A very Seattle Rehearsal and Welcome drinks

I should probably do another details post or two (OOT or Programs), but I really just want to get on with the recaps already. So, that is what I am going to do.

For your listening pleasure. Play while reading. (It's a long post so there are two songs.)




Thursday brought most of our families to Seattle, and the day was filled with truffle making and family time. By Friday everyone but BV was in town. Friday was nail salons, truffle packaging, and hair practice.

If I'd seen this before...

you can bet I would have thought about trying it.

Truffles!

I thought about doing a post about our favors before this, but when I tried to take a picture of the test run it came out mildly icky looking.

I made chocolate (white chocolate drizzled) and Kahlua (cocoa covered) for the trial truffles.

So I scratched that idea. Plus I thought it might be nice for most people to be surprised by the favors.

Transistioning into married life...aka finding new blogs

I've come to the realization that I'm married. This makes me question which blogs should I read now? Lets start from the beginning...

Wedding check. Honeymoon check... I'm ready for sleep.

We have officially been back from Italy for five days. The wedding photos were waiting for us when we got home, but I haven't done anything with any of the thousands of wedding and Italy pictures. Why? because I've been enjoying relaxing and not doing anything productive. The photographer even sent me an email on Monday with a slide show, and the first time I looked at it was last night.

Some background for this slide show:
Watching it for the first time was the only time I cried because of the wedding.
I blame the crying on the song. I probably should have picked something else. Oh well.

http://secure.smilebox.com/ecom/openTheBox?sendevent=4d5459324f4467334e5446384d5451354d4449354e6a633d0d0a&sb=1

Bacholorette Party Picture Evidence

Since there are so many great pictures from the night, I am mostly going to let them tell the story.

We started out the night having drinks and food at KA's apartment.

Veil. Check.

After several weeks of crocheting, tea staining, and sewing my veil has finally been completed.

The men go shopping

So... I'm not going to lie. I know next to nothing about menswear. They have weird measurements, and I still can't get over the fact that they don't need to try on shirts. Hence why I didn't really have an opinion on menswear. FI decided on tuxes, and since 3 out of the 4 groomsmen live in Seattle, they made an outing to the tux shop

One of the men trying to be dapper

Trial: round two

After my first failed attempt at a hair trial, I pressed forward to my second. I was recommended to one of Vain's senior stylist. Her bio on their website reads like a decathlon of hair treatments. She does everything from color to cuts. So I wasn't quite sure what to expect because most of the employees have their own specialty. I also decided to do a makeup trial while I was there. I really had no idea were to go besides Vain. There were other options, but either the effort or $ that would have gone into them didn't seem appealing. So, I walked into Vain with my pictures and accessories for a second time hoping to come out with more than just curls. And this was the end result.

(Yes, I realize that I probably should have smiled so that last picture didn't look so scary.)

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results. My hair will be smoothed out with more hairspray for the wedding, but since it was a trial she didn't want to get to intense about it. It would have been easier for her to change the style had I wanted it to be different, but the first updo she did was a great combo of all the hair inspiration pictures I brought. I love the hair folds and dimension. The secret to the hair... Its not all my hair. I have a squishy cylinder thing in the bottom fold. I will also be going lunch lady style on my wedding day. Oh yeah, there will be a hair net in my hair. Just what you wanted to know right? The cameo will be placed either in the middle or on one side. Tea roses were suggested to frame the cameo since it will be small compared to the overall hair, but I can't imaging tea roses in my hair. What I can see is baby's breath around the cameo. So light and airy and perfectly vintage. As for makeup, I wanted 1940's vintage, dramatic red lipstick. I've never been one for lip stuff. It tends to take over my face. As you can probably see in the picture above. Again I think I should have smiled. In person I didn't think it was too much, and I definitely like the overall retro effect. The question is will it look funny in pictures? Although, I think my eyes in that picture are creeping me out the most.

Wedding bands... the jewelry not the music

We finally got out wedding bands! We looked at a few places around Seattle. We seriously considered buying our rings from E.E. Robbins (my e-ring store), but we decided to look else where just to see what else we could find.

