I am a craft attempting, comfort food to healthy recipe cooking, sometimes exercising, adventure loving museum curator with a passion for politics, history, my husband, and our cat Mr. Moose.
During our trip back to Iowa, we had the chance to meet with our florist. My family has been using Carmen's for everything for years and years, to the point where I'm pretty sure if my dad forgets to order for my mom's anniversary, they call him and remind him.
The best part of working with them is that they already know me. Our particular florist, Debbie, is someone I've known for years. Her daughter and I graduated high school together, and were involved in church youth group a long time ago. It is one of those nice, comfortable, easy relationships with someone you've known forever.
Debbie and I chatted via email for a few weeks prior to our visit. I'd pinned some ideas of flowers that I'd liked and sent her a list, and she let me know what their supplier would be able to provide during our wedding. Unfortunately, the downside of an August wedding is that a couple of my favorites, peonies and tulips, are going to be too hard to get. But, Debbie is going to bring some awesome flowers. Here are some of the photos I sent her for inspiration:
We walked through a whole list of who will get what. My bouquet will be mostly blush colored with some ivory, and the girls will have mostly ivory with some blush, and both will have the brunia berries and lambs ear or dusty miller. Our mom's are getting wrist corsages, as is my brother's girlfriend, who will hopefully also be our ceremony musician.
She also had some fantastic ideas for our centerpieces. Awhile back, I saw this picture and fell in love:
Seriously, how adorable is that? My parents have been assigned the task of gathering books. I had planned on buying gold plate stands to prop the books up, but when I showed Debbie this, she had a better idea. A few days after we got back home from our trip, she sent me this:
I love how she incorporated the book into the arrangement. These were just the flowers she had available, not necessarily what she'll be using for real. We talked with her about adding more flower, less greenery. We're also going to hopefully do half of the tables like this, half with a large manzanita branch as the focal point. When I go back in April, I'll meet with her again and see what we can do.
Mr. C's mom is awesome, and gave it to me in an awesome cutting board in the shape of my beloved home state. Mr C. and I both decided that we'd prefer to keep it looking pretty, so he hung it up over our sink in a place of honor.
Awesome, right?
This is both a chance to show off my awesome gift, and also a lead-in to what Id id over my Christmas vacation. We started off in CT at Mr. C's family family for "Fakemas" and too much junk food, then headed back to my homeland from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day. It was awesome, and we also got SO much wedding planning done! Over the next few days, I'll break down the various appointments/tastings/trials that we had to catch you up, but for now, here's an overview:
In addition to all of that, I also got my likely wedding shoes (yay!), got most of the work done on the wedding website, and have a design for our Save the Date magnets that is now awaiting a final proof of an engagement photo before heading off to the printers.
If you'll recall from a few posts back, Mr. C and I recently attended the wedding of some friends in South Carolina, and the bride gave me her bouquet at the end of the night. I was determined to do something nice with it, but hadn't decided between a couple of options.
Well, the groom is in town this week and won't be again before Christmas, so it was now or never. I decided to start with the ornament, and if I had extra petals I'd talk to the groom and see if the jewelry is something his bride would like.
I've been keeping my eyes open for awhile trying to find clear ornaments. Hah. You'd think with all of the shops putting Christmas things out before Halloween that it wouldn't be tough, but after visiting three local big boxes I ended up driving to the nearest Hobby Lobby. I picked up the ornaments (50% off!) and honestly that's really all I needed. Initially I was thinking of doing one big ornament, but once I got started I realized I had plenty to fill four pretty decent size ornaments. I am going to try to get some ribbon to tie to the hooks so they can hang them a little more festively, but all in all this is a relatively inexpensive craft.
One nearly completed ornament
Mr. C was off at his second to last grad school class of the semester tonight, so I took some time to put everything together. Really it was pretty simple. I'd put her bouquet into a vase to let the flowers dry after the wedding, so I carefully broke it down. There were two colors of roses, some lilies, some sort of dark berry, these little green globes, and a couple of different sizes of leaves. She also had little red crystals in the bouquet, so I put one of each of those in each ornament. It took me about half an episode of Once Upon a Time.
Strips of invitation and curled hearts
I also saved their invitation, and cut it into thin strips to make into little hearts. Each strip I folded into half, then wrapped around the skinniest part of a mechanical pencil. Initially I thought I'd hot glue the pieces of the heart together, but I think they are staying together well enough on their own.
The Moose really enjoyed helping clean up the spare paper
All in all, I am very very happy with how this turned out. We're meeting up with the groom on Wednesday, and I can't wait to give this to him. Originally I was going to wrap it in Christmas paper as a surprise, but I want to make sure he knows what it is so he packs it carefully for the trip back home.
This weekend, we had the pleasure and the honor of heading to Greenville, South Carolina to celebrate the wedding of GM J and his new wife. The wedding party was just the siblings of the bride and groom, so Mr. C was an usher. They were a gorgeous couple, and the wedding was so much fun.
Two things really came out of the wedding for me. First, I feel reinvigorated for planning our own. Mr. C went down to South Carolina on Wednesday, and MaidoH A and I followed on Friday. On the trip back up, she and I had a four hour layover in Newark, and we spent a good hour of it talking about our wedding. We also walked through the duty free shops testing out perfumes. I think I may fall prey to the wedding day scent trend. What was nice though, is that after a few months of a lot of frustrations with work and ignoring wedding planning to be excited again. Some of the guests at this wedding will also be at ours!
