Congrats Kate and William!

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I'm very torn about the royal wedding. Normally, I despise celebrity gossip in any form. I stand firmly in the "their business is their business" camp. Yet because we are getting married a mere 4 months apart, I can't help but feel a kinship with Kate and William, especially since they were originally planning on August. We could have been date buddies. And since I'm in wedding scouting mode, I have an urge to know all the little details of their big day.

And I'm ashamed of it. I shouldn't want to pry into their day, shouldn't feel the need to know everything, definitely shouldn't judge Kate by her dress choice, and most especially should not feed the media circus surrounding their wedding, even in a small way, by weighing in.

Nonetheless, I want to. I want Kate to blog about all those little details, and I want to comment on everything they do, even though they probably didn't have much of a say in the decor or decorum.

It is a highly problematic feeling.

There is one thing I am sure of though: I'm glad my wedding isn't being scrutinized like theirs. A supportive group of other brides is nice, but the entire world judging your choice of table runners is quite a different story. And I feel bad for them, mostly her (let's be honest, we all know it's the girl that gets responsibility for everything at the wedding). I wouldn't trade with her, not even to be a princess.

Though I imagine being made a princess balances a fair amount of the invasion of privacy.

What do you think? Is it wrong to analyze their wedding? Or is it too good an opportunity to pass up, even at the couple's expense?

Making It Work at Michael's

One of the few pro-wedding aspects of my job is that it is right next to Michael's.  On my breaks, it is very easy to nip over there and browse for wedding items, and so far, I've been making out pretty well.

 

You would think that given my obsession with bridal gowns, my dress would have been my first wedding purchase, but it was actually these guys.  I bought them before we had a budget or indeed any wedding money, but they were so cute, and I figured we would find a use for them.  Now I'm really glad I bought them because our venue is a little hard to find, and it will be nice having them mark the entrance.

Since our invitations are rather simple, I've been looking for a way to spice them up a bit.  I figured tying a thin piece of twine around each suite would be a nice, beachy-looking touch, and this hemp rope will work perfectly.

*All Personal Photos

As Easter season approached, I figured it would be a good time to find a flower girl's basket without paying wedding prices.  Sure enough, this Easter basket was half the cost of the official flower girl's baskets at Michael's, and I like it better anyway.  Plus, it's a little bigger which will be good for our long aisle.  I can't wait to see Lizzy with it!

Yay Michael's for making everything crafty easy to find!

Have there been any stores that you found especially useful while searching for wedding stuff?

Tables Numbers? We Don't Need No Stinking Table Numbers!

I've been brainstorming table numbers for a long time.  There was no way I was going to use boring old numbers when we could think up some creative names, but I've been torn between tying them into our theme and totally geeking out on them.

Having California-related table numbers would be appropriate, but naming the tables after Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. is just so much more fun.

When I brought it up to Daniel, he of course came up with the perfect idea in about 2 minutes.

We move a lot.  Like, a lot a lot.  I've moved on average every 6 months for the past 6 years, and while Daniel's moving rate is more reasonable, it's still high.  Since where we've lived has been a big part of our relationship, we're going to name our tables after the streets we've lived on.  And it just so happens that the number of tables we're having matches the number of places we've lived together.

Except of course for our table.  We've decided that for the purposes of our sweetheart table, we've also lived at Disneyland (or Main St., USA, as it were).

I've got to give him credit, this was a super cute idea.  It's very appropriate to our relationship yet still ties in with Northern California as 3 of the streets are there.

But then, the all-important question:  what will our table names look like?

I think this may be an area that I'm not willing to put in too much effort, but I thought perhaps the name on a card with a picture of us in each apartment might be nice.  Something like this but less formal:

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The pictures would probably feel more like this:

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Anyway, you get the idea.

What did you do for table names/numbers?  Did you try to personalize it?

Slightly Off-kilter Registries

Man, it has been quite a week.  My hours were severely cut at work followed by daily schedule changes, I found out my dress may or may not have been altered without my consent (to answer your question Charlene, I haven't gone over to find out which yet), and we were rejected by grocery store florists across the land, all in the last 5 days.

And to make things busier, my future MIL came up to visit us yesterday.  While this is certainly not a bad thing like those mentioned above, it does take a certain amount of time away from dealing with said bad stuff.  Of course, at this point that may be the best thing for my sanity.

But even with all the stuff that's been going on, we did manage to get one thing accomplished this week:  all of our registries are officially a go.

Though we'll have several, the important one is our honeymoon registry.  I was surprised to find how few free ones are out there, but then I came across Honeyfund.com.  They are totally free and seem to be decently configured.  The only thing you pay for is the PayPal fee if your guests contribute that way, but it also gives the option of printing a sort of gift certificate thing and sending a check or cash.  I'll probably encourage people to do that, but regardless, it's nice to have options.

Of course, the big things we're putting on the registry are our airfare and accommodations, but we've been told people will contribute more if we put more tangible gifts on too, so we also included some excursions and luxuries like...

a trip up Dunn's River Falls (the go to adventure in Ocho Rios),

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scuba diving a wreck (life-long dream for me),

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and a couple's massage (because you know we'll need it after all the wedding craziness).

