Our Wedding Photographers Rock!

Our wedding photographers are featured on Style Me Pretty today...The shoot captures a great, foggy wedding in the NC mountains.  Lots of great shots and gorgeousness, like this:

Check it out

So excited for them to shoot our wedding!!!!

If I Had the Guts...

...I would totally sport this at my wedding.  Made by Style by SOCA, this is a serious piece of gorgeousness.  LOVE.

One of my favorite wedding blogs, With This Ring showcased this earlier last week but I just saw it today.  (And the more I look at it, the more I think it might actually look gorgeous sewn onto the side of a dress as an accent piece.  It would definitely dress up a simple dress!)

Speaking of veils...I'm going to try on a veil with my dress the weekend after Thanksgiving.  Not only does this give me an excuse to put my dress back on but I will finally be able to take pictures, since we forgot the camera on our last trip. 

This is actually a special trip for many other reasons, the main one being that the veil we will be trying on was given to me by my godfather and his wife just weeks before he passed away from a long time battle with cancer.  I have never seen the veil out of the packaging (it was brought over from Belgium in the 80's by the wife's mother) but from the few peeks I got, it looks gorgeous.  What a special way to remember my godfather - I can't wait to try the veil on.  And while I won't share pics here, I'll definitely let you know how it goes!  (obviously those who really want to see can get pics via email...more than happy to share!)

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone :)

The Year for Christmas Cards?

B and I have been living together for 2+ years.  Each year around Thanksgiving, I always ask, "Should we send a holiday card?".  And each year the response is the same, "No, only once we're married."

Truthfully, I suck at cards of all kinds - thank you notes, birthday cards, holiday cards.  I'm just not a card person, I guess.  So I have never really fought the whole Christmas Card issue.  I'm sure I would have gotten them out the day before Christmas even if B did agree to sending them.  And secretly I'm too cheap too.  That money could go towards clothes :)

But this year...we're engaged, we've got the two cutest dogs on the planets, and I'm kind of in the "holiday mood".   Is it weird to send a holiday card before we're married?

If I had all the time in the world, I'd make holiday cards.  I love craft projects..baking..sewing..anything that involves making.  Unfortunately I don't have a lot of extra time, so over the years I've done less and less of things that involve "making". 

Enter...Shutterfly.

They've actually got some cute cards (which you can find, here):

For some reason, I love the cards with the retro touches the best.  They just seem FUN.

Who knows, maybe we'll get our act together and actually get cards out.   Everyone else seems to do it :)

(PS - yes, shameless plug for their xmas card blogger contest, which you can enter here.  but they really DO have cute cards...seriously, I looked at them ALL).

Wedding Checklist Fail

I finally got around to adding a few things to my (very bad excuse for a) wedding binder.  The first thing in said binder is a wedding checklist from my planner, so I decided to see where we were with everything.

I knew we still had a lot left to do, but good grief, we are pretty far behind, at least per the checklist.  Here are the things that we should have done by now:

• Start thinking about stationery/wedding invites (in the July - September list)
• Select and book florist 
• Select and book caterer
• Send out save the dates 
• Order invites (in the October list)
• Select and order bridesmaids dresses
• Select and order baker for cake
• Register for wedding gifts
• Book transportation
• Book honeymoon
• Take engagement photos

Holy smokes!  What the hell have we been doing?

To be honest, we're pretty close on florist, caterer and save the dates.  And I'm planning to ask my creative guys at the agency design our invites, so no stress there.  I'm waiting on spring on the bridesmaids dresses, for the brighter colors to come out, we're planning on doing cake stuff in January and registry in February. And we already told our photographers that we'd prefer to do our engagement shoot in the spring.

So I shouldn't feel so bad....right?

Still..looking at this list and thinking about what we have to do gives me a mini panic attack every time! Ahhhhhhhh!

Not Quite On The Road Again...

So, we didn't make it to Hampden-Sydney this weekend like we originally planned.  Everyone in B's family was sick, and since we'll be in VA for Thanksgiving (which is less than 2 weeks away - crazy!), we decided it would be better to stay here.

