Table Number

I saw this today and thought it was pretty snazzy. Simple yet classy. I'd replace the flower with our logo/monogram though.

Wedding Favors

In lieu of gifts....

Donation Wedding Favors? Yes please!

In memory of my grandma Teresa who died of Pancreatic Cancer in 1996, I'd love to make a donation on behalf of the guests in lieu little trinkets :)

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These

As you know our theme is a starry night theme with a heavy use of plum purple and navy blue colors. The main inspiration for this idea comes from my favorite artist Vincent Van Gough's famous painting "Starry Night" and "Starry Night Over The Rhone"

Starry Night

Starry Night Over The Rhone

That being said I hope some of you now make the connection between this blog's title ("Starry Starry Bride") and Don McLean's song about Van Gough, "Vincent (Starry Starry Night)" :)

Anywhos, we're using the pictures for inspiration and a drawing board for color ideas. I'm set on navy and plum being our two main colors and figure white/silver will play a role in the scheme as well. One thing you'll notice in these two paintings is the use of the color yellow, which I'm increasingly wondering if we should incorporate that as a color, but that's still on the fence because although it looks great in this work of art, when you lay out the colors navy, plum and a butter pecanish yellow, not so appealing.

This morning I got to thinking about cakes.

Which has me craving icing right about now.

Some of you may know that we're planning on serving cupcakes at our wedding as opposed to the traditional wedding cake. Why? Cupcakes are just more fun, more easy going and downright tastier (in my mind).

When I was a little, little girl I had a kitchen play set -- complete with plastic stove top, plastic oven, plastic countertop, plastic baking ware, you get the gist. While all of that plastic was good fun my most favorite part of this set was the plastic cupcakes that you "baked" in the oven. I always remember playing with those cupcakes and having such a strong desire to eat one. The vanilla base and purple icing topping was irresistible (if we dug them up today I'm sure there's be gnawing marks all over the toy).

Thus, my love of cupcakes began. Growing up I was never a huge fan of cakes and the thought of a wedding CAKE kind of grosses me out when I could have my beloved cupcakes if I wanted to!!

Anyways, back on track now, I was surfing the net this morning with a novel idea. Perhaps we could have those cupcakes I used to obsess over when I was four in non plastic form! Since our colors ARE purple and blue, we could have some purple and some blue cupcakes...... with vanilla bases!! *excitement*

Thennnn I got to thinking about what the heck are we going to cut?? So obviously we'd have a top layer that we'd cut and have tiers of cupcakes below it. Since the theme of the shindig is Starry Night I thought to myself: "self, how cool would it be to have the top layer decorated like the painting Starry Night??"

A little googling and ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom.....

(These are actually cupcakes :p)

So that's that. What's nice is that cupcakes are slightly cheaper than slices of cake (approx. $2 a pop vs $3.50).

I had always wanted cupcakes but wasn't sure how to do it. I figured we'd end up with a cake like this:

Which is gorgeous, don't get me wrong.

But this cake is a canvas.... let's paint it.

Te Me Gusta

I found this hair style that's cool but what's even cooler is the little star rhinestones entwined in the hair! Must have!

I found this sexy style of bouquet. Sans the pink it would look snazzy with a deep purple and a bit of.... 

Blue! 

But again, this whole bouquet with deep blue and purple roses. Classy, eh?

That's all for today.... promise!

Amanda

This is really happening!

First off, I'd like to point out that I have the song "Arabian Nights" from Aladdin on repeat in my mind. I don't know why but I'm thinking my mind is sending subliminal messages to watch good ol' Al tonight.

Secondly, WE'RE ALL BOOKED!!!! We went to visit my beloved Amy tonight and it's official, we have our venue for ceremony/reception/awesomeness and I couldn't be more excited. I had Danny in tow tonight to see the grounds and he's in love as well. *claps*

As always, Amy was a doll and even though she had a meeting looming in the coming minutes while we were there she still took the time to show Danny around and even gave us those yummy Doubletree cookies.

Afterwards (for a non-wedding related pit stop), we swung by work to exchange Danny's new soccer shoes for a 1/2 size up. Then we set off on a quest for decent shin guards but left in defeat.

Becauuuuuuse, we had to be off at 6 to get to our meeting with DJ, Lenny Fritts, on time! We were a bit early and I'm glad we were because we had 15 minutes extra with Lenny (in total we sat and chatted for an hour and 45 minutes and had a blast!!). Lenny is a super fun and super awesome guy and I'm proud to say that we're working on getting the contract back to him ASAP! We want this man as a part of our wedding!!

So, yep, it's really happening!!

*girlish squeals of excitement*

PS Lenny recommended a videographer and lighting dude tonight as well. The lighting guy looks awesome and I think we'll give him a ring sometime in the near future. It's great how things are falling into place one vendor after another (probably because one vendor will recommend another and then that vendor another and so on and so forth).

I'm not planning this wedding based on who's on The Knot or Wedding Channel..... this is a word of mouth affair!

Veil

I love this veil with little rhinestones giving it a starry-like quality!

Picture property of Elizabeth Burgess.

Let's Get It Started

When we first started planning this shindig we set a budget, thought about ideas and looked for a wedding planner. I was convinced that we needed someone to help with this hectic time. I don't want to say that I'm a bridezilla but under stress on the day, I could defo see a little zilla seeping through (which I wanted to avoid at all costs).

I went out to our local bridal store Everything but the Bride and began my planning process there by buying a MAMMOTH three ring notebook with all the questions, lists, calendars and budgets I'd need to see me through this day. I immediately booked an appointment with a planner in the local area and stepped into the wedding planning world.