The other piece of it was a very touching moment. The bride surprised me and handed me her bouquet at the end of the reception. I was honored and thrilled, and definitely carried it around with me the rest of the evening. Now I have their beautiful bouquet and Mr. C's boutonniere, and I'm trying to find something special to do with them that I can send back to the couple. I have two ideas, and I may do both.
I found this option online this morning while I was browsing around, and I really like it. You send in dried flowers from the bouquet, and they are made into beautiful pieces of jewelry. The best part is that they keep any extra beads for awhile, so if the bride really likes it, they can have jewelry made for their mothers. It is something I think Mr. C's mom would like to have.
This one was my original plan, basically from the moment she handed me the flowers. I saw it on Pinterest quite awhile ago, but really like it. You take petals from the bouquet and very gently put them inside of a large clear Christmas ornament. I like this one too because she has some very pretty crystals intermixed with the flowers, and I think this would look awesome on their Christmas tree.
New York indeed.
PS - I know Mr. C can sing. He sings in the car, he sang in the choir back at reunion, when we go to church and stand next to each other, I hear him sing. But. BUT. Oh my gosh. They had karaoke at the reception, and the groom finally convinced Mr. C to sing "New York, New York." Gotta love my Yankee. But, holy bovine, folks. Here's a photo of me literally fanning myself off because of the waves of hotness pouring off of my crooning fiance.
When people say wedding, I almost always think of this song from My Best Friend's Wedding:
To me, wedding planning so far has been lots of wishing, praying, hoping, and planning. Luckily I've got an incredible team in my corner. They're incredibly supportive, and I can bounce ideas off of them all the time. Eventually, I'll do posts on each of them, so you can see how lucky I've been to have this network that is there to help me out, listen to my ideas, and call me out when I'm being an idiot.
That said, Mr. Burg, MaidoH A, and MatronoH K often get sent pictures or blogs of things that I've found that are awesome. I try to limit myself to things I'll actually be able to use, but every now and then fancy things that are nowhere near our budget catch my eye. We're exceptionally lucky and are receiving financial support from my parents and from Mr. C's, but I don't want to blow their money.
But, as is bound to happen, every so often something sparkly or fun or just downright amazing catches my eye and makes me wish I didn't have student loan bills or you know, basic living expenses so I could spend all of my money on these things. In addition to the finances, some things just seem logistically difficult. Especially when you consider we're in NY and the wedding is in Iowa. Makes things tough sometimes, but that doesn't mean a girl can't dream. Here's a few prime examples:
Take for instance this lovely, elegant statement necklace from BHLDN. It is pearl and blush, which are my two accent colors and would look AWESOME with my dress. The only problem. $480. I can't really justify spending $20 less than my wedding gown on the necklace to wear with it. It sure is pretty though.
Ah, the flower arch. With big, beautiful, puffy, soft, gorgeous flowers that are probably peonies and we're getting married in August. Now, I haven't totally given up on the idea of a floral arch, and Mr. C actually suggested the idea, but I have a hunch this would take a big chunk out of our budget.
This is from the same wedding as the arch from above. Can you tell that I love this wedding? Visually it just has a lot of the softness and elegance that I love, plus that blue color is exactly what I'm aiming for. And I adore the look of this lace overlay on the tablecloth, but yeah, custom designed table linens are WAY out of the budget.
Bakery Beauty Dress via Modcloth (no longer available)
Oh boy. There are some really freaking adorable little white dresses out there. And how adorable are they for things like bridal showers, bachelorette parties, and rehearsal dinners? I wish I could afford one dress for each wedding related event. After all, how many times in your life are you a bride? But I really don't think I can justify spending the money on a new dress for each event. Perhaps this will be a little splurge where I find one dress that will work for multiple events? Or maybe I'll just keep scoping out Kohls, Target, and Marshalls and see if anything jumps out at me. MaidoH A is awesome at scoring deals, so maybe I can ask her to keep her eyes peeled for a good deal.
Oh boy. I want this. Like, I'd forgotten about it until just now and going back into my Pinterest boards and I found it again. This one isn't so much the financial difficulty (although that many books isn't cheap) as the logistics. In the original iteration, this is actually one of two of these little displays, set into a larger wall. I'm not sure how you could do it to make it free-standing. And if we could do it, I'd want to try to find a way to move it down from the ceremony down to the reception.
This is the one I may actually see if I can find a way to make it happen. I haven't yet met a unity ceremony idea that I'm completely enamored with, other than copying my parents idea of giving each other trees. But then tonight, I stumbled across this. I adore glass. One of the neatest museums I've been to (and I've been to a LOT of museums) is the Corning Museum of Glass. What made the trip really phenomenal was getting to do a couple of the workshops while we were there. I also dropped quite a bit of cash in their gift shop, getting ornaments for my whole family. So, when I saw this, I was intrigued. Rather than a simple sand blending ceremony, you purchase various sand colors from the artist. After you've blended them during your ceremony, they form them into these beautiful sculptures or bowls that you can keep forever. You can also purchase ornaments or glass hearts with "your" glass after you've bought the sculpture or bowl. They start at $379 for the sculpture, but man how amazing would it be to have that in your home forever? This may be one of my big wedding splurges.
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