bye bye

obviously, for those of you who still check back. I haven't posted in a really long time. I'm super busy with my research and honestly don't really feel the need to relive the wedding on the blog. It was amazing. The pictures are amazing. I would recommend all of my vendors. but not to leave you completely without some love - a few pics from the wedding.

My beautiful dress by Marisa purchased at Jacqueline's Bridal

The boys in their ties (Nautica from Macy's) and socks (Banana Republic)

My fabulous bouquet by Arenas (note the green strawberries and the succulents - love it!)

The tables - arrangements in my antique bottles by Arenas

*All images by the wonderful Tammy Swales (whom I just love)

so for now, good bye.

maybe one day I will have another blog or continue writing here.

is it weird to want to get your wedding photographer a holiday present?

I saw these magnets on How About Orange (from ThinkGeek) and just thought - wow Tammy would think these are hilarious.

And for only $25 they aren't particularly expensive, but then I think of how much we are paying to shoot our wedding, and its not like she is a friend... I don't know. I just think these magnets are awesome and I want to buy them for someone.

final save the date

So after conferring with Tammy and Beau we picked a pictures and I finished the save the dates. We ordered them from Magnet Street last night after a lot of "are we sure, we can't really return them, are they perfect?" from me. Magnet Street wasn't the cheapest option, but the magnets come with envelopes - major bonus, and I know that they make good quality products. I also found a 10% off coupon online - sweet!

We bought the "PrintReady" 3.5x4 inch magnets - basically these are ones that you make completely on your own as opposed to uploading a picture into a design that they have made. Hopefully they turn out.

Here is the final design.

My words of advice:

1. proofread
2. Proofread
3. PROOFREAD!

I had already checked and double checked and rechecked my image to make sure it was perfect and exactly to their specifications, and I had uploaded it and was about to pay when I decided to check just one more time. OMG, its amazing I did, because as I looked upon my creation, I nearly fell out of my chair with horror. The date was wrong. I had apparently asked people to save the date for my wedding which had taken place about 6 months ago on 05-30-09! Oops! Luckily it was an easy fix. I re-uploaded my image and we were good to go, and in 7-10 days I will have my completed save the dates and envelopes, which give me plenty of time to gather the last of the addresses and make address labels.

Save the Dates

I have two pictures that I'm deciding between, your opinions would be helpful. Please try and disregard Tammy's watermark on the pics - it will not be on the final version. The quality of the pictures is also not great because I wasn't using the high res images - this will also be fixed for the final version. Also, these are just drafts of how the text might be arranged. Please feel free to let me know what you like/dislike about each.

* Images by Tammy Swales, STD design by me.

E-shoot!

Beau and I had our e-shoot yesterday afternoon with the great Tammy Swales.  We did three sets of pictures.  The first in casual clothes at our apartment.  The second in dressy clothes on the campus of Nazareth College in Pittsford, NY - I'm wearing the green Nicole Miller dress in these pics.  Finally, the third in the Naz pool where Beau swam in college and still holds numerous records - I know weird, but actually Beau suggested it, and Tammy and I both got very into it.  Actually, I liked the idea from the start because of these pics that Sexy Red Frame was in.

Tammy was so excited with how the pool pictures turned out that within 3 hours of the end of our shoot we had 6 fully edited pictures from parts 2 and 3.  So here you go!

This is absolutely one of my favorites

For the pool pics a couple good friends convinced me to wear the 1st wedding dress I bought and ended up hating.  I was going to try and sell it, but I think this was a great use for it.

I'm not really a sexy person (usually I'm just silly) - but I'm glad to know I have it in me!

I hope that some of the pictures form our apartment turned out because I think I want to use those for the Save the Dates.  I'll post more as soon as I have more, and I have a computer again...

Would rather be here...

via Home Sweet Home

Photographer - check!

We finally chose a photographer for the wedding.  It was a hard decision for me because I really wanted Eric, but we just really couldn't afford him.  Luckily, my man can be just as anal as I am and he decided to make spread sheet comparing our top three choices: Eric Laurits, Erich Camping and Tammy Swales.  He broke it down into three categories: picture quality (with subgroups for "getting ready", "ceremony", "candid" etc), price/packages (ie - what is included in the base price) and personality.  Most items, unless they were a yes or no, got rated on a 1-10 scale.  When we differed on opinion we averaged our two ratings.  At the end Tammy came out on top for cost and the most consistent high ratings in the picture quality category, and while The Beau preferred Erich's personality, he decided Tammy was the right person to bring out my silly-side that he loves so much.  This actually went along with my gut feeling (that I totally don't trust after the dress incident) that Tammy was the best for us.  But still I couldn't officially commit.  At the end we met with Tammy again last night and looked through a ton more pictures; we were both really happy and told her that we wanted to hire her.  Yeah!  One more important thing off my "to do" list.  Now, I just have to email a lot of other photographers to let them down...

Here are some of my favorite pics off of her blog and website.

(This is a picture of Erich Camping - Tammy took it for his website - awesome, right?!)

Practice?

