Dreaming of Veils

Even though I have seen tons of brides with beautiful tiaras, and gorgeous flower crowns, or rocking amazing hairstyles without any kind of decoration at all, I have known since I was a little girl that I want to rock a pretty, floaty veil with my wedding gown. When I chose my dress back in December, they let me try on a few veils with it, but I didn't decide to buy one at the time. I was so in my feelings after having my bridal moment with the dress that I didn't want to immediately decide on a veil, too.

 

 Personal Photos

These are two veils that I tried on with my dresses in store. I know they're hard to see. The top one had some bling around the edges, which I hated. the second veil was beautiful, but it only comes in champagne, and I ordered my dress in ivory. I hope to try on some more veils next week while I'm on my teacher spring break and home with my mom, but in the meantime, I've been oogling some of my favorites online.

 

Mimi: Juliet Cap Veil with Beaded Floral Lace from AgnesHart on Etsy.com

I love the look of this Juliet cap veil with beaded lace. I think Juliet veils are so dramatic and unique. I do not see a lot of brides wearing them in real life, though I have seen several bees who've rocked them. I guess my concern is that I don't know if I could pull off this look, or if it would be too much with my dress, which is covered in lace appliques. Maybe something more girly and less edgy is called for. 

 

One-tier halo cathedral length veil from David's Bridal 

I really like this halo-style veil from David's Bridal. I really like the idea of a flower crown anyway, so this might be an easy way to incorporate that look. It is a little simpler to me, but on the other hand, I might rather have fresh flowers. It seems like I gravitate towards the long cathedral length veils, but I wonder if a short one might look better with my dress. 

 

 Multi-Layer Scallop Edge Mid-Length Veil at David's Bridal

I find this veil more simple, without all the lace and bling, and I think that could be very pretty with a dress that has a bunch going on. The scalloped edge still gives it something special though. But I always go back to the long veils because I think they're beautiful, and I guess that's what I've had in my head since I was little. 

 

Chantilly Lace Veil from CoutureBrideBoutique by Etsy.com

My mom wore a Chantilly lace wedding gown, and even though I could never wear her gown (she was slender, and it's not my size), I think it would be nice to incorporate some elements of her wedding look into mine. Lace is so beautiful anyway, and I love the edged look on veils. So pretty! 

Complicating the whole shopping process, though, is the fact that I have four veils on offer to be my "something borrowed." 

 

My parents. Wasn't my mom a stunner?

 

Mr. Blue Moon's parents. 

 

Mr. Blue Moon's grandparents on their wedding day in the early sixties.

 

Our dear friends and the parents of our flower girl. 

So as you can see, I have four gorgeous options to borrow. I think it would be so nice to incorporate something that was used in the wedding ceremony for any one of these successful marriages. That seems like some pretty good luck! I would have to double check, but I think most of these veils are true, true white. My dress is ivory. I guess I would have to try them on to know if they would work together or if the color difference would be too much. They're also all shorter veils, so that may or may not work with the overall look I'm going for. I'm still deciding!

Are you wearing a veil on your wedding day? Did you decide to purchase your own, or are you borrowing one from someone else?

Planning a Menu, aka People Have Lots of Opinions

When it comes to the wedding reception menu, this is one area where Mr. Blue Moon wants a lot of input. The two of us LOVE food, and we love to try new food. We love Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Indian, and Thai food, and we also both went vegetarian in 2013, so we like to try a lot of different restaurants, as well as creative recipes at home.

Of course, having tastes that are maybe beyond your average Southerner's (we've tried to no avail to share our love of different ethnic foods and vegetarian foods with my family) make it difficult to plan a wedding menu that will satisfy everyone.

 

Maybe not everyone's cup of tea, but I would eat this plate all day, everyday. And I would totally serve it at a wedding! Redi-et Ethiopian Cuisine via Veggin Out And About

For the longest time, I was dead set on brunch. Mr. Blue Moon and I love brunch, and I think brunch receptions are the cutest. I was picturing a coffee bar, towers of little pastries, buttermilk biscuits with all kinds of jams and spreads, an omelet bar with different cheeses and vegetable options, and a fruit display. I also had it in my head that this would be a cheaper option than a meal at a different time of day, and that people would miss meat a lot less if we were serving breakfast or brunch.