Needless to say we were both bummed, but decided to make the best of it by taking a day trip to Asheville. We woke up early, grabbed the dogs and hit the road.  B had never been to the Biltmore, so we decided to spend the day there.  Obviously we couldn't go into the house with the dogs, but we had a great time explore the gardens and vineyards that run throughout the property.  It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day:

After exploring the gardens and walking for over an hour, we rewarded ourselves with wine and lunch, outside of the winery.  I also did a mini photoshoot of the dogs :)

Hope you had a good weekend, too!

On the Road Again

This weekend we're heading up to Virginia to see B's family and go to the Hampden-Sydney/Randolph-Macon football game.

The good news is that our two terriers terrorizers will be coming with us.  This is the first time B's family has seen and met Charlie, so we took both pups to the groomer to ensure they looked their best ;)

Here are two pics of the dogs post-haircut (excuse the quality, since these are from my non-iphone phone):

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Save the Dates: We've Hit a Wall

Our Save the Dates are finally coming together, woohoo!  After sitting in a box in our condo for 4 months, it is SO nice to feel like we're making progress:

 

Well..we were making progress until we hit a major wall: I didn't order enough baker's twine...so now we're in a holding pattern until more comes in.  Mwah, mwah.  I really want to get these out soon, so they don't get mixed into the Christmas Card hoopla.   Thankfully a good friend has offered to help me finish them up next week!  Here's hoping that by next weekend we are done, done, done!  This would be a big thing to check off our list, so we can move onto more important things like cake tastings and caterer selection.

Good times :)

Bye, Bye Bride Magazines

I have a confession to make:  I think wedding magazines are kind of dumb and boring.

Wait, what?  Isn't every bride supposed to go ga-ga over bridal magazines and just looooove looking at them?  Well, not this bride.

When I first got engaged, I bought every bridal magazine in site, I guess because I expected to love them.  I tagged pages, ripped out a few pics...but that got old fast.  I quickly realized that all the magazines are the basically same...plus reading magazines takes too much time for a busy girl to read, especially a busy girl who loves her DVR :)

Despite all of that, I just couldn't bring myself to throw the magazines away.  I mean, what if I wanted to dig one out again?  So they've been sitting in our bedroom for months.  I was starting to feel like one of the women from hoarders, so I decided to chuck the entire pile.  I mean honestly, I am never going back to re-read those bad boys.

Bye bye bridal magazines.  It was fun for a moment:

Am I the only one who thought these magazines were pretty useless?

I am TOO Old...

It's official, I am just too damn old for Widespread Panic shows.  This is something that has been said before in our house, but after last weekend, I know it's true. 

Last weekend, we headed down to New Orleans for "three nights of Panic".  These were the infamous Halloween shows, and the tickets (and the entire trip, really) were B's birthday present to himself.  I love New Orleans, so I was more than happy to tag along.

We decided a few weeks before the shows that we would bail on the first night so that we could spend some time with one of my best friends from college.  We had a great time with her and her husband: we had a divine dinner here, followed by Po Boys and Bloodys the next day and an awesome (though very hungover) brunch the next day.  Yum.   B even made it to Harrah's to "check out the scene".  The only bad think about our time with them is that we didn't take one single picture - not one! This is the second weekend in a row I've been with college friends and the only picture any of us took either weekend was this horrible horrible horrible shot. 

I digress...After saying goodbye to our friends, the rest of our weekend was filled with daiquiris, hurricanes and great music.  Between the halloween debauchery on Bourbon to the craziness of the widespread crowd, we also took in some awesome people watching.  The shows were pretty good too, but I think I've seen enough that they're all starting to sound the same. Plus being trapped in a smokey arena surrounded by people doing more drugs than I've ever seen in my life...well, not exactly my ideal concert experience.  That said, both nights of Widespread really were fun and it was awesome to be in downtown New Orleans during Halloween & a home Saints game.  If these are going to be my last (traveling) shows, at least I went out with a bang!

Here are a few pics from our trip, enjoy!