YES to the dress!

well, THIS GIRL has got a wedding dress. very exciting stuff. but this also means that i won't be sewing my own bridal masterpiece. aww. but no worries, i still have plenty to work on: table runners, paper flowers, table decor and other bits and pieces.

polotek and i have been on a little east coast tour for the last several days and have found ourselves in dc, philadelphia, new york city and now atlanta.

christmas at my folks' house in philly

nyc happened so we could make a day of dress shopping. well, the boys went to hang out and drink somewhere while the ladies searched for a dress. we had a couple appointments lined up with lovely bridal shop and nicole miller, and we dropped into rk bridal and david's bridal as walk-ins.
we did not leave new york with a dress, but i learned a very important lesson about searching for your wedding dress: you cannot judge a dress by its hanger. or the size 2 model wearing it in a picture.

yeah, what i had drooled over for weeks when searching online, and was so confident was going to be pure hotness when i got to try it on, was not at all what i expected when i put it on my body.

conversely, some dresses that i didn't expect to look good when looking at it on the hanger looked awesome on me. so basically all the "prep" work i had done in searching for what would be my perfect dress match online went out the window very quickly. though it wasn't a complete waste, it did help as a starting point.

how about a few visuals to compare?

these two dresses were in my top choices, but when i put them on, all i heard was...womp womp.

oleg cassini

vera wang

      

here are a couple of dresses i thought would not work for me...but when i put them on, angels started singing!

nicole miller
(what's with the model's stank face?)

watters

fast forward to yesterday, now in atlanta. i did round two of shopping with three of my favorite atl ladies in buckhead, and we managed to walk through the selection at winnie couture and got some last minute appointments at brides by demetrios and le dress boutique.

when we went to le dress boutique, a "luxury dress consignment shop", we started by picking out several size 10 dresses but when i went to try them on, none of them fit except one! i'm not sure why gowns run so small...talk about killing a bride's spirit!

so my family was scrambling to find me gowns to try on in the next size up. my auntie and cousins picked out a few randoms, unsure about how they would look or if i would like them. ha! who knew one of those gowns would be the one....?

i had a feeling about the dress as it was being taken out of the plastic garment bag that it would be something special, and after i put it on my gut feeling was confirmed.

once i knew this one was a serious contender, i sent schniz a few pictures to get her thoughts. she sent me her buy in immediately, and my atl family agreed that i would be crazy to not walk out of the shop without the dress. i'm not gonna lie, there were a couple wet eyes in the parlor.

wanna see what i picked? check out this link. also look here and here for more photos. i'm not going to post the photo in this post -- that way polotek can choose to not look at it. i wouldn't be too worried about ruining the surprise for you though, because like i said before, you can't judge a dress by its model or hanger, and i'm also planning to make a few minor tweaks to add to the awesome. but still, if you can help yourself, try not to comment on the design of the dress on this post.


so i called my prince charming from the boutique and told him that i found the dress. he was a little surprised that i found it so soon. but the real shocker for me was that he didn't even ask me how much it cost! when i asked him about it, he said it didn't matter as long as it was the dress that made me happy. :::gush:::

reason #45873 why i am marrying this man.


my inital hope was to find a dress for less than $1,000. after shopping around i realized pretty quickly that the dresses i liked were not going to be in that price range. they seemed to all sit in the $2,000 area. however, the price i paid for dress and sash.....was....drumroll please....
$875 total! that includes the dress and a sash i bought to go with it. and i could take it with me since i bought it from a consignment shop!

to my other brides: as a newbie to all things wedding, it would have been helpful for me to know some things when considering my dress purchase.