 

By Taylor Lord Photography via Project Wedding 

 

By Jill Thomas via 100LayerCake.com

Of course, Blue Mom, who is paying for the majority of the reception, and therefore, has a big say in what we serve our guests, really thought that people would miss bacon, sausage, and ham at a brunch. And for my part, I knew that we will have seven or eight vegan guests, who do not eat any dairy or eggs, and I thought there might not be enough in a brunch for them to eat. I also hate to wake up early. So we moved on. 

My next idea was to use one of my favorite vegetarian/vegan restaurants in Nashville to cater the entire reception. The Sunflower Cafe is a joint in Nashville that Mr. Blue Moon's mom originally found and turned us on to. They do an amazing vegetarian barbecue that I thought would be perfect for a Southern lunch or dinner reception, with lots of yummy sides. 

 

Vegetarian barbecue with collards and sunflower rice, by Yelp user Shawn T. via Yelp.com

When Mr. Blue Moon and I were home for Christmas, we took my parents to eat at the restaurant's storefront. They were really good sports about it, and liked some of the flavors, but Daddy Blue Moon commented that it did not taste like wedding food to him, and that he would rather keep looking. 

At this point, Blue Mom asked our wedding planner, Adriel, to step in and come up with some ideas of affordable catering for us to check out. She set up a tasting for us with CJ's Catering, who does tons and tons of weddings in our area and has lots of experience. The tasting was so fun, and the head chef has many options! Although they have a catering menu to choose from and a baseline price per head to start at, the head chef will work with couples to customize the menu in any way we want. So we decided to go ahead and put down our deposit, and now we are in the final stages of planning a menu for a 5:30 reception. Here's how it's going to break down. 

Passed Hors d'oeuvres

Caprese salad on toast points (vegetarian) and fruit skewers (vegan). The only place we are buckling under pressure from my family on the meat will be for one entree option, but otherwise we are not serving any meat. We will also make sure to have plenty of options for our vegan guests.

 

Caprese Salad via CJ's Catering

Salad

Strawberry and spinach salad with toasted walnuts, gorgonzola cheese, and some type of vinaigrette. We are either going to request that a small portion without cheese be set aside for our vegan friends, or allow guests to dress their own salad with cheese as they please since we're having a buffet. 

Entrees

Two options: Blackberry chicken or marinated grilled Portobello steaks

 

We're requesting the mushroom steak special, so our caterer doesn't have a picture, but I envision something like this. Via AllRecipes.com

Sides

Alabama Sin, which is whole kernel corn cooked in cream cheese and butter

Grilled squash and zucchini 

Mashed potato bar with vegan bacon bits, chives, butter, sour cream, cheese, etc. so that guests can dress to please

Deviled eggs are a special request that we are adding to our menu because Mr. Blue Moon and I are obsessed with deviled eggs and could eat them for every meal

Sweet rolls

 

Mashed Potato Bar by Short Stop Blog via BrideBox

Dessert 

Since CJ's also does wedding cakes, we are ordering our wedding cake from the same vendor, and we are also planning to order about two dozen vegan cupcakes from a local bakery to make a cupcake tower

Although I am not necessarily getting the "exciting" menu I might choose if I were the only one making the decisions, I think it is just as important to choose a menu that all of our guests can enjoy. If it were only up to me, I would never serve meat, but I knew how important it was to my parents and that many of our Southern guests would be giving them serious side eye if there wasn't a meat option. 

Since I know what it is like to go to somebody else's wedding and not be able to eat anything, I want to make sure we have enough for our vegan friends to eat a full meal and dessert, too. I feel good about the compromises I made, and Mr. Blue Moon does, too. I can't wait for our guests to enjoy a delicious Southern meal! 

How did you plan your menu, and what are you taking under consideration as you think about what your guests can and can't eat?  

