Wedding Series – Bridesmaids Dresses

When I was planning my our wedding, I had a couple of routes that I was thinking of going with my bridesmaids.

First of all, I had 6.  6 Bridesmaids, 6 Groomsmen and us, making our wedding party quite large at 14 people.  I knew that I wanted everyone to coordinate, but I didn’t want it to be too match-matchy.

I used my Pinterest Wedding Inspiration board to hoard a bunch of ideas

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And then we had these – so different from the soft pink

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I loved the idea of all the girls wearing a soft pink colour, and everyone wearing different dresses, like they all went out a bought a dress that they loved and felt amazing in.  But that was a little hard to coordinate – having six bridesmaids, all wanting to please me, we instead opted to go shopping as a group.  I really loved the White by Vera Wang line at Davids Bridal, especially since they had a lovely soft pink colour in their collection for 2013, and there were a lot of styles so they wouldn’t have to all wear the same dress.  BUT when we went there, my girls loved two dresses specifically, and they ended up in 3 in one style and 3 in another.  Oh.  And in black.  The dresses that they loved didn’t come in the pink.  I panicked a little bit and my bestie talked me off the ledge.  So we decided to go with black.

For the shoes, I told them I just want them to be pink.  It doesn’t matter what shade, what style.  Just pink.  And look how lovely they were:

Beautiful!

PS. All photographs are courtesy of my amazing photographer Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography and they cannot be reproduced without permission (unless otherwise cited).

Wedding Series – Guest Book

Guest Book.

This was a hard one.  I knew I wanted something different from your typical ‘write your name and where you came from on this line’ white ugly frilly thing that I would never look at again.

So I scoured Pinterest again and again.  And I was uninspired.  I saw the usual, the unusual, the complicated and the expensive.  I pinned the following hoping to gather some inspiration from them.  It didn’t work.

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After a few months, I still wasn’t in love.

So I came up with this:

I bought a book on flowers.  For everyday of the year, it presents a flower with stunning photography.  I asked our guests to choose their favourite flower and write us a warm wish.

No we have a lovely coffee table book that is not only gorgeous to look at but also lovely to read.  The words that our friends and family wrote were so thoughtful and warm, my heart is filled every time I open it up.

I love that not all the pages are filled, so its a nice surprise when you stumble upon a note.  I keep it out all the time, and its a nice reminder of our day.

Wedding Series – Flowers

This was a tough one for me.  I knew that I wanted beautiful fresh flowers for our wedding, but I also knew that they came with a hefty cost.  Being budget conscious, I was kind of afraid.  I gathered some inspiration from Pinterest, and it was clear – I had expensive taste in flowers.

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I learned a few things from this.  I loved bright colours, garden roses and peonies.  After searching a few florists, and getting a few quotes, I decided to use Laurels on Whyte and I had a great experience with them.  I got to deal directly with the owner who was both detailed and creative.  This is what they came up with:

We had light pink peonies, bright pink garden roses, yellow scented stock and hydrangeas – some of my absolute favourite flowers.  My bouquets was extra special for me because I tied my dad’s blue bow tie to it – the bow tie was my something borrowed and my something blue, and because had he passed away a few years before, it was his presence as well.

My girls had smaller versions of my bouquet but without the yellow stock and more hydrangea.  My little flower girl got a little posy of bright pink garden roses.

The boys’ boutonnieres were yellow roses – the trophy husband’s was bright pink.

At the tables, we chose hydrangea, bright pink roses and light green carnations to save some coin.  And they turned out lovely.

I couldn’t have been more in love with our flowers, and I would like to send a huge THANK YOU to the amazing team at Laurels on Whyte.

PS. All photographs are courtesy of my amazing photographer Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography and they cannot be reproduced without permission (unless otherwise cited).

My Funny Valentine

The first day that I met this man, I said to myself – ‘That was the funniest guy I have ever met’

And he hasn’t let me down since.

Happy Valentines Day from me and my Funny Valentine to you and yours ❤

PS. All photographs are courtesy of my amazing photographer Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography and they cannot be reproduced without permission.

Wedding Series: Dress

When I was planning my wedding I knew that I wasn’t willing to be one of those women who spent $7500 on their wedding dress.  It just kills me to think about spending that kind of money on a dress that you only get to wear once.  So I set a budget and went shopping.

Davids Bridal opened in my town a few months prior – so knowing that it was a bit less expensive, that was the first place that I looked.  And it absolutely blew me away at the dresses that they had for the price.  Again, these aren’t those super detailed, super beaded gowns but there were some really great contenders.  I was in love with the White by Very Wang (and I have wanted to wear Vera Wang on my wedding since I was like 18 years old), so that was the line that I focused on.  Of course I did explore other designers, but everything about the Veras just spoke to me.  I wanted to wear a pink dress and that line was not afraid of colour.  Eventually I chose a white dress (well actually, it was ivory) but I was just so in love with it.

It was fitted but still had some drama in the skirt.

It was lovely.

PS. All photographs are courtesy of my amazing photographer Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography and they cannot be reproduced without permission.

Wedding series… Cake!

For my wedding cake, I was struggling.  So, of course, I went to Pinterest for inspiration.

Now the colours of a lot of those cakes were not for me, but I really liked the designs.   My wedding inspiration pin board made it very clear that I liked floral.