• making appointments is a must. some places will take walk-ins, but definitely plan ahead by scheduling a time with the shop. it's worth it to have the extra time with the consultants, who should be very knowledgeable and can find you more dresses you like with ease. note that a few places may require you to have a ring and a date already. 
• give yourself 6-9 months before the wedding at the LEAST to start shopping. this was crazy to me when i first heard it, but it's true. most wedding shops have to order your gown and it can take 4 months or more to get it in. then you still have to have time for alterations.
• know that pricing for the same dress can vary from shop to shop, and if you can, take the info of your favorite dress to the interwebs and see if you can find it on sale somewhere or buy it pre-owned if you are okay with that kind of thing. 
• be ready to potentially pay tax and shipping on your dress. 
• don't forget to budget in accessories such as a sash, fascinator or veil and jewelry and shoes -- i still don't have most of these items, but have it built into the budget.
• alterations are what can take your dress from beautiful to jaw-dropping! get referrals from bridal shops you trust for a good seamstress. one that specializes in altering wedding gowns and not hemming pants. also, make sure you have the money set aside for the alterations, too.

i have more to share about a couple other events that happened in the last several days -- marriage counseling and seeing the venue....more on that later!

cater 2 me.

see? i haven't forgotten about you. life has just been....life. busy and amazing all at once.

something that happened since my last post....WE BOOKED A CATERER!
woooohoooo!

a holiday miracle!

that was no easy feat. it's good that i was armed with a wedding goddess to help with what seemed like an endless re-tooling of the contract. but i think it ended up being something that is going to make our big day an awesome one.

i have to admit that it was tough choosing who we wanted to go with, even though we were only seriously looking at two caterers. and after much ado, we are going to have R&R Catering of Springfield, VA handle our catering needs!

one thing (of many) that assures us about having made this choice is that they have partnered with St. Francis Hall before, and seem to have a great working relationship with them.

whew. i'm so glad this part is taken care of.

a note to future brides reading this: please PLEASE be ready to put down mega money for the catering part of the wedding. and even more important, be ready to put down a large chunk of dollars for the deposit. we only had to pay a 25% deposit, which schniz tells me is conservative, but that was about $2,150..... now you can do the math of how much the entire catering bill will be.

so, if polotek or i ask, all one hundred and fifty of you bastards coming to the wedding better tell us the food was one of the best meals of your life.

truth be told, we haven't come to a final decision on what the actual menu will be, and luckily we have plenty of time to mull it over. all i know is that mac-n-cheese will be apart of it somehow. that's a definite. and we are doing something special for the dessert portion, so no wedding cake (or cutting fee) is in the catering number. that will be a separate line item of the budget entirely.

but some of the things included were:
* ceremony set-up and breakdown
* cocktail hour munchies
* beer & wine open bar
* buffet style meal for 150
* actual dishes, linens and service for a 5-hour 150 person wedding
* piece of mind

i know people have opinions. any feedback for me on caterers in general or what kind of food is good to eat?

saving the date!

hey there! life has been busy in the bay area, but the save-the-dates have all gone out -- so it's time to share!

i guess i should probably spare you the story behind my late-night-evite-faux-pas that sent broken jpegs to more than 100 of my friends and family.... yeah. ok. i'll spare you.

yep. amazing.

you may remember me mentioning a design that i saw and liked back at the tilt wedding fair. well, that was my inspiration, and we decided to go with a similar look for our save-the-dates and invitations...

design by hello lucky

i'm so lucky to have schniz, my wedding goddess, because she hooked me up with a good friend of hers who is an amazing graphic designer that really nailed the idea i had in mind. having dara (designs) put it together saved us a LOT of money and we got to tweak it to be exactly how we wanted, like the colors, the formatting, and changing it into a postcard. check her out. she's fantastic!

polotek and i are fairly casual people, who want to have a fun and offbeat wedding, and we wanted to really set that tone through our STDs -- i know, "STDs" makes you think of the clap or crabs or something, but it's annoying to keep typing all those words -- with everyone, giving them that feeling. no pomp. no circumstance. just what promises to be a really awesome day. i wanted to stay as far away from script fonts and flourishes as possible. we are not trying to be extra fancy now or on our wedding day.