 

 

Wedding Website Essentials

Even though my wedding is small (it will probably end up being less than a hundred guests), I knew that Mr. Blue Moon and I would need to coordinate a wedding website because roughly half of our invited guests are from out-of-town. I have extended family in Georgia, and since Mr. Blue Moon and I both went out of state for school, we have college friends all over the country. Having been to dozens of weddings since the rise of the wedding website, I have seen a lot of sites, some good, and some bad. Thankfully, since our engagement will be 2+ years long before it's all said and done, I had a lot of time to draft and revise our website before it went live with the sending of our save the dates.

I think a wedding website needs to do three things to actually be functional instead of another useless thing on your to-do list.

1. Give guests a taste of how your wedding will look and feel overall.
2. Provide information for guests, particularly those that are coming from out of town.
3. Tell your story as a couple for anyone who cares.

The Nitty-Gritty
We went with Weddingwire.com to build our wedding website. It had the most options for what I needed, and I love that you can organize your site either as a scrolling list, or into subsections with a sidebar. At first, we had all of our pages as a scrolling list, but as we got deeper into planning and added more information to the website, we switched to the sidebar layout.

As you can see, our website is divided into ten pages. We may end up merging Song Requests and Registry with q&a, but we're still deciding. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Wedding Look
To coordinate our wedding website with our overall wedding theme, we chose a design that featured one of our wedding colors and vintage-esque accents to help our guests picture our wedding day. When guests first reach the website, they see our wedding date and city, and one of our favorite engagement pictures on a Welcome page. I also thought carefully about the tone of the writing on our website. For a very formal wedding, I think I would keep my tone formal as I write about my love story and wedding information. Since our wedding is not very formal, I kept my writing personable and warm throughout.
 

"Thank you so much for visiting our wedding website! This space will include information for our family and friends. We are in the early stages of planning, so please check back often for updates!

We're so excited to celebrate our special day with our nearest and dearest!"

Important Information
Of course, you will want to start by putting down addresses for your wedding and reception venues. Weddingwire also allowed us to include a handy map, which is nice since our reception venue doesn't actually have a physical address yet.

I think that even if your wedding guest list is small enough that you don't have to book a block of hotel rooms, it is still important to provide accommodation recommendations for your guests in a variety of price ranges. We suggested two hotels and one bed-and-breakfast to our guests that are all within about fifteen minutes of the ceremony location.

Another important touch is our list of local activities. Since we are getting married in our hometown, which is right outside of Nashville, we provided a ton of ideas for food and fun. We want all of our guests to have a blast in one of our favorite cities. We divided this page into "Eats," "Sweets," "Sightseeing," and "Music," but you could customize what you want to include based on your location. For example, not every city would need a whole section dedicated to music-related activities. We also found a picture to go with every subsection to give guests who have never traveled here an idea of what they can expect. Finally, if we had a personal story or anecdote about a particular place, we included that, too.

Finally, we dedicated a page to our wedding registry, and a FAQ page of questions and answers that we thought our guests might want to know about. On this page, we explain the wedding's dress code (dressy casual), special traditions we will incorporate into the ceremony, as well as the basics, like when we are going to send formal invitations and what to do if guests have a special dietary need.

Your Love Story
I am not sure how many of our guests want to read about the mushy stuff, but I included a page about our love story just in case. There are some people in Mr. Blue Moon's family who have never met me, and vice versa, so we wrote short biographies of each other, described how we met, and wrote about our engagement. 

Guestbook
Finally, I absolutely recommend including a guestbook. It seemed really cliche to me at first, but I have really enjoyed reading people's sweet messages, particularly from some of my students who happened across my page one day. Apparently stalking your teachers online is a real thing. But I am really happy to have these types of memories preserved.

Final Tips

• Get someone, or several someones, to proofread your website before it goes live. Even though I'm a reading teacher, I had several typos. 
• Include lots of pictures. Pictures add visual interest, and it's also a really nice way to feature your engagement photos, too. 
• As you think about information to include, consider what you would want to know before attending someone else's wedding, particularly if it was out-of-town. 

If anyone is interested in looking at what I came up with in more detail, I'm not super squeamish about sharing personal information, so you can check out our website here.

Are you going to make a wedding website for your special day? How did you go through the process of creating it?

*All photos are screenshots.

