Like a cold splash of water to the face

You know in movies when somebody chucks a glass of water in somebody's face to wake them up/bring them back to reality? That water to the face this week was our wedding cost in its full glory. 

Way back in February of 2012 when we booked the Portland Club, and hence Black Tie catering, we were given a rough estimate of the cost of food/rentals/space for our wedding reception. The number was high, but  fell in our acceptable price range, and we figured we could wriggle the number lower by changing food options and playing with service options. As we went forward we got ideas for keeping costs low from our event contact, entertained different ideas for food and bar service with cost in mind, and generally progressed with a fuzzy number in the back of our heads for total costs. 

With updated 2013 menus and a tasting under our belts, we designed a few different menus and added up costs and had a pretty specific tally in January of this year. Of course, in the process, we added on appetizer ideas, cupcake flavors, and a ceremony before the reception at the venue. Just a few days ago all of the approximate costs (with a healthy dose of crossed fingers that we were overestimating) were splashed out the window with a nice, cold dose of reality. Our event coordinator pulled together the full proposal with our menu, service, and setup choices and there was no "under budget" part of the proposal. 

The good news: when you add up the total wedding costs and subtract it from our bank account, the number is not negative! The bad news: that number is not huge. We still have a few more months of saving, and this is a push to save more and spend less in anticipation of the wedding. And while we were secretly hoping the wedding would come in under what we were expecting to pay, we made the choices we made for the ultimate celebration with our friends and family and we will have that on July 13th. 

Seemingly minutes after readjusting the working budget for food costs, Vader announced that swords were cheaper than he had seen in months. Perhaps right after getting a final number was not a great time to buy several pricey bits of weaponry, but they are now on their way! More on that next time...

dressing Mom

The wedding planning hiatus is over! Largely due to busy times in other areas of my life, I haven't really done much wedding planning in the last few weeks. 

Until Saturday.

After placing the print order for my invitations, Mom, MOH Moxie and I set out on a Portland adventure hunting for a mother of the bride dress. Mom had an idea of what she wanted in mind, which turned out to be quite difficult to replicate. We tried Macy's, David's Bridal, J.C. Penney, Coldwater Creek, Kohl's, and a particularly crabby shop called Serendipity, all to no avail. Things were too scratchy, too informal, too sparkly, or just plain gross. This may or may not have to do with the fact that all of the stores were pushing their prom gowns heavily, with less focus on "special bridal party members" (yes, that's what some stores call wedding folk who aren't bridesmaids). Since none of us thought Mom should wear a backless, skin tight, sequined cutaway prom dress, we moved on. This was our general opinion of the dresses we had seen so far:

At Burlington Coat Factory we scored the cutest little bow tie for Ringbearer Melmo, who will look positively adorable while he tries to rip it off his neck all day. We then stopped by Michael's on our way home, and I was quite excited to get all the crafty supplies I had written on a list for months. When I got home I realized how underwhelming 3 packs of stickers, a letter stencil set, a giant stamp pad, 4 spools of ribbon, and a #16 decorating tip were - but hey, I was excited! Mostly for a ribbon that actually matched the pink on our invitations!

Once we had exhausted all of our options, we headed home for some online shopping, where Mom promptly learned the potential evil of online shopping. You know when you click "add to bag" on the PERFECT item, only to receive the "no longer in stock" message? We had finally found the perfect dress from Macy's, and it was being discontinued. Mom was crushed when we couldn't find the dress in the right size anywhere online, and further dress searching proved fruitless. Luckily for my mother, her relentless hope for this dress served her well, and she found the dress back in stock a size up the next day! She'll be looking lovely in peach in July, and we're one step closer to having all the important wedding folk outfitted. *Hint hint, bridesmaids and groomsfolk.* 

It was a long day of shopping, but it was nice to spend some time with my Mom and my sister. Can't you tell? 

Paper. (or how to save some wedding $)

I wish I had graphic design skills and/or software.

It turns out there are a lot of documents one needs to throw a wedding: save the date cards, envelopes, invitations, information cards included with invitations, ceremony programs, boatloads of thank you cards, table numbers, escort cards, menus, photo sharing information cards, signs directing folks to the bar, the photobooth, the parking lot, or the restrooms, etc.