we are just trying to be us.

design by dara robin lustig

so, i hope we captured at least a little bit of that intention with our stationary. aaaand you can look for our actual invitation design to hit this blog in about 4 or 5 months. ha. we're not trying to be stuffy, but we do want to leave SOMETHING to the imagination!

picture perfect.

last week was full of happy life gems, one of them being that polotek and i got to see our photos from our engagement session with ananda and bliss fotography. as i told you kids before, we hadn't planned on getting any engagement photos done at all, but then changed our minds after i won this free shoot from a wedding fair. and i'm really glad we decided to do it, because the photos are AWESOME.

awe. some.

i'm going to give you a little sneak preview, and you can go to the bliss fotography site to see more. we will also be sprucing up our currently-drab wedding site with some of the pictures, so you will see them there, too.

pure auss.

ananda was great to work with, she made us feel very comfortable and encouraged us to just be ourselves, and she captured some pretty fab moments between us. also, my day leading up to this shoot was completely batshit crazy, and i was totally flustered and all over the place when we showed up to the ferry building for the shoot.

the back story of that day:

i was tasked with trying to get polotek a nice shirt to wear (his wardrobe basically breaks down to 70% zombie and tech t-shirts, 20% lucky brand jeans, and 10% underwear). well, that morning i was farting around on pinterest and took my time to getting to the mall to get his shirt. i thought i could take my time because i already knew the specific shirt i was going to get, like others polotek has had, from express.

regardless of the fact that it was closer, i wanted to avoid the parking madness that is westfield mall in san francisco, and so i went to daly city in the 'burbs. i did this only to realize that there is no Express at that mall, and when i look up the store locator (ugh! why didn't i do this before i left the house?!) i see that the only one is in westfield mall. in sf. in the downtown yucky tourist cluster.

at this point, time is getting tight, but i'm determined and i think i can make it. so i run to westfield mall, making it in a record time of 15 minutes from daly city. i park the car and get to express in a snap to buy polotek's shirt and a shirt for me. in fact, i did this all in such record time that decide that i can make a pit stop in bloomie's to get a cover-up jacket for my ensemble, too.

well, that actually turned into me looking at a really cute dress that i HAD to try on. and i did. and i liked it. and i contemplated buying it despite it's WTF price tag because it looked really good on me. after a few minutes of twirling in the fitting room, i use my better judgement against it, and return it to the rack. i look at my watch and see i now have to be back at the house REALLY SOON.

i leave the mall, cross the street to pay parking...and realize that the parking ticket is no where to be found. i know i put it in my back pocket, so it must have fallen out in the dressing room. and i run all the way back into the store and into my fitting room to check for the ticket. no dice. so in addition to my waste of time, i end up having to pay $32 dollars for parking less than an hour at the mall i didn't even want to go to in the first place. i'm then annoyed, and running late.

so by the time i got back to the house, i just started throwing clothes, hair pins, makeup and other shit in boxes, and start scrambling to make myself look like a goddess in 15 minutes.

i manage to pick up polotek and my friend who volunteered to help out with the shoot, and make a b-line for the embarcadero.

by the time we show up (somehow only 10 minutes late), i'm a hot-ass-mess. polotek goes to change. then when he comes back, he is not even wearing the shirt i went through all that trouble to buy him because it turns out the shirt i got him didn't even fit.

muthafreakin' WOMP WOMP. after all of that mess i went through. and all the tags were already ripped off and everything. ugh.

luckily, in my box packing madness i threw in another shirt for him to sport. he put that on and it worked out just fine....buuut in the end, we could have saved ourselves a nice hundred plus dollars. oy.

the great thing that turned this exasperating day around was ananda and her overall amazingness.

despite my being totally flustered and polotek not knowing what was going on, she made the photo shoot one of our best experiences. by the time that shoot was over, we were floating on cloud nine. she was very easy to talk to, give my corny ideas to, and ask questions. i think she did a wonderful job of capturing the "essence" of us.