 

Save the Dates Made Easy

When I first met with my wonderful wedding planner, Adriel (Adriel Nutter Events), one of the very first things she told me was that Mr. Blue Moon and I needed to decide what to prioritize in our wedding budget. For example, some couples care more about great food and less about a great DJ. Or maybe we wanted to invest a significant portion of the budget into photography, and not so much into flower arrangements. After sitting down to discuss with Mr. Blue Moon, I quickly realized that he did not care one bit about invitations and stationary for the wedding. We could probably send all of our guests an e-mail or make our wedding a Facebook event, and Mr. Blue Moon would be fine. I, however, have a love affair with fancy paper.

Seriously. I can't go into most stores without stopping by the card section that sells thank you notes. I love to throw parties, if only to design and send invitations. I adore receiving mail, but I enjoy sending it even more. I have an entire drawer in my home office dedicated to cards, stationary, return address labels, and other accoutrements. I know, I know. I have a sickness. And before we even had a venue nailed down, I was lusting after gorgeous invitation suites and perfect save the dates.

How perfect are these Nashville skyline wedding invitations via My Lady Dye

Lavender Love invitations via SJ Wedding Invitations

Rustic save the dates from Sweet Invitation Co.

Sadly, our wedding budget, which is hovering somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000, does not leave a lot for invitations, and we originally had not even planned to have save the dates at all. But since I have so many friends getting married around the same time as Mr. Blue Moon and I, we have been receiving gorgeous save the dates and I really wanted to see if we could do some of our own affordably.

So we turned to Vistaprint. I don't know why I didn't think of Vistaprint sooner. I have heard nothing but good things, and while I'm still not sure if we will go with them for the invitations, it was a breeze to design my save the dates, and I even got to include engagement pictures like I had wanted.



It was as easy as selecting a design that I like, and putting in the relevant information. The hardest part was deciding which photos to use on our save the date cards! I selected this design. The website allowed me to preview before I purchased, and so I knew our cards would turn out something like this.

The front side, edited for anonymity.

I selected another one of my favorite photos to take up the entire back side of the save the date. We could have sent them as postcards, but I love cute envelopes way too much.

We were able to use a promotion code on our order, and since we only needed sixty of these bad boys, the entire order ended up being about $35.00. I threw in some matching address labels, paid extra for glossy paper, and of course, paid for shipping. All told, I was very happy with the quality of our save the dates for the price.

The only real extra I added was finding A1 kraft paper envelopes to send them in. I'm a sucker for envelopes and did not want to use the white ones that Vistaprint sends with their orders. They were the only part of my order that seemed kind of cheap to me. I found my envelopes at PaperAndMore.com and was very happy with the quality.

Of course, the final decision to make was how to address the fronts of the envelopes. My handwriting is completely atrocious, but I am also OCD about centering things and writing evenly. It's not a good match. So I decided to find a font I like to print the addresses on my envelopes. When it comes time to mail invitations, I hope to splurge on professional calligraphy.

I chose Janda Stylish Script, which I found here. They had plenty of other script fonts to choose from, too, so if you're thinking about going the home printing route, check this resource out!

 

Via A Practical Wedding

I wish I had saved a final product to show ya'll, but I'm terrible like that. I did, however, have the foresight to use one of the white Vistaprint envelopes to mail a save the date to Mr. Blue Moon and myself. Don't judge me, I wanted to have one to show posterity! 

Personal Photo

The finished products looked like this, but imagine them on kraft paper envelopes. I went with Summer Harvest stamps to give our guests a taste of the warmer months of the year since we're mailing these in the dead of February, but we will probably pick something more romantic to put on our formal invitations. 

So there you have it! My not-quite-DIY, cheap-and-easy guide to some swell looking save the dates. 

Are you mailing save the dates? How did you choose a look and design?  

  



Blue Moons on the Beach: Our Engagement Story and E-Pictures

Mr. Blue Moon proposed on April 14, 2014, during a trip with our good family friends, Aimee and Mike, to Seacrest Beach in Florida. Our friends own a beautiful beach house and were kind enough to invite us to spend a long weekend with them soaking up some sun and relaxing before our exam weeks at our respective universities rolled around.

