The second installment of my wedding planning adventures!
WEDDING RINGS.
While researching options for
wedding rings, I came across the idea of having each other’s fingerprint on the
inside of the wedding band. I completely fell in love with the idea of it and
tried to find someone locally to accomplish this. We stopped at the jeweler
that Joe got my engagement ring from and they couldn’t accommodate the request.
I ended up contacting someone in Germany via Etsy to make our wedding rings. Even
though I started the process months ahead of time, we ended up finally getting
the rings pretty close to the actual date. We had to send our fingerprints
using a molding kit that they had to send us and reportedly the ones from the
first set weren’t useable so we had to wait for another kit and send that back
again. Anyhow, things worked out and we’re pleased with the results. On the
outside, they look like a fairly plain and unassuming white gold bands but we
have each other’s fingerprint, our wedding date, and the phrase “as you wish”
engraved on the inside. I feel they were worth the time and effort and I LOVE THEM!!
GUEST LIST, SAVE-THE-DATES, and INVITES.
As mentioned, I am not a fan of
being in front of a crowd. I really had “small” and “intimate” in mind for our
wedding. I don't have a very large family and figured we could get away with just inviting
immediate family and a couple friends for our big day. I got started on making
the Save-the-Dates in January because even though we had announced it on
Facebook, I wanted everyone to have plenty of time to arrange for travel and
accommodations. I’m well aware that travelling is expensive and I really hate
the idea of putting anyone out in order to come to see us get married. I had
gotten a list from Joe’s dad of the people he invited to Joe’s sister’s wedding
that he had weeded out the guests of the groom and some of his work buddies and
the instructions were to “invite who you want”. Joe went through the list and
picked out the names he knew and we put them on the list. Since I was doing
this thing, there’s no way I was going to go half-assed with it so we had to
have magnets. Based on online research, I determined that it was pricey and time
consuming to have somebody else make them and I wanted to design them myself anyhow
so we found some print-yourself kits at Party City. We originally had
enough supplies to print what we needed but the printer ate some of them, some
of them printed blurry, and then the guest list kept growing so we ended up
needing to order more sets online after we wiped out the stock in-store. Sigh. Turns
out that it probably would’ve been cheaper in the long run to just have someone
else print them! Had even more hassles with the invites; the super fancy, linen
textured, pearlescent paper I had bought wasn’t appropriate for an ink jet
printer, even though it was listed as such. I had to print each one single-sided
and feed the paper one at a time then lay them flat overnight before printing
the other side and allowing another round of laying flat overnight before
sending them out. The postcards devoured the print cartridges. We went through
about 3 or 4 each of color and black cartridges printing the magnets and
invites. Not. Cheap. Advice: Get your guest list quadruple-finalized before buying supplies or at least plan on buying about 30% or more supplies than you really think you need. Also, if you’re going to be printing stuff yourself, make sure the cost of ink isn’t going to outweigh the cost of just having them printed. Do plenty of test prints on plain paper before using actual magnets or whatever expensive paper too!
BRIDESMAID DRESSES.
My original vision was to have
each of my four bridesmaids each wear a different dress, but in the same color.
Knowing that the girls have varying skintones, I suggested that everyone just
find a grey dress and we’ll be good. Nobody was
comfortable with the amount of variations within the color grey so I figured
I’d try to simplify things and find some similar dresses that they could choose
from. I know everyone is on a tight budget so I did my due diligence and looked
all over the place online for dresses under $100. I happily stumbled upon some
cute grey bridesmaid dresses at Target.com that were around $70 and had
multiple styles. I excitedly sent the girls an email that they could pick whatever
dress they wanted from those styles as long as they pick “cement grey”. Well,
two of them quickly responded that they liked a one-shoulder style and nobody else
wanted to be the odd person out (none of the bridesmaid had met previously, by
the way) so they all went with the one shoulder style. Little did I realize,
there were TWO one-shoulder styles – a long length and a shorter length. Which
we figured out after two girls had bought their dresses… one long, one short. We
ended up going with the longer style, mostly because my sister hates shorter
dresses (and she’s the maid of honor) but of course that meant that somebody
had to send one back as the dresses aren’t sold in the stores, only online.
There was some confusion on how the sizes run (bigger on the longer version
than the short one, apparently)… and in the long run, I almost wish we had gone
with the original idea so as to not have to deal with alterations or taking the
trouble to order things multiple times. All-in-all, regardless of varying body
shapes and sizes (and pregnancy for one!), everyone looked gorgeous and the
blue hydrangea and baby’s breath bouquets each of my girls were carrying looked
great. Aqua earrings and necklaces and gray flip-flops completed the look. 
TUXEDOS.
The guys wore rented grey tuxes
with grey Converse. They looked great!! Joe insisted on bowties and of
course we picked vests (rather than cumberbunds... who wears those anymore?!). His tux was the same as
everyone else’s but he had a darker bowtie and vest. Joe's dad wanted to
wear a tuxedo, I figured my dad didn’t and verified that with my mom so the
dads weren’t going to wear one. Until my dad found out that it was an option
and decided that he did indeed want to wear a monkey-suit. Drama, sigh. Anyhow,
they guys had boutonnieres made out of sweetgrass roses made locally, tied
together with twine, and some antique aqua-colored buttons. The groom’s
boutonniere had hops and wheat and beer-related matter attached to it (thank
you, etsy.com). 
More later, ciao for now!!
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