Monthly Archives: August 2010

Aug30

Engagement Party!

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So I definitely have homework I should be doing right now instead of writing this, but really quickly here are some pictures from our engagement party this weekend! My bridesmaids (except Brittany, we miss her when she’s in Ohio) threw this for us and it was really a great event!


Everyone toasting to us! You can see it really got quite crowded in my little apartment!


Our fancy toasting champagne glasses! I may just wear one on my head as a veil.


Delicious punch. Ginger ale + pineapple juice + rainbow sherbet + mango rum.


Our very impressive cake that Waverly made and Lauren decorated. You can see some of the proofs from our engagement shoot that we cut out and stuck in frames.
Me and my Maid of Honor Lauren who came up from Boone to throw this for us.
Us playing a game to find out how well we know each other. People wrote questions for Chris about me and vice-versa.

Aug24

Something to Dance to

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So life has been super fast paced recently and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon. In the past week I moved back to Blacksburg, hung out for a cool 36 hours, and then headed off to the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a wedding with Chris’s family. I returned Sunday evening just in time to finalize my schedule and get myself to class Monday morning. Senior year has officially begun!

Know what else I’ve done in the last week? I’ve found a wedding band! Actually to be fair I found them weeks, months, years (not true) ago, but I have had my eye on them for awhile. I used gigmasters.com to figure out what was in the area wedding-band wise. To be honest I was a little disappointed with the selection as it mostly consisted of punk rock bands that also happen to play weddings. As I’m not particularly interested in dancing to punked out versions of “Shout” I kept looking for a slightly more traditional wedding/variety band. I came across a couple bands that could have worked and emailed them for quotes before I stumbled upon ‘Timeless.’ I drooled over their videos and song lists for a little while before very nervously asking for a quote. Up until now I was only looking at 3 or 4 piece bands and Timeless had 8 pieces! The quote came back slightly higher then the others but at significantly less per piece, and I was really impressed with the speed at which my follow up emails were answered. (Sidenote: vendors who don’t respond to emails = the devil.)
So if I had already found the band what did I do this last week? Well I took Chris to go listen to them! Booking a band was definitely not something I was going to do without hearing the band and they just happened to be playing in High Point, NC at a public event on the exact day Chris and I were supposed to head back to school. High Point is almost half way to Blacksburg so we were able to stop for a couple hours with almost zero inconvenience. And we loved them! They’re very high energy and I’m hoping will be exactly what we need to turn my wedding into the epic dance party I would oh-so-love for it to be! It’s hard to ignore an 8-piece band! They have a sax, trumpet, and trombone so are able to really get a fun swing/dance/jazzy sound that I’m definitely looking forward to!
So far we have a church, a reception hall, a caterer, and a band! This very day Chris and I will be meeting with our hopefully officiant and we met with 2 photographers last week! We are well on the way to getting married! Stay tuned for information on the photography situation, it’ll will probably be posted the next time I’m in the library downloading software!
Aug16

Committed!

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… to our caterer!
My mother and I were in Blacksburg for a super brief 24 hours this weekend to meet with our caterer. We met with Angela from Professional Catering on a drizzly Saturday morning and hashed out all the concerns, questions, and worries we had.
Mom’s biggest concern was that for a sit-down dinner things would get bungled up: people’s orders would be mixed up, food would be cold by the time it made it to the last tables, etc. Angela wasn’t able to completely put this worry to bed but she was able to ensure us that there would be plenty of staff on hand to get the food out in a timely manner and that they cater many weddings and sit-down dinners and are very experienced with the process.
I’ve been to 6-7 events catered by Professional Catering with almost all of them taking place at our reception venue so I am confident that they are familiar with the space and experienced enough to bring everything together nicely.
We got to look at the silverware, china, table cloths, and overlays that we will get to choose from and that all looked good. I didn’t love any of the china options but they were nice enough. It seemed weird to me that they didn’t have a plain white option which would seem to be the most versatile and universal pleasing, but oh well.
While we were in Blacksburg we also got to do a little shopping (we purchased the paper for our Save-the-Dates!) and visit a salon Mom had found online. Elite Style Salon was only a couple minutes from my apartment, and although I had ensured Mom that we didn’t need to look into that yet I’m glad we did. Their mission statement is a verse from 1 Peter and their salon was packed with 3 different bridal parties. Their prices are significantly lower then others in the area but we were able to see first hand that they did great work and were super friendly. I’m going to make an appointment for a hair trial and if I like it (which I’m pretty confident I will) I’ll go ahead and book them! Now I just have to decide what I want my hair to look like. Here’s what I’m thinking:

Half-up, curly, flowers, and a lot longer then it is now. You may remember that a mere year ago this was me:
I love, love, loved this haircut but it’s coming back to bite me now that I’m trying to get married not even 2 years after it. So how am I going to stretch out my locks? Well for one I’m just counting on 2 years being long enough to get it to a good length but aside from that I plan to keep the ends trimmed to encourage growth. My mother has also prescribed that I take prenatal vitamins to encourage my hair to grow. After a quick google search I’ve found that many people do believe that prenatal vitamins can promote healthy hair and nails, and are perfectly healthy for non-pregnant women for short periods of time. Who knew?
So I have lots of time to decide how I want to wear my hair and hopefully plenty of time for it to grow. Right now it falls just below my collar bones. Although after this weekend even if I wear my hair in a pony tail, at least we’ll have food!
Aug9

Cake Tasting!

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Mmmm cake! So Friday was our very first meeting with a wedding vendor. Mom, MOH Lauren, and I went to Once In A Blue Moon Bakery in Cary and looked at, talked about, and tasted cakes. Blue Moon is our go-to place for cakes and they make some really delicious cakes in all kinds of flavors.

After we’d looked through picture books of cakes they have made we got to try some samples. I believe that if you start from about 1 o’clock and go clockwise you have: chocolate cake, white cake, yellow cake, hazelnut mousse, mandarin orange mousse, lemon mousse, raspberry mousse, chocolate-raspberry mousse, chocolate mousse, and strawberry mousse. The three in the middle are buttercream icing, almond-buttercream icing, and cream cheese frosting. They also brought out carrot cake with cream cheese frosting for us to try (that’s Chris’s favorite!)
Mom and I both LOVED the hazelnut mousse and all three of us were really jazzed about the chocolate-raspberry. The cream cheese frosting and the buttercream were really good too, and all three of us kind of agreed that the type of cake didn’t make much difference. I’m not sure if our ratios were just way off or what.
So when faced with all this wedding cake goodness how is one to choose just one flavor? Or even if you assume you can get a new flavor for each layer, how is one to choose? This tasting didn’t go over our favorite Blue Moon specialty: margarita, or our all time favorites: german chocolate, carrot cake, and devil’s food cake.
Solution: cake bar!

We can still have a small 2 tiered cake to cut but then we can have all our favorites on display around it. We’ll probably end up being able to choose 10 flavors or so, and although we might double up on some there will still be plenty of options for everyone! Hurrah cake!

Aug2

Oh the Madness!

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Well the wedding planning madness seems to have begun! I got back from New York this morning and was greeted with an inbox full of responses from wedding vendors. Just today I made appointments with a band, a caterer, and a bakery for cakes. I also have a photography meeting lined up! All of these will be the first meetings of their kind so hopefully they will help me know exactly what to look for and get a feel for the options available.

So with 11 months (to the day!) until the big day what’s on my to-do list?

1.) Continually be seeking out inspiration online or in magazines on all things weddings. Especially be looking out for cheap projects that I can do myself.

2.) Work on the wedding website. This needs to be up and running before we can send out save-the-dates and since so many people have to travel I’d like to have them sent out as soon as possible.

3.) Book hotel blocks. This needs to be on the website before save-the-dates go out.

4.) Prepare for meetings with caterers, bakers, and photographers. Have lists of questions ready as well as clear ideas what we do and don’t want.

The list could oh so certainly go on but this is really quite a lot already. My first meeting is Friday morning with a baker who will provide a sample plate of the flavors of cakes available. I thought everyone would jump at the opportunity to skip work to taste cakes but neither Chris nor my father want to. Weird. This is without a doubt the vendor meeting I’m most looking forward to, and even if I can’t have a Sylvia Weinstock cake or the $11,000 cake Chelsea Clinton had, at the very least I will get a small sample plate. Yum!

Sylvia Weinstock cake, all of those flowers are edible sugar flowers.