Bridesmaids Dresses: LulaKate

Last week, Two weeks ago (wow time seems to be flying lately) I had to be in Charleston for a conference.  While on a break, I was walking down King Street and spotted LulaKate.

LulaKate has been featured a LOT lately and with good reason - their dresses are super cute and they offer a lot of customization that allows each style of dress they make to look great on the girls that wear them.  There are four skirt styles for each dress.  You can choose to have a waist band added or not (like the first picture below).  You can vary the skirt length.  You get the picture..

To be honest,  I was pretty anti-bridesmaids dress this entire time.  I wanted something off the rack that had max re-wear potential. But these dresses were so cute...and so much easier than trying to find something off the rack that was affordable, cute,  and would look remotely good on all 10 (yes 10!) bridesmaids.  I've officially become a fan.

After a quick consult with the maids of honor, it was decided, let the girls pick from one of their three ruffled styles:

 

The strapless dress will have a ruffle added at the top, that folds over - I saw a sample in the store with it and it is SUPER cute in person.  Probably the most re-wearable of the bunch, but also the most simple.

Can't wait to see which dress each girl picks.  And can't wait to pick colors.  I'm waiting on B to choose his ties and then we'll go from there.  Have my eye on navy with fun shoes or this awesome teal that would look great in pics and work with all skin/hair types.  We shall see! 

Fingers Crossed

First of all, I forgot my ring today, which makes me feel naked and "off".  I discovered soon after getting engaged that apparently I get VERY hot when I sleep..so while my ring is still too big during the day, I literally sweat it off when asleep.  I'm still hunting for a nice ring holder, but for now my ring lives on a silver jewelry tray every night.  Unfortunately this makes it somewhat easy to forget, especially if I'm going casual and not wearing a ton of jewelry, like today.

I digress...forgetting my ring has nothing to do with the title of this post - my fingers are crossed because we've applied to adopt another dog and I'm really hoping it works out. This dog, a gorgeous yorkie, came to the shelter with terrible wounds on it's back. Like the hard to look at kind.  The pictures are so sad - it breaks your heart to see any animal in this condition, but something about this sweet little dog especially just broke my heart. (I'll refrain from posting pics here, but if you are curious let me know and I can send you the link) The shelter reports that the wounds are healing and the dog is still as sweet as could be, wagging his little tail often.  I sat at my desk and cried, emailed the link to Beale and we both agreed we had to put in an application.  How could we not?

If we are not selected to be his new "parents" it will be okay, I just hope this dog goes to a loving home where he gets the love and attention he deserves, and we will continue looking for another rescue dog that will get along with Tim (the dog needs to be smaller,  not an alpha dog etc).  Ugh..my heart is heavy just writing about this little guy.

Finally..on a more upbeat note.  It's Friday!  For that I'll leave you with a little bit of Friday ridiculousness:  yes Lilly is now making sorority inspired gear.  WTF?  Yup, that's what I said too, then I laughed my ass off.

Here's the schmappa schmappa gamma scarf.  Girls, I think I just found your bridesmaids gift!

Yup, those are keys & owls.  HI-LARIOUS.

Happy weekend everyone!

The Ingredients: Bridesmaids

Even before B & I actually got engaged we had talked about who we wanted in our wedding party.  I don't know why but it was always fun to talk about who would be sharing one of the biggest days of our lives by standing at the alter with us.

But when I actually got engaged, I really struggled with how to ask my bridesmaids.  So many of my girlfriends have already gotten married and done some really cute things to ask their friends to be bridesmaids.  I felt a lot of pressure to do something different (this has been a common theme actually, I'm really getting sort of tired of people saying "Oh I know you're wedding will be so crazy cool and full of different stuff"). 

A few examples of what friends did in the past, off the top of my head:

• Mini champagne bottle w/ cute tag
• DVD w/ nice letter
• Homemade cookies shipped out to all the girls
• Bridesmaids Survival Kit
• Nice letter
• Framed picture + note

I also saw some really cute ideas online but all seemed either super time consuming or really expensive.  Sorry girls, you're totally worth it, but things were really busy at work and I was in major saving $$ mode.  

I decided I wanted to do something slightly humorous, yet still let each girl know that it really would be an honor to have them be part of my wedding party.  So after lots of thought (and procrastination), I went with a funny card from Naughty Betty, purchased through Jack Cards, and pictured right (Naughty Betty cards are honestly the funniest around, I am so glad I discovered them, thanks Holly for the reco!).

I think most of the girls got the humor and thought it was funny.  Thankfully all of them said yes to being a bridesmaid, so now the next challenge is to find ways to torture them with ridiculous dress options.  Only kidding.  I'm SUPER excited and can't wait to get all 10 girls together for the big day!

How did you ask your bridesmaids?  Any creative ideas?

Do or Don't: Patterned Bridesmaids Dresses

I bought the dress below over the summer from JCrew and it was so damn cute on that I started thinking I might consider a patterned dress for my bridesmaids to wear...

But I started rethinking things when a friend sent me this pic:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!  (what are those little white sleeve things?!)

Then I came across this post and the dresses I saw there totally sealed the deal...NO patterned bridesmaids dress.  Yall can all breathe a huge sigh of relief and save your cute, fun patterned dresses for the rehearsal dinner, hah.

Feel free to send links of anything cute yall find...this has to be one of the worst parts of wedding planning!