Back in the early days of wedding planning I determined that to save money I would make all our our stationary by hand, adding in my stamping and scrapbooking skillz. Ha! After more than a little lusting after beautiful and unique handmade designs from wedding sites and Pinterest, I looked into how much it would cost to put together each item. My dreams of DIY wedding stationary were quickly dashed when I realized that I would spent twice the money and quadruple the time on paper items that would not be able to measure up in quality to professional work.

Dedicated to not shelling out thousands on all-in-one stationary companies, I figured the next best thing to making everything by hand was to have pieces made individually that look nice and then print them en masse via a discount printing service. Enter Vistaprint! There are all kinds of wedding-y folk online that are dying to help other brides save money, and I came across a particularly awesome site written by a former bride (who happened to get married at PL, my childhood summer camp!) describing how to game Vistaprint deal e-mails for wicked cheap wedding stationary. So far I have managed to get photo sharing materials and return address labels for less than $10 total, and there are plans in the works for Thank You cards, ceremony programs, menus, and other signage for purchase with Groupons (another wedding cash-saver) that I am putting together.

Another very helpful resource was finding that more and more Etsy vendors are selling digital files of creative signage for weddings. For a few dollars I can get a well-designed document that I can then upload to Vistaprint and have printed cheaply, leaving me more time for paper-flower folding instead of pretending I understand how open-source graphics software works! If you own the software and understand how it works, look into doing the same thing! Speaking as a design-challenged, short-on-time bride there's some decent money to be made.

So no, you will not be reading our ceremony details the day of the wedding on handmade, individually painted layered programs. But I will still have all my hair (that mass with a mind of its own deserves its own blog post) and we'll even be able to afford to buy you a drink!

50 shades of (the wrong) pink

At the very beginning of our engagement, I casually mentioned to Vader that our wedding colors should be a combination of our favorite colors, pink and blue. He shared that he thought they might look strange together, and I was adamant that "they worked in my head." Thank God we went in a different direction, because then I would have to match TWO colors to all of our wedding decor!

We went with the classic black and white basics, and though there are some variations everything we have found so far matches both shades without problem. Our pink, on the other hand, is proving much more difficult. Petunia, more specifically, was the Alfred Angelo bridesmaid dress color accent I chose blindly from a few shades on a swatch card. It was a bright, middle pink, that in my mind matched most pinks I saw on fabric shelves and in ribbon aisles at craft stores. 

I was wrong.

In the world of weddings and crafts, it appears that pink traditionally exists in one of three shades:

light/baby pink ------------- fuchsia ---------------- hot pink --

There are a few variations, usually one in the middle of fuchsia and hot pink called something like watermelon, and when you add a touch of orange to it the name changes to papaya or guava or some other tropical fruit. It would appear that Petunia falls on the "coral" side of hot pink, fitting exactly nowhere in the spectrum. 

 

I first realized that Petunia was difficult to match as I searched through a stack of pink samples for matting to our invitations. I found a close match, Azalea, and ordered that. Unfortunately, Azalea and Petunia were both losers in the napkin running, as our venue only offers baby pink for pink options. Alas, white will do. I was most surprised, however, that neither shade could be found in all of Macy's and Lord and Taylor's tie departments. We are still waiting to check out samples for (hopefully) rented ties at Jos A. Bank who promises to match Alfred Angelo colors, but had to laugh when the salesman there suggested we check into custom-made ties from Vineyard Vines. Not about to spend hundreds on douche-y whale ties, we will keep hunting. 

For all those who are curious, yes, this has turned me into *that* bride. You know, the one carrying color swatches around in her purse. 

we love the Beatles?

In an attempt to find a recessional song for the ceremony that captured the "somewhat unique while still a classic and not boring" attitude I am hoping to set for our wedding, I stumbled across a list online of songs people have used in the past. One of those songs was "When I'm 64" by the Beatles and I like the upbeat tune and cute lyrics. Recessional song chosen: check. 

