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.
Welp, I'm officially a bad blogger. My apologies for the long delay in posting. I'll blame it on a combination of bad weather, food poisoning, a nasty cold, and general wedding fatigue. I'll address the last one in another post (probably?) but for now, I'll keep plowing through our busy Christmas planning extravaganza.
I wasn't really sure what to expect going into my hair trial, to be honest. I have very, very, very fine and thin blonde hair, and many times in the past attempted updos have left me looking quite bald. I really wanted to avoid that. I spent quite a bit of time looking around Pinterest trying to find photos that I thought would work with my hair. I wanted an updo with some volume, and with details on the side so when my veil, which is nearly opaque, is on, you can still see that my hair is done up.
We tried a couple of variations, and this is what we ended up with:
Side View
From the back
Front View
At the time, I really liked it. The side wisps drove me nuts, within the hour I'd tucked them behind my ears. But now, with some distance, I'm not sure how I feel. I like the way it looks from the front, but I really don't like the side view. I'm not sure how to fix that, but when I go back in April I'm going to try again.
The other thing is that, by the time we'd gotten the braid and the poof, she had almost no hair left to make the bun at the bottom. As such, Lady A and I are going to start looking around for extensions. I've never worn them before, but I think it make be the solution we're looking for. My plan is to try to find a set of real hair clip-ins. I'll let you know how that goes!
As for the makeup, that I was less thrilled with. It didn't look bad, at all, but I made the mistake of telling her I don't wear a lot of makeup normally, so I think she was afraid to use very much on me. As a result, it actually is much softer than what I wear when I'm dressing up to go out. Unfortunately, I didn't get a great photo, but here you go:
30 minutes post trial
Obviously, there needs to be a more permanent lipstick solution. The other thing is that we're having a formal evening wedding, and I don't know that this is enough "umph" to match that. I'm also seriously considering seeing if they do lashes. As you can see, I get crinkly eyes when I smile, and I think I'd like to have some more definition.
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.
But, that would be a wedding all about me. And I don't want that! The whole point of this is Mr. C and I joining together, so the wedding needs to reflect that. The wedding that Mr. C and I are having is taking place here:
What that means, then, is that I'm having to figure out how to transition the ideas that I had for the first picture into the reality for the second picture. And I'll be honest with you, I haven't figured it out. I've let it stress me out for WEEKS now.
Finally, last night, I realized that it was probably time to call in the professionals. This morning, I called the florist my family has used since forever. We didn't talk flowers, or centerpieces, or bouquets, but they are sending me some information.
Even more reassuring for me was the fact that they did a wedding for a couple who lived in Oregon, and who the florist never actually saw in person. We'll be going back home in December, and so we won't have to be that drastic, but knowing that they are comfortable with long distance correspondence is reassuring.
I'll have to talk with them about more specific flowers and centerpieces and all that before we book with them, of course, but I think I'd forgotten that there are people that do this for a living and was just sort of expecting myself to have to have all of the answers figured out. Thank goodness that's not the case!
A few years ago, back when I was living in Cooperstown, I happened to be at the lakeside park when a wedding rolled in. They had chairs set up overlooking an arbor that was next to the lake, and it would have all been beautiful except for one thing.
The same view, just a few weeks ago
It had rained non-stop for the two previous days. And I don't mean cute little sprinkles, I mean a deluge that had flooded some of the roads. So, these lovely chairs spread out on the grass had all sunk about an inch into the ground.
The bridal party pulled up in one of the village's famous trolleys. Out popped the groomsmen and the groom, who took positions near the arbor. The bridesmaids stepped out, barefoot or in flats, and made their way up the while. Finally, the bride and her father. She looked lovely in her gown and heels, and on her father's arm took the first steps onto the grass....and proceded to sink right in.
What happened next was one of the best wedding things I think I'll ever see. Some brides would have panicked, kept trying to walk, or completely lost it at their big moment going wrong and bawled their way down the aisle. This bride? She hiked up her dress, kicked both shoes a good five feet away, then marched down to her groom and got married.
It was, in my opinion, the best metaphor for starting a marriage you could ask for. Things go wrong. Sometimes, you get stuck. But instead of staying stuck, or wallowing in it, you kick off your shoes and join hands with the person you love. I hope, as we move further down the road of planning this wedding, that I can keep in mind the shoe-kicking bride, and roll with any and all of the punches this process throws our way.
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