Flower Bling

Yep, another post about flowers. Are you sick of them yet? Well, bear with me, this will hopefully be the last one until recap time.

I'm not sure where I first saw the idea of blinging out your bouquet, but I immediately knew I had to steal the idea. Just look at these beauties (all found from Project Wedding):

Looooove. And since I'm wearing some may-jah bling on my wrist and ears (and not to mention my left ring finger), I figure adding a bit to my bouquet and the bridesmaid bouquets would be a nice little tie-in.

Momma P and I hit the antique stores and found some FABulous vintage rhinestone brooches. Here they are in all of their shiny glory!

Now, I will tell you that the one on the far right is not vintage, it's from Ann Taylor and my mom had it in her jewelry collection already. But the rest are beautiful vintage pieces and I luuurrrrve them.

I'm putting this one on my bouquet because it's a little bit different than the rest:

After the wedding the girls can either keep them or return them to me if they don't. Hopefully they remember to take them off either way! The brooches were dropped off at our florist meeting last week and I can't WAIT to see how they turn out. Bling-tastic!

Are you adorning your and/or your bridesmaid bouquets in any way?

Reading Rainbow

Much like my epic search for our invitation wording (y'all remember that, right?) my search for the perfect ceremony reading was a wild ride. Obviously "wild" is a relative term in this case.

After searching Weddingbee threads and posts, Googling "wedding ceremony readings" and yep, you guessed it, the Kvetch section of indiebride, I found something that I absolutely adore. Wanna read it?

Love, by Roy Croft

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.

I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out.

I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can’t help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.*

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.*

  

I can't even describe why I'm drawn to it, I just *am*. I like that it has a sense of "realism" so to speak. It's not overly sappy, but it's still romantic. I like that it's simple and straightforward. Basically, I like it because it has all of the elements that our relationship has: romance, simplicity, honesty, realism, etc. It's uncomplicated, kind of like us.

My beautiful friend and bridesmaid Despina is reading it during the ceremony and I know she is going to do a fantastic job.

 Ain't she purty?

 Are you having any readings during your ceremony? What are they and what drew you to them?

*The italicized parts we will not be using, but I wanted to include them here in case anyone is interested in the full poem.

Momma P to the rescue!

*Note, in high school my friends started calling my mom Momma P. It stuck. She now refers to herself (in the 3rd person) as Momma P. Love her.

One thing I did not want to worry about for this wedding was flower girl baskets and the ring bearer pillow. But lo and behold, I did worry. Most of what I saw was just straight up ugly and generic and not my style at all.

But then, fate intervened. (Ok, it probably wasn't exactly fate.) The beautiful Miss Jellyfish over at Weddingbee wrote a post that inspired me to finally figure out what the flower girls and ring bearer would carry.

I grabbed inspiration from Etsy shop Creations of Love 4 Brides, specifically these photos:

(Found here)

(Found here)

Not bad, right? Unfortunately, I lack a sewing/DIY gene. It's not fair (although I'm told life isn't fair either, and I just can't seem to accept that). Well, my awesome mom came to the rescue and created something even BETTER! She's got mad DIY skills. Lucky for me, she loves me and offered to make 2 flower girl baskets and a ring bearer pillow!

For the flower girl baskets my mom thought that instead of reinventing the wheel, we should just start with a store-bought generic basket. So, we began with this:

Not my style...at all.

And ended up with this:

So much better.

I love it!  My mom removed the side bows as well as the little pearls that were just sewn onto the basket. Some black ribbon, a green flower, and a rhinestone button later and voila! Super cute flower girl basket.

As for the ring bearer pillow, Mom's rock star DIY skills came through again:

The ring bearer pillow with the 2 flower girl baskets. 
Did I really need to explain that in a caption? 
Probably not.

Yay! She still has to attach some ribbon around the rhinestone button so we can put the rings on it. Actually, that reminds me. Should I attach the real rings or fake ones? Our ring bearer (my little brother) is 4. What did/would you do?

So basically, my mom is amazing. Oh, and that's not all she did, oh no. Juuuust you wait, my pretty lil blog friends.

But for real, what should I do about the ring conundrum?

Today is April 22

Does anyone know what that means? Well, that means that one month from today is May 22. And that means that in ONE MONTH I'm getting MARRIED!!

CRAZY. TOWN. USA.

It's surreal. We've been (officially) planning this wedding since July 2008. For the past however-many months we've said "Oh, the wedding is still so far away." Well, folks, this wedding is decidedly NOT far away anymore. It's very very close. It almost doesn't seem real and I'm sure it hasn't even hit me yet.

Well, maybe it hit me a bit yesterday when I wrote a ginormous check to our DJ.

I'm not super-stressed at the moment. There is a lot to do, but luckily I have a lot of free time (unemployment will do that to ya). Let's see if I can stay fairly sane for the next month.

So my question for you today is, what are the most important things not to forget this last month? Logistic-wise, sanity-wise, etc.

Flower Power: The Mock-Ups

My wedding flowers are going to be SO EFFING AMAZING!

Whew, felt good to get that out.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty excited about the flowers for this wedding. Yesterday I had the final meeting with our florist, Blooms by Plantscaping, and ladies they are some damn miracle workers.

Granted, I gave them a lot of direction when it came to the flowers. I pretty much knew exactly what I wanted. If you need a refresher, please review these three posts. But even so, I had no IDEA the creations would look this awesome.

Behold...

Our three centerpiece options.

The tall centerpieces. They will have floating candles which are not pictured.

The first low centerpiece option.

The 2nd low centerpiece option.

For the low centerpieces we decided to go with the first option. The second one is equally beautiful, but we felt the first was the better choice for us. Also, please note we will have black linens, not ivory as pictured here.