this was my corny idea, but i love it!

ananda is based in the bay area, and won't be traveling to DC to shoot our wedding (we have the wonderful abe landes for that!), but if you are a nor-cal local, and looking for a photographer for something special...i highly recommend her.

check out the photos, tell me what you think!!

flower me with love.

ummm, operaqueenie creative / wedding-related obsession #4573: handmade paper flowers...

love.

so schniz has been throwing ideas like this at me for the last few weeks about flower and centerpiece alternatives -- it saves money, and also lets me flex my DIY muscle -- but you know, sometimes it takes a catalyst or some a-ha! moment for these things to click. well, yesterday lil' ape pinned the picture above to our collective wedding board, and BING! yahtzeeeee!

well, first i clicked the link to the etsy shop listing it...and saw the price...and laughed. trust me, i am in no way trying to knock this lady's hustle. in fact, i was really, really impressed with her shop. but there is no way i'm paying that for flowers that aren't even real! then i thought, someone has got to have instructions on how to make these! and, of course, google swoops in for the win... i found this handy little post about kusudama flowers!

all of a sudden i got really excited about it, thinking about pretty paper flowers and using pretty papers. some of you may know that i am a recovering paper addict, i was flying high off of making cards for people for a good while. and i do still love it, but now that i have more time to get into my other crafts and sewing, cardmaking has taken a back seat.

so i went into my paper stash yesterday, and pulled out a couple sheets and my hot glue gun.

here is my first attempt at making one from last night...

not bad, for a rookie, right?!

aaaand, now i'm obsessed.

the etsy shop i mentioned is doing all sorts of cool things with the kusudama flowers. i think could work with this idea for bouquets and boutonnieres!

schniz also posted another cool idea....i think i'm gonna have to test this one out, too.

maybe for centerpieces?

and oh, the papers....sooooo many i can imagine playing around with. i love the lotka papers. LOVE them. and i have a few scraps of lotka at the house i'm going to test out first. then i think a trip to paper source is needed. expect more photos on this.

now, don't get me wrong, i love real flowers. i buy flowers for my house all the time, and they make me soooo happy. but as the wedding goes, i told y'all i want different. i want unique. i want offbeat.

so feel free to send me your opinions on paper vs. real flowers -- awesomesauce or tacktastic?

how low can you go...?

apparently, not low enough.

by the way, sorry it took this girl so long to post -- last week was a busy week. and this one looks like more of the same. i'll try to not leave y'all hangin', though.

now i'd like to shout out to my fellow non-kardashians who can't throw ten-million-dollar weddings. what the crap, man?! i was especially irritated to hear about this last week because i spent that day working through catering estimates, all of which are BEYOND the $5,000 number we had hoped for...

oh, frustration!!! i mean, one way to look at it is that we were able to cut out about $3,000 from some estimates -- thanks to some great cost-saving ideas suggested by schniz -- but really, we are looking at roughly $8,000 for our total catering line. and with our budget already being as low as it is for many of the other line items, we know that this wedding is not happening for $15K. it could be more like $20K.

oy.

here's some rough info about the breakdown of our leading estimate, for those of you wondering how it could possibly cost this much:
 - we are budgeting for 150 guests (our original budget number was based on 120 or less)
 - there are a number of incidentals that really add up, and makes up approximately $3K of the $8K total
 - the food and beverage price per person is actually $35 -- this really is a low number because that includes a dinner buffet (all you can eat!), four hours of beer and wine open bar (all you can drink!), and cocktail hour nosh and after-dinner coffee bar
 - some of the incidentals really are things we must have -- table cloths, dinnerware, and servers for 150 people
- the caterer is also responsible for the set up and breakdown of the ceremony in addition to the reception parts

we are still waiting for some revisions to other estimates that could come in a little bit lower, but at best my guess is that the number will still be in the range of $8,000.

