresses I printed them out onto labels, well not all of them. I ran out of the labels that I bought for the engagement party/save the dates with 10 address labels left unprinted. I had to make a next day trip to Office Depot to buy 300 more (yea that’s the smallest increment of clear laser printer labels that you can buy, who knew). Luckily, after all was said and done everyone on the list got an invitation with only TWO to spare.

Now that the invitations are out it’s super officially official, we’re getting married in just over two months!