Posts tagged ‘budget’

June 6th, 2010

Just a few things left to do

We’ve gotten nearly everything wrapped up for the wedding and hopefully, we’re done bleeding money for awhile. Oof.

  • Wedding dress picked up. This is a story in and of itself and I’ll post about it later. Suffice it to say that I would NEVER recommend getting alterations at The Wedding Shoppe in St Paul, MN. Their service for choosing and purchasing a dress, in my experience, was excellent, but the alteration process was less than optimal (and not just for me). I’ll share more of that story later.
  • Attendant’s gifts ordered.
  • Bridesmaids’ Jewelry – I wasn’t planning on buying jewelry for the bridesmaids originally, but decided that it would be a nice gift and take one more thing off of their plates. I stalked 1928 Jewelry for a few weeks and ended up finding some very pretty navy blue pieces on sale from the Blue Moon set. I also bought a faux pearl and crystal bracelet and earrings to wear with my wedding dress.
  • Card Box – Similar to the guest book, I just wasn’t sold with the easily available options and had postponed getting anything until I stumbled on a Wedding Card Birdhouse on etsy. It’s personalized and comes with one roof for the wedding (with a hole for cards) and another lid for the birds! Extremely cute and clever. I’m excited about it.
  • Discovered we don’t need a full kids’ table – only 4 kids attending.
  • Plane tickets to wedding purchased.
  • Going Away Dress – Purchased yesterday. We’ll need to leave our hotel pretty early the next day so I decided it would be significantly easier to have the wedding dress already under control. Since we were already at Bloomingdale’s* on a registry-related task, I checked out their plus-size selection. I found a lovely Jones New York Collection dress in our wedding colors – white with navy flowers with apple green leaves and centers. It seemed quite appropriate and it looked great with a fairly reasonable price tag (read as “on sale”). I’ll wear it with a cute pair of white sandals and then repurpose both of them for one of the dinners on our honeymoon.
  • Guest Book – I didn’t want a typical guest book, but still wanted to have a place for people to leave their names, thoughts, and hopefully, email addresses. I looked at the recipe card style boxes but it didn’t make sense to me beyond the day of the wedding. It would just be a dust magnet. Despite my leanings otherwise, I ended up going with a book as it made more sense in terms of keeping it. I found a lovely handmade one on etsy. It’s personalized with our names on the cover.
  • Matt’s ring picked up.
  • Turned in final paperwork for venue with best guess guest count.
  • Made final arrangements with vendors and altered orders based on the guest count.
  • Thank you notes! (Hooray for Matt writing them!) The list is ever increasing and he’s keeping up pretty well.

Now we need to pack for a week for pre-wedding, the wedding, and a week of honeymoon, as well as making sure the apartment is in a reasonable state. Somewhere in there, we need to spend quality time with the cat. Regardless of how much quality time we get in, he’s still going to make us pay when we return. I have no doubt in my mind.

Really, that’s the bulk of it. We need to finish our pre-cruise registration bits and print off or boarding passes and luggage tags, but hopefully, that’s by far the most complicated thing we have left to do. I’m really, really looking forward to the honeymoon, if for no reason other than we can both get some much needed rest.

*Just as an aside, prior to our setting up our registry, I’d never shopped at Bloomingdale’s but their customer service throughout our wedding planning have definitely won my business. They are one of the few registries that has a built in Thank You manager, as well as excellent service in person, including useful (and very few) phone calls (as opposed to annoyances).

November 13th, 2009

Forget the invites! I’m using notebook paper.

Wedding invitations. Engraved, letterpress, thermography, and digital. Every shade of paper under the sun, except the color you actually want. A bazillion colors of ink, but the color you like isn’t available on the paper you want. The invitations are customizable except for the part you don’t particularly like.

And they’re all ridiculously expensive.

*sigh*

November 1st, 2009

Nothing up my sleeve… oh wait, there aren’t any

Picking up where I left off a few entries ago, prior to interruptions from visiting parents and unexpected surgical procedures, I was walking through how things had evolved from the original wedding plans I had cooked up in my head. So, we’d gone from 40 to 140 guests, backyard to restaurant, and from one date to another. Having never really thought about having a wedding or getting married for that matter, I had no clue what kind of wedding I wanted – dress, colors, themes, music – all foreign to me. I initally was thinking that I didn’t really want a dress and was looking at salwar kameez, but veered away from that. Then, I thought maybe incorporating a subtle steampunk theme would be fun. I made the mistake of letting my Mom google it unsupervised and she panicked a little. Then, my friend finally dragged me to the dress shop.

I went with three friends. When we walked in, the samples/sales rack was out and two of them pointed out a two piece dress that I rather liked, but was four thousand sizes too small. Besides, it was slightly poofy and I thought I wanted a simple, as not poofy as you can get dress. I also thought I wanted sleeves. The problem was when I those dresses on, none of them did it for me. So, our salesperson began just bringing in random dresses. She managed to find one quite similar to the one my friends had pointed out in the beginning.
Wedding Dress

As you can see, it met my need for simple – no decoration, no lace. It was just dress and I adored it. It even had a train which I swore I didn’t want because of the wedding being outdoors but the salesperson showed me how we could bustle it up. Suddenly, it also met my interest in having a neo-victorian feel to the wedding attire. Plus, it went nicely with the fabulous apple green wrap I’d found (and already purchased). The pic is a relatively close approximation of the dress, minus the sash. Focus on the dress part because it really is kind of an awful picture.

Needless to say, my Mom was pleased that I wasn’t wearing something bizarre. She’s still pretty hesitant about the apple green wrap, but I’m hoping to win her over at the first fitting. In the meantime, I need to re-lose ten pounds that I’ve gained since I bought the dress. My bustline was one size (the smaller size). My waist was a middle size. My behind was a bigger size. I went with the middle size; so, I need to actually fit into the dress. That’d be helpful. I should have gotten the bigger size, but oh well, water under the bridge.

As for the price tag, it was surprisingly reasonable. I went into the whole process imagining the worst and not wanting to spend a ridiculous amount of money on a dress. By the time I’m done with alterations, the price tag should be right around $600. I think I did pretty well.