I ran the idea by Vader, who suggested that we match our processional to our recessional and choose another Beatles tune. This totally solved my dilemma of what to walk down the aisle to, and we settled on an acoustic guitar version of "In My Life." It's another song that I love and was once the theme song of some loved (yet forgotten) television show I used to watch with my family. However, when I looked up the length it became clear that eight girls sauntering, an eight-year-old steering her toddler brother up an aisle, and me in a pair of heels were not going to fit within one song. To be honest, I wasn't too broken up about the need for my own tune. I'm only slightly embarrassed to admit (publicly) that I want my own musically obvious entrance. 

Cue the need for another Beatles song. Having watched Love Actually a quadrillion times with my friends in college, it was hardly a stretch to connect "All You Need is Love" to a wedding. Since the bridesmaids (and Groomsman Peanut Butter) assure me the moment won't be too hoaky, Dad and I will be walking in to the trumpet-ful intro from an instrumental version of the song. I don't expect live instruments to pop up in the crowd, but I do plan on outdoing Keira Knightley and her weird, weird dress. (If you're confused, rent the movie RIGHT NOW.)

And, Bridesmaid Madonna, I think we'll keep our Beatles theme to a trio. You may shriek "Honey Pie" as loudly as you like the week leading up to the wedding :)

Shopping for guys: no less annoyingly easy with weddings

While I enjoy shopping, I find the fact that women's clothes have no consistent sizing or styling across brands or clothing types quite aggravating. When Vader hops online to order clothes, enters two numbers, and receives guaranteed-to-fit-properly stuff it makes me hate him, just a little bit, for how easy it is for him to shop.

I'm sure you're asking yourself what this has to do with weddings. Here it is:

I have been bothering Vader for weeks to pick out what his groomsfolk are wearing, and a few days ago he finally agreed. We had some dinner downtown and headed over to Men's Wearhouse, as I had some deals from buying my dress at David's Bridal. I expected that we would look at several suit options, some tux options, Vader would try different looks on and we would at best leave with an understanding of what everybody in the wedding party would be wearing come July.

Instead, we walked in and wandered in front of the "wedding rentals" display for about thirty seconds before a helpful employee asked if she could help. In five questions or less we learned that renting a tux would always be cheaper than buying a suit, that Vera Wang tuxes are the only black tuxes that look like 3-piece suits (and not super tool-y), and that in about half an hour we could get everything set up for the wedding. So we did!

We went through a list of questions that seemed important (what color vest, do they need shoes, ivory or white shirts), then progressed to things I had never thought of (what color studs & cuffs, what color pocket square). It was a quick process, we learned their pinks are terrible so we will find properly-colored pink ties elsewhere, and the rental group is now being set up. Here's what the guys will look like, plus vests and minus the bow ties (but with pink straight ties instead):

They probably won't look quite that intense in wedding pictures, but we hope they will look almost as dapper. And with no endless trying on of styles, worrying over price points, or waiting to be overtaken with tears we were done and we left and its done, aside from each guy being fitted. As it turns out, Say Yes to the Tux would be the world's quickest and most boring reality show ever!

Do we?

With the help of Pinterest, the interwebs, and more wedding magazines than I would care to admit to owning, I have had a lot of fun over the past few months picking out wedding details I want to replicate or gathering inspiration for reception decor. Because the reception is longer, more open to creativity, and in many ways easier, we have (until today!) neglected to do a lot of planning of the ceremony itself.

Because we opted to have a secular ceremony officiated by a friend, the order, wording, and content of the ceremony is completely up to us. The freedom to choose anything is mostly overwhelming, though a bit cool as well. I have spent the better part of today gathering snippets of ceremonies past from online and a book I bought a few months ago called "The Wedding Ceremony Planner." Along with a healthy dose of bothering Vader on seemingly inconsequential details, it's coming along nicely! We will have a reading by our sisters, a prayer, and a song from three bridesmaids and a groomsman. We will do some traditional stuff, like a welcome, vows, and rings, though in our own unique style. I am incredibly excited that we settled on a format for our vows, so I can put my I'm-gonna-write-a-stupid-poem fears to rest. But-I'm left with one question.

WHERE THE HELL DO WE SAY I DO?

We are not doing traditional vows, but are open to considering a somewhat traditional ring exchange. Only, in all my searching, I can't figure out where people usually say I do! Nor can I remember the words in weddings we have recently attended. Can anybody help me out? Can it be featured during the ring part of the ceremony?