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.
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.
To be honest, I should have known better. I should have known not to get my heart set on colors without running them by my lovely fiance. And yet, I did it. We had talked a few times before our engagement about what the feel of our wedding might be. Elegent, soft, romantic, lots of candles. So, I came up with this:
Blush, grey, with little punches of cream and green thrown in. Wine corks, watercolor, soft fabrics, and dusty miller. All excited about it, I showed it to Mr. C.
His response? I like blue.
So, back to the drawing board, at least in part. Because my groom loves blue, and to be honest, so do I. It is my favorite color. So I turned to The Perfect Palette, trying to find a way to work blue in. But, I began getting more and more frustrated. I loved the soft romance of the pink, and all of the royals, marines, navys, pools, and aquas looked too harsh.
And then, I found it. I was browing the Perfect Palette's Pinterest page (try saying that five times fast) when I found The One. The Color. The one I'd been searching for:
They even have an entire pinterest board devoted to Dusty Blue. It is soft, it is romantic, and it is already so close to what I was looking at. The bouquet on the right in my inspiration board up above? Switch the pink ribbon out for blue and we're set. Bridesmaids? Ditch the grey and put them in blue. It'll look better on everyone anyway. I'll probably still keep some of the pink around for pops of color, but man, it feels like this is moving in a direction I like. Granted, watch us book a recetion site with lime green or maroon floors or something like that. But for now, this is where its at!
