From The Beginning

I'm coming up on 1 year of wedded bliss. And it is great. Unless I talk to someone about the stress of planning my wedding, I've mostly forgotten all the things that made me want to cancel the whole damn thing (nothing to do with my husband, by the way. ALL in the planning).

I've still got my head swimming with information and advice so, I'm going to spill it out from my head to my finger tips from time to time. I've blogged about the wedding thing a bit before, but this time, with a clearer head, I'm starting from the beginning.

You just got engaged! Congrats!
Once you've made all of your phone calls, texts and emails announcing your engagement and the dust has settled, you now realize... "where the hell do i start? there's so much to do!".

The first 2-3 weeks of engagement:

Step 1
Grab a calendar and X out all of the dates you'll be on your period. No matter what the occasion, and especially your wedding to honeymoon time, the LAST thing you want to deal with is The Curse Of Eve. So, mark away as far in the future as you can. This will help in the planning process.

Step 2
You'll want to worry about the date, location, the guest list (esp since you just told everyone you're engaged - shit! Do they all think they're invited?). Relax. Deep breath in... and out. Good. Now, if you're one of those modern-day independent gals, like me, you haven't actually pictured your dream wedding day. So, take this first week or two of being engaged to enjoy being engaged, grab some bridal and wedding magazines, and not just the ones with dresses. Grab ones that show different table settings and decor ideas. Look through them with your hubby-to-be casually and mark the things either of you like. This will help get you both in the frame of mind and help you figure out what each other wants at their wedding.

After I got engaged, my husband knew I would want to jump right in planning, but I was surprised when he would pipe in with his own ideas of what he really wanted. I had no idea he cared what the colors of our wedding were or that he'd hate all of the cake toppers out there. Don't worry about making your decisions right now, just get inspired and have fun looking around. Together.

Step 3
There are a lot of great resources available on the internet. Signing up at TheKnot.com was very helpful to me. You can plug in your budget, guest list, wedding date and it will help list all the things needed to do in time for your big day. This is another great place to get inspired. They have suggestions and photos on all things wedding related, so grab a few images to your desktop to sift through later.

It's important to take these first few weeks to just be and let your imagination go wild. Don't look at dollar signs right now, just get your creative juices flowing and find inspiration in everything.

All Married Up - intro to the NEW hesper blog

It's been almost 1 month exactly.

May 1, 2009 all of my stresses and my fears, my future and my present mashed together. I got married. And it was great. It was incredibly stressful and frustrating until right before I walked down the aisle.

EVERYTHING I'd heard from my girlfriends, is true. Once you see all of your friends and family members, the people you had to handpick to be a part of your most important day, nothing else really matters. When you reach the altar and see your husband to be with tears swelling in his eyes, who cares what the centerpieces looked like, or that a whole table name/number went missing, or that you forgot to give the DJ 3 songs you wanted played... Well, that last one we didn't realize until we were about to enter the reception. Thank God for the digital age...

Everybody who was there keeps telling me how FUN my wedding was! It's so nice to hear! They also say it was beautiful, because it was. The place was gorgeous, the wedding party looked great, my husband wore the most handsome colors in his tux and I felt like a princess in my brand new Maggie Sottero designer gown I had bought on ebay.

I would LOVE to offer any tips and advice on the whole wedding thing, based on my experience. You REALLY have NO IDEA how rough and frustrating it is until you go through it. I have a lot of great stories I'm going to share on this blog. A lot of great pictures, too! Please feel free to contact me if you want advice or info. In the meantime, check back in for the updates.

Escort Cards

Because we've gone a different route than the standard table numbers, I was thinking about putting the image from the film and perhaps the title on the escort card itself.

So, it would kind of look like;




Michael & Alisha Savage


War of the Worlds table





OR I guess we could have a table number as well, but still the image, so they can easily match up the tables to their cards.

Another idea to help the themes mesh, would be to put a layer of unbuttered OR color-coated caramel popcorn around the escort cards. Similar to this;


I want to make sure the B-Movie theme doesn't feel or look like it came from left field, even though it kind of does. But it ties in with the cake, so the table numbers and escort cards, and escort card table, should help keep is solid. Right?

Table Numbers

SPOILER ALERT!!

Seriously, if you want to be surprised by our cool table numbers, then don't look any further.

They match our cake! They have nothing to do with the overall, young-love-in-springtime theme we got going on, but we came up with the cake design and wanted to compliment it.

For The Little Ones!

The Flower Girl dress has been chosen!

For the Bridesmaids and MOH

Done! I realized I just HAD to make a decision. And it was so easy to go round and round about it because I want to be considerate to each woman's size and shape and bank account. But in the end, I'd love you all to look cute, and kind of wearing the same thing and I've been stressing WAAAAAAAY too much over it, so here you go! Check out the size chart and, if you want to, contact the shipper. If you'd prefer to have me order all of them, I can do that, but 1 of you lives in seattle and 2 of you live in Portland and the other 2 I barely get to see, so it may be best to order it on your own.

I really like this dress because it's super cute and it has an optional shawl and shoulder straps. Shoe's are a whole different thing.

Wedding Colors

I know I bought my favors in blue and silver already, but I'm thinking about changing up the colors. To what, I do not know. But something more springtime.

I think the general theme for the wedding should be "Young love in springtime" which sounds totally gay, but you at least get the idea. And I need to figure it out before we dye the dress and before we make the invitations. Which is now.

This is a template of colors available from our wedding location, for table settings.