Mmmm, they look so happy!

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Hopefully, people will choose to contribute to our honeymoon, especially after I beg them, but for those who really want to give a tangible gift, we created a couple of other small registries.

Since we have limited space and the tendency to move often, we don't want much household stuff.  We can barely fit what we have now, and we just don't need much else at the moment.  However, there is one area where we both could do with some non-necessities:  the kitchen.  We like to cook, and while our kitchen is decently stocked, there are definitely items we'd like to add.

And so we created a registry at Sur la Table.  If you haven't heard of them, you're not alone.  They're a cooking store with all of the cooking stuff you could ever want.  We already enjoy moseying through whenever we come across one, so we figured this would be a good place for a registry.

And even though I'd be perfectly fine if everyone contributed to the honeymoon registry, I wouldn't exactly be disappointed if we got some of these:

 

Burn, Baby, Burn - mmmm, creme brulee

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I've wanted a hand-pumped vegetable chopper for YEARS!

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Um, how could you not want your bunt cakes to be shaped like castles?

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Our knives are pretty good, but we couldn't resist getting one super-sharp one.

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I swear we have useful stuff on our registry too, but it's just so much less fun to talk about.

Our Macy's registry is really small.  Really, really small.  So small that I'm wondering if we should just discard it altogether.  However, there were a few things we wanted that cannot be found at Sur la Table, and we literally created the Macy's registry because of 2 items:

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I have been in love with this china for years.  I saw it on some wedding site the first time we were engaged and haven't been able to get it out of my head.  I even have multiple friends with the same china, and I still want it.  Though I don't particularly want to store china, I definitely don't want to buy it myself, so I really hope someone helps us out with this one even though that's money away from the honeymoon.

That was my reason for wanting the Macy's registry, this was Daniel's:

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Ever since Daniel's cousin got married, and we chipped in to get them a good vacuum, Daniel has wanted someone to do the same for him.  We only have a small, crappy vacuum, so it would be really nice to get a good one like this.

There are a few other things on this registry, but those are the ones we care about.  Of course, it would probably be better if people didn't get them for us since they're expensive, and we'd rather have that money for the honeymoon.

We still need to streamline our "stuff" registries to maximize the appeal of the honeymoon one, but I'm glad we at least got them started.  With invitations almost ready to go out, we really needed to get this done.

Where did you register?  Why there?  Were any of your registries not-so-traditional like ours?

Elegant Lace Bridal, You Are Officially on My Bad List

Remember how the owner of Elegant Lace and I made a deal about my dress?  She told me I could either have them alter the dress down to a 6 and get my alterations somewhere else, or I could have the alterations done there, and they would alter the dress to my body, and I would only pay for shortening the skirt and the bustle.

This was less than 2 weeks ago, and I hadn't made a decision yet.

Last night, I got a call from them saying my alterations were done and the dress was ready to pick up.

Excuse me, what?  I haven't ordered alterations yet.  What alterations are you referring to?

This was essentially what I said when I called them this morning.  Their answer?  We don't know whether or not the dress has been altered down.  You'll have to come try it on to find out.

I was a fan of Elegant Lace.  I've promoted them on here.  I bought my dress and 2 of our bridesmaids' dresses from them.  I've recommended them when people asked me where to look for wedding dresses.

Now I wish I had never ordered from them.  If you don't know whether my dress has had alterations I didn't order, don't fucking tell me to come try it on to find out!  You find out yourself!  Show some customer service, dammit!  And while you're at it, how about a discount on my dress for ordering the wrong size in the first place and POSSIBLY doing alterations I did not agree to!

Yeah, I wouldn't go to them again, and you shouldn't either.

Dress horror stories, anyone?  Please make me feel better.

Debunking Bridesmaids' Dress Myths

Maybe it's because of my formal dress obsession, but I heard a ton of advice about bridesmaid dress shopping just after I got engaged.  Do this, don't do that, be careful about these things.  Some of it was ridiculous, some of it made sense.  Now that we've got our bridesmaids' dresses ordered, I wanted to share with you some advice I got from wedding planning sources that was off and some assumptions I made that were wrong.

Myths:

- Don't take all of your bridesmaids shopping at once:  I heard this from every bridesmaid dress advice column I read, and I have to admit, the reason I disagree with it may be because I only have 3 girls.  Nonetheless, I think it would have been much easier to come to a decision if they had been able to go together.  When I took MOH and Bridesmaid Megan (hereafter known as BM since she's technically the only one), they had little trouble agreeing on dresses despite the fact that their body shapes are very different.  It was only when I got them alone that they started having conflicting opinions, and while I was glad to get individual thoughts, it was hard going between them saying things like, "Well, this girl likes this about this one, but this part really doesn't work for her."  It's time-consuming, and it would be easier for them to see what does and does not work in person.

- Bridesmaids will have strong opinions about dresses:  This is something I was worried about personally.  I know them, and I was worried that they would not be able to agree on something, especially since my girls are not at all familiar with weddings and thus bridesmaid dresses.  But when it actually came time to shop, I was amazed by how hard it was to get opinions out of them.  All they cared about was what I thought about the dresses.  So I spent time worrying about this for nothing, and you shouldn't because when it comes down to it, they know it's your day, and they want to wear what you want them to wear.  Which is something I really need to thank them for.