While they didn't provide mock-ups, we made final decisions for my bouquet, the BM bouquets and the rest of the flowers. I may be a bit biased, but I think we scored the best florist in the greater Cleveland area. Our guests are in for such a treat!

It feels so good to actually be making final decisions. With just about a month to go it's getting more and more real!

A PSA

Because I love you all SO MUCH and want each and every one of you to look supa-fine on your wedding day, I'm sending out a PSA.

Mind your face.

Don't be like me and think "Oh, I know! I'll entertain my guests with reenactments of funny stories accompanied by "funny" faces! Yes, that will certainly make for a great day."

Because when you do that, you end up with photos like this:

 Why?

Also this:

Really, Emily?

And finally:

Not. Cute.

So please, learn from my mistakes. Don't look like an asshole on your wedding day. Thank god this was just my shower.

Are you known to take extremely unflattering photos? Care to share in my misery?

Showered with Luuurrrve

Let's just get it out of the way: I've been a terrible blogger. Again. I sound like a damn broken record. But moving is tough, ya'll! But this time I'm really going to try hard to get back on the blogging bandwagon, and I figure what better way to do that than to write about my shower...that took place almost a MONTH ago.

Four fabulous women offered to host the shower and they did such an amazing job!

From L-R: Avis (BM Claire's mom), Jenna (our flower girls' grandma),

Phyllis, Denise (they're sisters), and my mom.

These women are my mom's best friends in the world and MAN do they know how to throw a party!  Arrabiata's Italian Restaurant hosted us and let us have the place all to ourselves for a few hours. Plus, OPEN BAR! Trust I enjoyed a few adult beverages (my nerves were crazy).

Denise made these adorable cookie favors:

Black icing represented the BMs

And white icing for the bride (that would be ME!)

The cake was made by the same baker who is making our wedding cake, Wild Flour Bakery. It was SO YUMMY and was honestly big enough to feed a small African village (no hate mail, please. It's a JOKE.) 

A word to the wise: black icing WILL STAIN your mouth. Please trust me.

If you're thinking of getting black butter cream icing on your wedding cake...DON'T.

It looks pretty, but your mouth will be a hot ass mess.

The table arrangements were also just lovely and matched our wedding colors so well!

You can't really see it, but the basket is black and white. Adorable.

The BEST part of the day (yes, even better than presents) was that one of my BMs surprised me! I was *shocked* to see Nikki walk through the door and I immediately started bawling. Like, ugly cry for REAL. Of course, my camera died before I could get a pic with her. I'm sure some one else took one, but I'm not sure. 

So we ate a ridiculously delicious meal (dare I say, it may have been better than the food we tasted for our actual wedding?) and went right into gifts. No silly games for this bride-to-be. 

I won't show you the 230493 pics I have of me opening presents because um, that's kinda boring. But I will show you this one with the cutest wrapping ever!

It's kind of hard to see, but Josh's aunt got so creative and matched the wrapping to our wedding colors. 

Loved it. I'm a sucker for nice wrapping.

All in all, I'd say it was a successful day. Very emotionally overwhelming and filled with love, exactly how I imagined.

I gots mah hurr did: part deux!

BM Breeze was in town for my shower last weekend (more on that soon!) and agreed to do another hair trial. Ah, the perks of having your FSIL do your hair.

You may remember these posts about my hair inspiration and first hair trial. While I loved what Breeze did the first time, it still didn't feel completely "me." This time I asked her to make it bigger and the results were amazing!

My camera was completely dead after taking those two pics so we weren't able to get a great shot of the front. Oh and of course I forgot my hair flower. But I assure you, it's fabulous and I'm extremely happy.

There are absolutely no products in my hair (we also started with clean hair rather than starting with day-old dirty hair; this is Breeze's preference) and the bobby pins were kind of crappy (my fault, whoopsie!) so this is a bit messier than how it will look on the wedding day. Breeze assured me that her up-do's have massive staying power, and of course I trust her.

I wish I had taken a pic of my hair when I took it down. Oh my gosh, SO glamorous! And then even after I slept on it, it still looked fabulous! I wish Bree could do my hair like that every single day of my life.

Did your hair go through numerous revisions or did you have a concrete idea of what you wanted?

Licensed To Wed

What a boring title, right?

Josh and I took a little trip to the courthouse a few days ago. No, we didn't have a quickie wedding. We DID, however, get our marriage license.

We tried to take a self portrait with the license. After a few (5 or so) failed attempts, a very nice woman took pity on us and said "Oh give it to me. I was that happy once, let me take your picture." Um, not sure what that means, but thanks!

I know it seems super early to do this, but with the move and everything it was literally the only day we were able to do it before the wedding. Luckily the license is good for 60 days!

It gets more and more real with each passing day!

Sashay! Shante!

Many times on this blog I've gone on and on about our amazing photographers, Ted and Rachel Linczak of Linczak Photography. You've seen our e-pics and examples of their "First Look" work. I've sang their praises loud and proud.

Well, ladies and gents, it's time to do that once more. Because our photographers? Are the bomb dot com.

A few weeks ago Rachel emailed me to see if Josh and I would be interested in a "bridal shoot" of sorts. She wanted a sexy dress, big hair, and my hottie groom. Check, check and CHECK!

On Monday we braved the frigid (and I do mean FRIGID) Cleveland temperatures all in the name of kick-ass photography. Here are a few teasers from the day!

The first few pictures highlight the gross parts of downtown Cleveland. Luckily, gross landscapes are often some of the best backdrops. The final picture was taken in the back seat of a car with Rachel sitting behind me with a spotlight. The end result is amazing, right??

I can't wait to see the rest of the pictures!

**All images are property of Linczak Photography.