I looked online, but online ring buying was a little too abstract for us. Trusting in a company to send you a product worth so much, yet you've never seen it nor talked to anyone= a little scary. Even though, I only looked at companies with high ratings. So we went onward with the physical search and looked at Greenlake jewelry. (Which ironically is actually by northgate not greenlake.) It's a restaurant converted to a "We make and design jewelry in house" jewelry store. They had so many designs and options. The best part is that our rings were less here than the other stores we visited.

And here they are

Tungsten with sterling silver interlay


Pictured in yellow gold but mine will be in white gold. Leaf and stem engraving pattern in matte finish which will give it more of a sparkle then seen above.

Sorry about the quality. I could only save the small versions of the pictures.

Of course one of my favorite things is that my ring is unique while still being traditional. One of my favorite concepts.

All aboard the hair FAIL tug boat... Toot Toot

It's serious now. I can feel everything coming together, and with all that merging comes accidents, mess-ups, and incompletes. So, far I've been pretty on track as far as wedding stuff. Things have worked out, but this weekend might have been a FAIL. There were definitely some things that went right (we got our wedding bands!), but yesterday and this morning were a FAIL. Neither yesterday nor this morning could have been helped they were accidents, but still disappointing.

Budget friendly rehersal outfit

Right now there isn't a lot of extra money in my bank account, but there have been a few splurges I decided to go for. Like this...

Invites

Invitations were sent out almost a month ago, yet I haven't blogged about them. There were just so many details to them I hardly know where to begin.

I designed the invitations, rsvp, and maps using Microsoft publisher. The layout I "borrowed" (read as stole) from another bee (august15bride), but it was so different and perfect I had to. Without my families help, I would not have been able to put these all together. They cut, folded, stamped, and helped me create the vision I had for these. All materials were bought though paper and more, the paper mill store, vista print, and Micheal's.

Let's start from the beginning. When one of our guests opens up their envelope (5.25x7.25" in sand) the first thing they will see is...

What do you want for...

For the gift giving holidays, I usually get asked "What do you want for ______?" I say nothing and let him fend for himself most of the time, but this valentines day I actually had an idea. I decided to ask for perfume. Its a pretty generic v-day gift, but I also asked FI to pick it out with me. I'm planning for this scent to be my wedding day fragrance, and I didn't want him to hate it. So I needed him to judge the perfumes too.

We started out by going to Sephora. Where we found this

and this

Unique but bridal

Through out wedding planning, I have been striving for a unique but clearly bridal look.

Bridal hair Google image search results

To buy or rent?

I know. The obsession with umbrellas is getting a little much, but I just found a new website.
http://www.bellaumbrella.com/

Can we just talk about the TOMATOES for a minute?

Okay...
I know this isn't exactly wedding bee, and my small amount of readers might not want to hear about this, but what else is a blog for but to vent?

I have beefsteak tomatoes.

Tutorial Time!

This is a tutorial of my bridesmaids gifts. So, if you are a bridesmaid... DO NOT READ!!!

Nom nom nom CAKE!

While food is probably my number one wedding priority, the cake was not. Don't get me wrong, I want a great cake. Its just that the cake vendor was the last vendor on my list. I was burned out and didn't want to make any more calls/emails by the time we got to cake. I'm pretty sure free cake samples is really the reason we have a cake.

Accessorizing the Bmaids

Now that we have talked about the dresses lets move on to what will go with said dresses.

No Bmaids past this point. (That means you Karen!)

The elusive green dress

Green isn't an uncommon wedding color. But I see a lot more of this
than this.
So by picking a darker, non-hunter green, I may have in inadvertently made the bridesmaids dress search 10x harder. Lucky for them, I need something to search for on the internet.

Its been a while

I know its been a while. I needed to take a break/slow down on all the wedding stuff. You could say I got a little burned out. My wedding break came at the perfect time. After all the vendors were booked, before most of the craziness of a time crunch came, and during the holidays. But now I'm back in the game! Now its full force planning time.

A lot has happened since my last post, but I thought I would start off with one of the cliff hangers...