- A cheaper option to buying bridesmaid dresses is buying prom or other formal dresses:  You guys, I was all over this tip for months.  One of my girls is having a pretty rough time economically right now, and I really did not want to be a financial burden on her, so I was all about finding cheaper dress options.  I searched every department and formal store I could find for cheaper dress options.  And you know what?  They are not cheaper.  It was difficult to find something under $100 and not much easier to find something under $150.  Most dresses were in the same range as bridesmaid dresses.  It is also harder to find dresses that work for everyone in these kinds of stores because when it comes down to it, bridesmaid dresses really are meant to work on multiple body types, and the boring designs help compliment everyone's tastes.  Surprisingly, after we did some shopping for these dresses, we found that bridesmaid dresses, despite their horrible reputation, actually looked better than the other formal dresses.  It seems they do charge exorbitant amounts for a reason.  Go figure.  P.S.  J. Crew and Jessica McClintock, the go to non-bridesmaid dress stores, are not even remotely cheaper than bridesmaid dresses.

- You must order early, or you will die!:  I was super worried about getting charged a rush fee because we were ordering at the 4 month mark.  When we went to a store in mid-March, the saleslady told us we needed to order within the next week!  Yet when we ordered our dresses at the same store almost a month later, we were fine.  I would not recommend waiting longer than we did, but you don't need to stress ordering 4 months or more ahead of time.

- Ordering the same dress at different stores is totally fine:  I cannot tell you how hard it was to find the dresses Groomslady liked at stores in SoCal for MOH and BM to try on.  I called at least 10 stores looking, and I still wasn't able to find them all.  I also could only find one store that had more than one of the dresses stocked which sucked for MOH and BM because they had to visit a bunch of stores.  I know there's not much you can do if your bridesmaids live in different places, but if you can find dresses at stores with big brand names like Alfred Angelo and (I cannot believe I'm going to say this) David's, it will be easier for everyone to find them.  Also, apparently you should try to order all of the dresses at one store when you do order so that they will all come from the same dye lot.  Woops.

What did I miss?  What dress myths and expectations did you find to be false?

Wedding Dress Woes

So.......my dress came in a few weeks ago.

Considering my bordering-on-obsessive love for wedding dresses (you'll notice that even though I haven't spoken about them in 5 months, I still have more posts on wedding dresses than anything else), you might be wondering why I didn't come to you screaming with joy that I could finally take my dress home.

Yeah, it doesn't fit.

I had been worried for a while that my dress was going to be too big.  When I ordered, I looked at the sizing chart, and I ended up going off of what the saleslady recommended because I assumed the sizing chart would be correct.  Big mistake.  It wasn't until later that I started thinking about all of the other 8s I had tried on.  Now, I know all dresses are different, but I have tried on quite a few more than most avid dress hunters (over 200), and not a single 8 has ever fit me.  Has even come close to fitting me.  In normal sizes, I'm usually a 4, sometimes a 2, and rarely anything bigger.  Ordering an 8 started seeming like a bad idea.

And when I tried the dress on, it was about a size too big.

Now I know what you're going to say:  it's better to have an oversized dress than an undersized one, and I can always get it altered down.  But if you're going to spend $1,200 on a dress, it really ought to fit somewhere.  Even in the waist, which was supposed to be the one place where it would fit perfectly, was still about a size too big.  The bust might need to go down more than that.

To Elegant Lace's credit, it wasn't as much of a pain in the ass as it could have been to talk them into altering it down for me for free.  But now I have a dilemma.  If I do my alterations there, they'll alter the bodice to fit me, and I'll have to pay to shorten the skirt and for the bustle.  However, if I do my alterations elsewhere like I was planning, they'll only alter it down to a 6.

I don't want to do my alterations at the bridal store because I know it will be more expensive than elsewhere.  But at the same time, if the dress it altered to a 6, I might need to have the bust taken in still more, and apart from the extra expense, I don't know how well the dress would hold up to multiple alterations in one area.

So now I need to find out what prices would be like at other places which means I need to find other alteration stores that can handle wedding dresses which would be a pain in the ass even without the time constraint because how the Hell are you supposed to know how good someone is with formal wear without seeing them in action?  It's frustrating because I wasn't counting on having to do this yet, and I have other time-sensitive things that I need to work on, but now I need to make a decision about this too.

I'm already leaning toward the bridal salon though.  Since I won't have to pay for them to alter the bust, the price gap will probably be smaller, and I'm afraid of hiring someone who isn't good enough.  It would not be the first time I'd had a formal dress altered poorly.

I'm also frustrated because the wedding dress used to be my favorite part of planning, but between this and my 2 dress bride experience, I just want the whole thing done with.

I so, so wish my dress had a corset back.  That would solve all my problems.

Where did you do your alterations?  And if you don't mind saying, how much were they?  Anyone know a good seamstress in the Bay Area?  Or really, in Northern California in general?