Who doesn't love presents?!?!

I was SO excited to come home from work the other day and see a big Bed Bath and Beyond box sitting on our doorstep!! Our first wedding gift!!! Since my friend Julie - who currently lives in Dallas - couldn't make it to the shower, she sent us two of our place settings!! Out of our entire registry, this is one of the things that we need the most! We're still using Gary's dishes from college!!! Thanks Jules for the lovely gift!!

I'm a big nerd and had Gary take a picture :)

Jars, Jars and More Jars!

As mentioned in a previous post, when I decided we would be using different size jars for the centerpieces, we put the word out to friends and family. And boy did everyone deliver! I decided that I would sort through all the jars I had gotten so far to see what we still needed. I was pleasantly surprised to see that we had enough jars for 14 tables! That is more than enough for the centerpieces!

Being the control freak that I am with my projects, I arranged each grouping by table (hence the pink sticky notes) to make sure that I had various sizes on each table. I then put a piece of masking tape on the bottom so each jar is labeled with the corresponding table! I think my florist should be able to handle that...I don't want any surprises when we get to the reception! :)

Look at all those jars!

Thank you to everyone who helped us collect - and also to the ladies who supplied me with over 100 baby food jars! I'll show you what we have up for those in a later post!

Dressin' the Dudes

When it came to what Gary and the groomsmen would wear, we flip-flopped between finding suits for everyone and renting tuxedos. I thought I had made up my mind on doing tuxedos thinking it would be a lot easier for us to coordinate. And then we heard the price.

We visited both Men's Warehouse and President's Tuxedo one Saturday afternoon at the mall. We walked out of there pretty discouraged because both places quoted us more than $160 per tux! We just didn't reel right about asking the guys to pay that much for something they will where for a few hours and return the next day.

So we were back to thinking about suits. One of Gary's co-workers had just gone the suit route for her guys and had gotten them each a suit, shirt and tie for around $150 out the door. That seemed like a much better idea to us! And suits sure do look nice too, right?

We make a trip to K & G Fashion Superstore to see what we could find. I was a bit skeptical at first but we actually found a very nice suit that fit Gary great! The hard part was getting the rest of the wedding party in to try them on. After about 5 different trips, we had found suits for everyone! I was soooo pleased...not to mention that we got 8 suits for about $900!

As for ties, I had been thinking I wanted go with a gold satin. I didn't want to be to matchy-matchy and have them get the same colors as the bridesmaid dresses. Plus the girls will be wearing gold shoes with their bouquets tied in gold ribbon. I thought the gold ties would pull everything together nicely. I was a little worried that we'd be able to find exactly what I was envisioning but whadda ya know...K & G had the prefect ties too! This picture is a pretty accurate representation of the color!

Gary will be wearing an ivory tie (which we found for $10 at Marshall's!!) and our dads will be in black. All of the guys will be wearing ivory shirts - which we have yet to track down - and I also need to figure out what the little guys will be wearing. If anyone has any ideas of where to get boys suits - I'm in need of suggestions!!

Work in Progress

I've been slowly working on our invitations here and there but I'm finally getting to the point where we are only a few weeks away from sending them out and I need to get my butt moving!! Luckily, my parents were in town over the weekend and with some help from my mom we were able to get another chunk of cutting/gluing/corner-rounding out of the way.

I've had a design in mind since Memorial Day weekend when my mom was in town for dress shopping. We happened to pop into a scrapbook store downtown Northville that also makes custom wedding invitations. After looking at their book of samples, I found a design I absolutely LOVED!! At first I considered letting them do the work but quickly decided against it. I figured I could handle the task on my own and the invitations would be a lot more personal that way. I'm really glad I did because the process has been a lot of fun for me.

I'm not going to show any images of the finished product until they go out in a few weeks but here is a photo of my mom and I hard at work on them!

Trial and Error

Last week I had my hair and makeup trial. Since I don't really have a salon around here that I frequent (I'm really bad about the "getting a cut every 6 weeks rule") I was on the search for a salon. I found this particular company again in my reading of wedding blogs. It is called Bridal Beauty on Location. I liked that fact that they would come to your house so we wouldn't have to worry about driving to and from a salon. They also offer airbrush makeup which I really wanted to try. It may seem a little early for a trial but if I liked my hair and makeup, I wanted to book our date as soon as possible!!

I brought a few inspiration photos for both my hair and makeup. The overall look I was going for was very romantic, with soft curls and nothing that was pulled to tight from my face. Here are a few photos I brought along.






The look we aimed for was the loose curly 'do like Eva Longoria's. Let's just say it looks A LOT cuter on Eva than it did on me! I hated it!!! So she worked some magic and pinned the curls up a little more and this is what we came up with.

Back View

Side View

I think on the actual day of, I would prefer to keep my bangs not so curled and add a few more curls on the top of my head. For those of you that are wondering, I will be wearing a veil for the ceremony but I didn't want to wear it since Gary took these photos. I don't want him seeing me in my veil quite yet. :)

As for makeup, I gave here these photos as inspiration:

Basically a dramatic eye with a lighter lip color. Here are the results:


My apologies that these photos are a little dark but it was about 9:30 at night! I really liked my eyeshadow and liner, I just wish she would have curled my eyelashes! I will probably be doing fake lashes on the actual day so that won't matter. I also didn't love the lip color she used (which was supposed to just bring out your natural pigment) so I'll probably ask her to use something else or use one of my trust MAC colors!! So, what do you think??

Center of Attention

One of the things that can get quite costly for a wedding is centerpieces for the reception tables. Many people opt to go for non-floral centerpieces to try and save a bit of money. I've seen many great ideas such as...

Fruits/Veggies

Candles

Favors as the centerpiece

But something else really caught my eye. It would allow us to feature flowers in our centerpieces, yet keep the florist budget in check. It helps incorporate our rustic vintage theme and I was pretty sure I could get most of the components for FREE! So I present you our centerpiece inspiration photos...



The last one is my favorite...I'm aiming for all clear glass (although the antique blue in the second photo is gorgeous!) and different shapes and sizes, placing a few blooms into each jar. I've officially assigned all my mom's friends and aunts to collecting jars for me!! We would have paid a fortune if we had to buy vases for all the tables! So thanks are definitely in order to all the ladies who are helping out!!

MMMMM...cake....

I think Gary's favorite part of wedding planning has been cake tasting. I once again hit up a few websites to find local bakers in the area that other brides would recommend. The one thing I knew I DIDN'T want was fondant icing. I prefer butter cream so that was one criteria that helped us narrow down some choices.

The first place we went to try is called Lake's Cakes. Having never been to a cake tasting before, we weren't really sure what to expect. The husband and wife team run their business out of their home so we sat in their living room and sampled about 8 different types of cake and just as many filling flavors. While the cake was YUMMY, I wasn't crazy about the frosting. It was a whipped butter cream and just didn't have very much flavor to it. It tasted a lot like whipped cream to me.

The second place we tried was Gwen's Cake Decorating Etc. She also runs the business out of her home but instead of giving us a small piece of each flavor she offers, she baked us too mini cakes - one chocolate and one vanilla - with two different flavors in each. While the flavors weren't exactly what we were looking for, they were very tasty and the frosting was more to my liking. We booked her on the spot and she agreed to bake us two more cakes for us in the actual flavors we were interested in using on the big day.

Here is Gary and I enjoying our cakes at home...one chocolate peanut butter with peanut butter cream filling and the other spice cake with cream cheese filling. We haven't completely decided on what flavor we will choose but I guarantee it will be delicious!!