One thing that I learned while shopping for a bakery/cake designer is that it is challenging to arrange a time to actually meet and do a tasting, it seemed that because I work the opposite hours as every bakery I was looking into, they were unable to accommodate a time to meet.  Until I found Once Upon A Cake.  Tara was willing to meet with my then fiancé at an odd ball time and we got to take home 6 cupcakes, each a different flavour.  We decided on having a 4 tired cake – the bottom layer was raspberry cake with white chocolate frosting and filling, middle were chocolate cake with marshmallow frosting and chocolate ganache filling, lemon cake with lime frosting and filling and the top layer was another layer of the raspberry.  It was amazing!!

For the topper, I didn’t want anything cheesy, so I decided to just have some beautiful flowers arranged on top, and a few arranged on the rest of the cake.  I was providing the flowers for the bakery to arrange, so after looking for sugar flowers (and not loving any that I could find) I elected to use silk flowers.  I decided to use peonies, garden roses and hydrangea to coordinate with the rest of my flowers.

Beautiful AND delicious?

PS. All photographs of my cake are courtesy of my amazing photographer Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography and they cannot be reproduced without permission.

Wedding Series – Invitations

Today I decided to start something new with this blog – a wedding series.  This past June I got married to a wonderful man, so, I am going to share how I made it happen.  Now, I will be the first to state, I am NOT a wedding planner, so bear with me on this one, it wasn’t easy and sometimes it wasn’t even fun.  But in the end, it turned out to be a wonderful day, with some of our guests saying it was “the best wedding ever”.  I’ll take it.

I’ll start with my invitations.

I spent many hours on Pinterest trying to find things/ideas that I liked.  With invitations, there are so many options out there, it’s really hard to make a decision.  But at least I was able to see a bit of a pattern with the invitations that I was pinning to my Wedding Inspiration board.

 

Clearly, I like script.

With our wedding, I was trying to keep our budget in check.  I wanted to be able to splurge on my flowers, so I had to find areas to cut back.  And my invitations were one of those places.  I decided to explore Wedding Paper Divas as I had a couple of my friends use them with great results.  So I spent hours and hours looking at every invitation that had that ‘Je ne sais quoi’ that I was looking for.  I wanted the invitations to look more expensive than they really were.  So I found a few that I thought would work.  Now, committing to them was my problem.  I didn’t want regrets.  So I had these made:

These invitations were beautiful, and very ‘cost effective’ – I think that I had to pay something like $225.00 for everything – including the postage to get these puppies out.

So, Wedding Paper Divas, A+.

PS. All photographs of my invitations are courtesy of my amazing photographer Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography and they cannot be reproduced without permission.

Nathan Walker – Edmonton Wedding Photographer

Hello lovelies!

Please take a few minutes out of your day to take a look at the blog of one of my favorite local photographers – his name is Nathan Walker of Nathan Walker Photography.  He is a truly talented photographer and I am always impressed with the light in his images.  Now I know that I am completely biased, but I hired him to shoot our wedding for a reason.  I would highly suggest working with him to anyone who is looking for a fantastic local photographer.  Although the photographs from my wedding haven’t been uploaded yet I still stalk peruse his blog weekly to see what else he posts.   I hope you enjoy his images as much as I do!

DIY – Glitter Candle Holders!

Helloooooo!  Now that things have settled down for me with all the wedding madness that was the month of June, I have been trying to organize all of the items that I collected over the past year to use at said wedding.  And as I rearranged Rubbermaid storage container after Rubbermaid storage container, I discovered that I have a lot of candle holders.  A lot.  In the form of recycled tea-lights, recycled votives, recycled jars and recycled glass containers from Slatkin & Co candles.  So what did I decide to do? Add glitter!!

I have been kinda loving gold lately so I decided to glitterfy some of these naked candle holders to add major glam.  I started out with some pretty basic stuff – glass containers, dollar store glitter and some glue that dries clear (I used a glue pen). I put newspaper down to help collect the excess glitter and put some glitter on a lid to keep it kind of in one place, because you know how glitter works, you use it in your kitchen and your cat walks by and then its EVERYWHERE.

Then I started just going to town, using the glue pen then sprinkling on some glitter every once and a while.

Then I did it all again with some pink glitter.

And TAH-DAH! Beautiful!

Oh, I let them dry for a couple of hours before I started playing with them, and then a full day before I put them on my night table.  The glitter is holding pretty well, but as with all glitter, there is a few little glitters everywhere I look in my house now.  Which is fine for me, because I love glitter.

Hope you like!

Helllllloooooooooooooooooo!

Hello lovelies,

Yes, it has been a long long time since I have visited my humble little blog.  This past month was a crazy blur – all leading up to a very exciting day for me and my (now legit) trophy husband.  This past weekend, my man and I got married, causing me to be MIA for the past month.  BUT, I did manage to capture a few moments during the past month on my Instagram – take a look!

I spent the past month running errands, doing the finishing touches for the wedding, attempting to garden (this one took the back-burner a bit), and a whole lot of shopping (a tiny bit for me, but mostly for the wedding – I went to the dollar store more in the past month than I have in the past two years).  I even ended up doing a quick trip to Vancouver Island, which I might add, is an amazing place to be.  Although it is a bit sad that the wedding is over, I am glad that things have started to settle down a bit.  Today (my first day back to work), I had a leisurely morning working on my yard/flowers and went for a walk with my neighbor.  And that was really nice.

Check out my Instagram @fancyladyblog and give me a follow !!!

April