Tiffany's Style Shower Pt.1

Two weekends back my maids under the leadership of my baby sister threw me a bridal shower and it was so wonderful.  They acquired the use of the clubhouse at my mom's boyfriend's apartment complex (And my mom's beau took care of the table and chair rentals... He's such a sweetie.  I'm so giving him one of my favorite paintings.).  The clubhouse was a fantastic setting for family and two of my school buddies who decided to make the trek up to Butler.  My little sister even pulled a little bit of art by constructing the congrats banner herself.  =)

As with all showers.... we started with food,

a bridal game or two, the cake

and then gift unwrapping.  With the unwrapping there was joy,

surprise,

in some cases confusion,

and of course silliness with bows,

Yes I do make a multitude of very expressive faces without even trying...  The rest of the photos taken by my camera can be found on my flickr site.  In the end we got plenty of registry and non-registry items that are perfect for us.  That is once we unbox and put away everything.  =)

Next... Part 2.  The Bridal shower silliness!

Wedding Planning BS

I'm seriously sick of wedding planning.  It's nice doing the design aspects and being creatively artistic but the coordinating vendors is for the birds!  When it should take one or two steps to get something done, it instead takes 10 and you haven't even gotten anything settled.

source

For instance, our vendor while being a sweet nice hippie-esque guy has wonderful food, we still haven't had even an estimate of the cost yet.  We were told he'd send it during June.  It's now August and tomorrow is a month from the wedding.   I need to know the cost so I can find the $$$.  Without knowing even an estimate, I attempted to get a line of credit from the bank for the rest of our wedding costs.  Of course with all the student loans I currently have, I was denied.  Luckily I do have two credit cards with fairly decent credit rates that we can use for the wedding if most of the other vendors do credit or paypal.  But it's much more of a pain this way.  And seeing as how regular bank loans take 1 month to be approved... we are too late to apply for one of those.  Thank you food vendor for putting me between a rock and a hard place!

In addition to this flowers are another issue of pain.  Originally I was trying to get relatives to grow me some sunflowers.  But crops are being eaten by critters so I have to purchase the flowers for the bouquets.  I'm fine with that.  And I checked into a local city farm to get them there.  But instead of just talking to one lady and having them make a date for me to show up.  I got tossed from one person to the next before getting to email the person I needed to contact all along.  And even though I said I had been planning to do my own arrangements, it was still unclear at first so yet another email.  Finally after several emails later, I have a time and date to visit the farm to see what they are growing and to place an order for flowers.  Uggg!  At times I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to just show up to the florist down the street from my work and tell them I need two and a half dozen sunflowers and another dozen red flowers with heads the size of sunflowers (gerber daisies if possible).  Or even just show up at Giant Eagle and buy whatever they have in stock that week.

At this point, I don't have the time for pussy footing around and playing email or phone tag.  I just need to get stuff done.  We still have to meet the pastor twice in the next month and create a wedding ceremony.  I still have favors, programs, and parasols to make.  There's a shit load to do and I really don't want to waste time with people acting stupid.  Because lets face it... it's all people acting stupid.  I'm a girl who knows what I want.  I don't want to be sold anything more or less!  Just vend me what you are to vend me!

Anyone else find that all this wedding bs is making you not really want to have a wedding?  You want to marry your love but you want to tell all these vendors to sod off!

Surprise!!!!

Our first registry gift arrived Friday evening!!!  When the UPS man pulled up in front of our house, I had a moment of excitement then realized I didn't order anything and thought it was probably another delivery to our new neighbors.  To my surprise, there was a knock at our door.  I jumped up, opened it to a delivery guy who tossed me the box and took off in his truck again.  Upon seeing that it was a Macy's box, I squealed with excitement.  Future hubs looked at me as if I were delusional until I explained that this had to be a registry gift.  I told him to pull out his knife (he's an Eagle Scout/ex-military so he's always got some means to cut on his person) as I ran to get the camera to document the moment.  As I ran back into the living room, he promptly gave me the box/knife so that I could do the honors...

I ripped into the box like a chetah on a fresh kill.

 

Scooping aside the tons of packing peanuts, I found something wrapped in paper placed in the middle.  My first thought with the packing being so large was that we got a vase...  

After unravelling the 20 feet of wrapping, I found we got two Mikasa crystal wine glasses from Brian and Mer!  And they gave us a down right quirky lovable note in the box saying a "Toast to your Marriage".  The Mr. loves quirky puns and we both thought this was just down right cute!

Now on to gratuitous shots of the glassware!  These pretty beauties are the perfect size for a nice glass of wine with dinner or for a special toast.  When we were looking at glassware, we fell for the flame pattern that looked almost floral from above.

And we did what anyone would do with new wine glasses... tested them out with dinner!  Just lovely!

Don't you all just love surprise deliveries?

An obsession with bags!

If you're a Bridesmaid of mine...  you may read further but I would suggest not as this contains one of the many goodies you will get from me!  =)



Any of my family will tell you I'm a bag fanatic.  Not purse like stylish bags but the cute kitchy grocery store or messenger style bags.  When I go to Whole Foods (which is few and far between now), I always have to pick up an extra bag from there even though I have ~20 at home.  So when I happened into Bath and Body Works the other week before my first dress fitting, of course I would find cute, cheap, awesome, self store bags.

There are 6 different colors and the bags roll up to be clipped for storage.  How wonderful is that?  =)  You can stash it in your purse for when you might need to have more carrying capacity on the go.  And the greatest part about these bags are the cost...  $2.50 each!  Another similar bag I bought at a recycle, reuse, urban hippie store sold for around $5 so this price isn't bad.

Sorry for the crappy phone pics...  this was a rather spur of the moment post.

I chose to go with the yellow bag as I loved the design.  It looks far better in person than on the site...  And getting myself the bag gave me a great idea for part of the bridesmaid gifts as I know a few of them have a bag fetish as well.  =)

Anyone else in blogland LOVE bags...  esp inexpensive, cute, reusable ones?

Under 50 days away!

We are around a month and a half away from the big day....  yes a month and a half!  And there's still many things that need to be pinned down and many projects to be done.  So this means I'm gonna be on a slight blog hiatus.  Yes as things get done, I'll post little tutorials about them here.  And as other things happen... like my bridal shower in a week and a half... those will be posted as well.  But for now I must focus on all the DIY projects such as favors, table # holders, tablecloths, finding wildflowers for submerged centerpieces (anybody has a field of wildflowers I can pilfer for the wedding please let me know!), easy or difficult fan wedding programs and a ton of others.

Gardening and Swimsuit?

As a bride wearing a strapless dress, you worry about funny tan lines due to sun exposure during tasks such as gardening...  So why do you never see anyone gardening in a swim top?  You may think it's the inappropriate nature of it.  But in the case of a long bandeau top such as this...

It works perfectly as a strapless tank top and when use in combo with jeans is quite breezy for pulling weeds.  But sadly it leads to this...

Wicked Sunburn!  Now I did spray on waterproof SPF 15.  Problem is that it was spray on and rather than a misting, I should have shellacked my back in SPF.  I also kept bumping into a wet bush (disregard taking that phrase to the naughty place) that wiped off some of the sunscreen.  And I was weeding with my back in the air from 10 am to 1 pm-ish otherwise known as the worst time to be in the sun.  So of course I got wicked burned with appears to be a white spot from what I can only imagine was a leaf stuck to my back.  Next time I garden and attempt to not get a farmers tan, I need a heavier duty lotion waterproof sunscreen.  I also have to avoid the area where I was weeding that contained no shady spots.

Anyone else tempted to garden in a swimsuit?