I love arranging flowers.  I find it very soothing and meditative; its very be in the moment yoga-ish for me.  And then for 5-10 days I have a small bit of loveliness in my home (this is especially important during the long Rochester winters).  I love doing it so much that I'm seriously considering putting together my own arrangements for the wedding.  The reasons I might not:

• I have no idea how I would get the flowers to the venue - I really don't want to have to deal with it
• I'm not convinced I could make a bouquet, maybe with multiple practice sessions
  
• I'm a med student, therefore I have some OCD tendencies, thus there is a 50/50 chance of me freaking out and becoming some crazy bridezilla while attempting to arranging the flowers

Yesterday as I was doing my shopping, I passed through the flower area and they had two of the three flowers I want at the wedding in the right color, plus some filler that went well, so I clearly had to get some to do a trial run of the flowers in the antique bottles.

Flowers purchased:

• 1 bunch (3 stems) white hydrangea ($14.99)
  
• 1 bunch (10 stems) white lisianthus ($9.99)
  
• 1 bunch (4 stems) dark purple "filler #2" (might be aster) ($2.99)
  
• Total cost $27.97 - made 2 large and 2 small arrangements
• I think I will need around 12 large and 12 small arrangements for all the tables - estimated cost: $170
• I compared the Wegman's prices to American Floral Distributors (a wholesaler) and Wegman's beat them in each case.  For the lisianthus, AFD charged $7 MORE for a 10 stem bunch!  If I DIY the flowers I think I might order them from Wegman's

(At the wedding I also want to include ranunculus in white or light purple.)

Results:

(I'm still loving this rectangular prescription bottle)

What I learned:

• Even the wide mouth bottles are a little too narrow - I would have liked the option of fitting in more stems, so that I could vary the fullness of the arrangements more; mason jars might be a good option for tall bottles with a wider mouth
• The narrow mouth bottles are very narrow - only 2 or 3 stems fit in, but it works in groupings with the larger arrangements
• I generally like the look - simple, elegant, a little rustic (like our venue)
• I need to get more bottles, especially some shorter bottles with both wide and narrow mouths to allow for more height variation among the arrangements 

*photos by me

omg, omg, omg, omg... (squeal)!  Eric had been booked for the weekend of our wedding, but just a couple of days ago the couple moved their date, and he is now available.  I am going to be seriously talking to him sometime soon.  I'm totally freaking out (in a good way).  Maybe something amazing will happen and I'll actually be able to pay him.

Photographer insanity

Now that we have a date and a location my next goal is finding a spectacular photographer at a reasonable cost.  This is proving much more difficult than anticipated.  There are quite a number of good photographers in the Rochester area, but I'm not convinced their worth the steep prices they charge.  I don't think there is a single photographer I've liked who base price is under $2500.  So what do I do?  I email Eric Lauritus.  Because I'm clearly a little insane.  (His base price is $5000)  You may remember my raving about Eric in this post, and I'm still raving.  His pictures of complete strangers make me cry (ok, not cry, because I don't do that, but literally tear-up).  I think I've been pretty sane about most wedding related things so far - I'm resisting The Dress, I've been cutting the guest list, I'm making invitations, Beau is iPoding the music - but I might actually go off the deep end on this.  I am in love with his photography.  If I could have any one thing for my wedding (other than Beau, duh) it would be him.  I would have a City Hall wedding with 10 people and dinner at Taco Bell if only he would be there photographing it - and you know what, it would be stunning and everyone in the wedding blog world would envy my City Hall/Taco Bell wedding because he is that good.

Ok, done with that bit of insanity.  Well not done.  I did actually email him to assess his availability. Maybe he is available and has a poor teacher marrying a poorer medical/graduate student rate.  Maybe he'll work on an IOU based on future earning potential...  I don't have money now, but eventually I'll be a doctor, and I'll have money to pay for crazy expensive wedding photography.

Just because...

...pictures of the Gabby-cat

Psycho-kitty-eyes

Freedom?

Stealth mode

Photographer

Last night I was surfing the wedding blogs and Rebecca at The White Aisle, had a post about her new favorite photographer - Eric Laurits.  I went to his website and spent way too much time looking through his galleries (and nearly crying because the pictures were so beautiful and emotional and real) and on a whim decided to contact him about doing our wedding.  This was maybe a little silly because we have no budget, date, location etc...  However, he sent me a nice email with a little more information and his base price - damn, it was high.  Not completely unreasonable, just about 2x as much as is recommended to spend on a photographer based on what I anticipate our budget to be.  He also picks and chooses which couples he works with, so even if I could pay him, no guarantee that he would even do the wedding.  I sent him back a relatively long email (since he had asked about our wedding plans) and told him about how none of my family lives in the states and about me and Beau, and some of the thoughts I've had so far about the wedding.  I guess we'll see what he says.  If he is willing to consider us, and I like him if we ever talk on the phone, I may even decrease my dress budget to pay for him!  Thats how much I like his photographs!  I'll keep you posted about what his response to my email is.

Engagement Photos

Buget Savvy Bride (who's blog I just adore) has been doing a lot of posts recently on engagement photos.  To be honest, before she starting blogging about them I wouldn't have known that such a thing existed.  But anyway, her posts started me thinking about them, and I've come to the conclusion that I think that the pictures she is posting are completely gorgeous and that I don't get it.  What is the purpose?  Is is just a nice excuse to get dressed up and have fun, beautiful, creative pictures taken of you and your beloved?  Do the pictures have some use beyond the remembrance of a random day?  Is is just another way that the Wedding Industrial Complex has come up with with get our money?  

I would totally understand it if by some remarkable amount of planning on the part of the proposer there was a photographer present to document the actual proposal.  That would be f-ing amazing!

Anyway, if there is anyone out there that can enlighten me I would appreciate it.