One thing I realize now that I didn't realize in the beginning is that while my gigantic bride bible is a great tool and a wonderful thing to help keep me organized (and sane), it is still a generic handbook for all brides and not set to my specific views and wishes. For example, our wedding is in May of 2010. Most wedding planning sites (theknot.com, weddingchannel.com, etc) and many "generic handbooks" suggest to start planning with 12 months as your base timeline. I guess this is good for those that get engaged and want to get married asap but for Danny and I, we wanted to wait a bit. We got engaged Christmas Eve of 2007 and knew we wanted to wait a few years until the wedding. We finally decided on 2010 and once that decision was made the bridal wheels in my head began to spin. It wasn't until July of 2008 that I actually sat down and said "ok, let's do this!" With 22 months to plan, most guidebooks don't give you that kind of time table so I'm kind of doing the time table my way. In addition I had to steer away from the stereotypes most books and guides list because I don't want this wedding to be a cookie cutter wedding, I want it to be OUR wedding.

In regards to the wedding planner, she was super cool and I was all ready to get to work with her. We had a contract done up, which oddly enough had about 5 mistakes in names, dates and times -- not the best first impression for a wedding planner, I mean her job is attention to detail, right? Regardless I was convinced she was the one and I was about to put down a deposit for her help throughout the whole process. We (and by we I mean my Mom and I, because Danny dreaded the fact of a bridal show no matter how much free cake he was promised) even attended our first bridal show to go and visit her and see her booth.

This is when everything changed.

I was due to meet with her the next day to drop off the deposit and told her at the show that we'd be there and that I couldn't wait!

While browsing the rest of the bridal show we came across loads of different vendors for all sorts of services (cakes, flowers, djs, caters, decorators and photographers).

We came across what felt like hundreds of photographers but there was one photographer there that caught my full and undivided attention, Elizabeth Burgess. We happened to be looking a country club's catering menu when we made eye contact from a woman over at the vendor next to the club's spread. I smiled politely and made my way over to say hello. Upon meeting her I found out that she was not a vendor herself but was in fact there to endorse her wedding photographer, Elizabeth. After speaking with the rest of the people around this booth I found out that they had all used Elizabeth as their photographer and had willingly come to this show to help bring Elizabeth business.

I for one thought that was heart warming. Previous brides and grooms so passionate about their wedding photographer that they agree to go to shows with her so that people can get a first hand perspective? Classy.

I promised all my new friends at this station that I'd go check out Elizabeth's website. Right as we were walking away to continue our stroll down the aisle of vendors the first lady I had met called after me and pulled me back. She let me know that Elizabeth had just come back from the bathroom and that I simply had to meet her.

After meeting Elizabeth I was in love, with one: her work and two: her personality. She won me over. To boost, when we had walked into the show there was an exhibit of photos from all of the different photographers and our favorite one that we had picked out was actually one of Elizabeth's of one of the brides there with her that day.

We set up an appointment for the very next day and the rest is history.

'But what about the wedding planner??' you ask?

It wasn't until after I met with Elizabeth that I realized how expensive venues and photographers and food and decorations and djs were. I knew the prices of things would be high but after asking Elizabeth's insider opinion of the wedding biz I had to rethink this planner. The planner, as nice as she was, was asking for 25% of our entire wedding budget to help plain the entire wedding. 25% of my wedding!!

After weighing the pros and cons (and remembering the mistakes in the initial contract which I had to correct), I canceled the agreement with the wedding planner and decided to use that huge chunk (*cough*25%*cough*) of money to go towards the wedding (food, decor, photos, music, etc) instead of someone's services to make appointments and schedule times for me.

With 22 months I felt confident to take on the task myself (with the help of my mom as well!). After all, I do love to plan and paying someone to take that joy away from me seemed silly in the end. Especially paying them 25% of my wedding to do that!

So, our journey with the wedding planner ended there, but the rest was just beginning to fall into place.

After signing our contract and booking Elizabeth we asked her opinion of which great venues and other vendors she recommends. She happened to recommend the local Doubletree Suites with it's own private lake (which I had been eying) and DJ Lenny Fritts.

I decided to contact the Doubletree for more information and the very lovely director, Amy Acosta, responded with a big list of prices, food, etc. I was a little overwhelmed and put it on the back burner. My parents had visited the local Hilton while I was away for Danny's birthday and said that it was amazing and that I had to see it. I was debating between the two.

It wasn't until I started to contemplate invitations and save the dates (thinking ahead, as usual) that I realized that I needed a venue. Once a venue was picked I felt like everything would fall into place and it would be easier to plan.

It wasn't until last week that I received a random e-mail for an open house at the doubletree that very night! I figured what the hey and went on down to see the set up.

And as you know, I fell into a big pit of love and we're going to put down our deposit TODAY!!!!

The crazy coincidence of this viewing was that the DJ they had hired to come work the open house was none other then Mr. Lenny Fritts.

I got to talking with him and we started speaking about weddings at the doubletree and weddings with Elizabeth. He said that Elizabeth and himself had weddings at the hotel down to an art and the two of them communicated beautifully and got along wonderfully, which affected the ceremony and reception positively since they practically run the show.

"Super!" I said. Which explains why after we leave the doubletree tonight after dropping off the deposit we have a meeting with Lenny at Panera!

All because I jumped into the wedding planning pool too quick to take a breath, thought hiring a wedding planner would be best for me, went to visit the planner at a show, met Elizabeth, who recommended the Doubletree, who had an open house, with Lenny Fritts as DJ.

It feels like it's meant to be.