to be honest, the more i look at the number, the less frustrated i am by it, because i know that this arguably the most important line item of the event. and we are working with great companies, so we are sure to get great quality and service for our money.

also, being able to rest assured that the caterer will take care of things is not something you can give a price value. unless it's eight thousand dollars.

in other news, the save-the-dates have started to go out! we are sending them in waves, but as soon as they are all en route to their destinations, i'll be sure to post the goods here.

oh, and i have a meeting with ananda from bliss fotography tomorrow! that means engagement shoot photos will be coming soon!!! yayayayaya!

anything you can do, i can do better.

and by "you", i really don't mean you reading this blog. i mean the hypothetical "yous" of the weddingverse. and the statement is still a slight exaggeration.... okay, eff it, it was a catchy title.

moving on...

i've been feeling very inspired to sew things in the last couple months. and with each successful project, i get a little more ambitious. so ambitious, i will note, that as of the last couple days i'm asking myself why i can't sew my own wedding dress. eh? eh??

source

so i realize that this week i've been talking about wild things like paleo dieting -- which by the way, polotek and i have started the challenge and i will document parts of the journey on my former blog "le petite pane", now "le petit paleo" -- and now crazytime talk of me thinking i'm vera wang or justin alexander or maggie sottero or something.

well, shut your trap and bare with me. this is my blog and i can talk crazy if i want to!

i now have a new fixation, and until i become familiar with the actual ins-and-outs of what it would require, i'm seriously considering it. armed with a good pattern or tutorial, i can be pretty nifty with a needle and thread. plus, i've been making my way through my exhaustive list of inspired projects since june...

ha, that guitar case was a serious test.

so here is how i got to thinking DIY wedding dress...
i have been discussing the search for the perfect dress a lot in the last couple weeks. i'm slated to kick-off the dress-a-thon with my stepmommy and aunt at christmastime in new york city. i'm waaaaay excited to do this. appointments are being scheduled. we may even hit up klienfield's, the shop from "say yes to the dress"!

but as we know, "in a new york minute, ooOOOooo, everything can change..." ha, please excuse my random inside joke reference. i know it will make at least two people laugh.

too priceless not to post!

anyway, i'm on the mccall's site looking for some other dress pattern...by the way they are having an EPIC SALE until monday where you can get printed patterns for one and a half beans. dead cereal. aaaah, i got 7 patterns for $1.50 each!!!!

so i'm looking for a couple patterns i can mish-mash together to make a dress like this one or this one, and i saw this. and i'm like, pretty pretty princess, much? ick. but then as i looked a little closer at the take-your-pick of styling and imagined much prettier fabric than the ones used on the model, i kind of warmed up to the idea of trying to make a formal dress. maybe all the easy sew patterns i was looking at beforehand gassed me up a little, but i'm thinking...i could totally do this!

i then put it up on pinterest, half joking. hmmm, and also half serious. then while doing some web surfing, i came across this blog post by a bride who did the damn thing. then i'm thinking...well. she did it! amaze.

from a cost standpoint, i could probably make about 10 dresses for the price that it costs to buy one in the store. and while i am still technically an amateur seamstress, practice makes perfect, right? i have several months to create mock ups and iron out the kinks, but then again, do i have the patience for this?? i dunno. in any case, if this does happen, i would likely recruit a master seamstress to help advise me with the tough parts...grandma, are you reading?

well, i invested the dollar and fifty cents and ordered the pattern. once it arrives, if i give the pattern a good lookover and if i still think i can really pull it off, i legit may try to do it. though i definitely wouldn't start 'til 2012, and YES a dress form would be purchased :::cough, cough::: {christmas present}. then i could use all the dresses i see over the holidays as inspiration for fabric, colors, and embellishments...

or shit, i could just find my dream dress in new york and that would be the end of it. i'm also completely fine with that option, because who am i kidding? others have tried and given up, and i certainly have crafty-project-ADD.