On our last day of our trip, Mr. Blue Moon and I went to explore a nearby state park, Camp Helen, which was originally developed as a recreation area in the 1920's. It is a beautiful, secluded place to visit and we had a completely private proposal with Mr. Blue Moon writing "Marry Me" in the sand. 

We got a passerby to take our first photo as the future Mr. and Mrs. Blue Moon on our hike back through the park. It was such a lovely proposal, and Mr. Blue Moon could not have done a better job planning it...even though he was so nervous to pop the question!

Personal Photos

When we were planning another trip to the area the next summer, Aimee offered to take our engagement pictures for us on the same beach in Camp Helen State Park where Mr. Blue Moon proposed. She had dabbled in wedding photography before, and we already knew her as an amazing photographer because she had taken very pretty prom pictures for us in high school for years. 

It was towards the end of July. The beach was a mile's hike through this park. The three of us had the wisdom to go barefoot because all of the walking is through sand. It was 107 degrees. 

There were no tears, but there was definitely sweat, and even blood from some blistered feet on that hot, hot sand, and it is a testament to our friendship that Aimee still carried on with taking our engagement pictures and even managed to make us look like we were not sweating buckets and totally miserable. Even after all my make-up melted off and my naturally curly hair EXPLODED in the humidity, Aimee kept my focus on the wonderful man I'm marrying. And it was super fun!

Here are some of my favorites:

'

Mr. Blue Moon is so handsome. How did I get this lucky?

 I wore these shell earrings that we had bought the same day Mr. Blue Moon proposed. 

 This is probably my favorite of all our pictures. Mr. Blue Moon had just said something completely hilarious. 

Aimee captured this surprise picture after we had been romping in the ocean to cool off.

All photos by Aimee Aver.

What was your engagement shoot like? Did anyone else use a friendor for their engagement or wedding day photography?

The Perfect Reception

Sorry for the short hiatus, ya'll. You might remember that I'm a middle school teacher, and with state tests coming up in seven weeks, things are starting to get hectic around here.

Since Christmas came and went, Blue Mom and I have been searching high and low for a reception venue near our church. The church we chose is kind of out in the middle of nowhere, so reception options are kind of limited.

 

New Hope Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee // Personal Photos

The very first place we looked at is called Homestead Manor, and I LOVED this property. It is an antebellum home just down the street from my parents and about ten minutes from our church, and they recently added a big events barn to the property with a fireplace, beautiful chandeliers, and a pond in the back.

 

 

Photos by Kristyn Hogan Photography via HomesteadManor.com

The venue also has a beautiful bridal suite inside of a re-purposed schoolhouse, and groom's quarters on the second floor of the house. Everything about it seemed so perfect, but Blue Moon and I decided to look around some more before we decided. We needed something closer to our budget, which is $15,000, and something that is not too big for the number of guests. The Manor's equestrian barn seats a ton of guests, and I was so worried that it would swallow our small reception. 

The second venue that we looked at, and went as far as penciling our date in with, was a restaurant just off Main Street in our hometown called Franklin Mercantile Deli. Though I have never seen them listed on a wedding website or anything like that, Blue Mom somehow figured out that they will do wedding rehearsal dinners or receptions for an extremely reasonable price. For under $10,000 and with the ability to seat around 85 guests, they will do a dinner with two appetizers, bread baskets, and two main courses with sides. The owner will also arrange the tables and chairs however we want and include white table cloths, twinkle lights across the ceiling, and some basic arrangements, like candles, on the tables. As you can see, it is already beautifully decorated inside.

 Decorated for a dinner // via Franklin Mercantile Deli on Facebook

I was honestly so in love with this venue, and definitely in love with the price. I only had two major concerns. The first was that the restaurant is twenty minutes from our church. Even though I know that's not a very long time in the grand scheme of things, we do have a lot of guests coming in from out of town and I was hoping to keep things closer together. Secondly, though I love the intimate feel to this place, I was worried about fitting our guests into here. I hope the final number of people coming hovers around 85, but we are inviting 107 total at this point. There's no way that many would fit inside! So Blue Mom and I decided to look around just a little bit more.

Meanwhile, there was one venue that I have had in the back of my mind almost since Mr. Blue Moon and I first got engaged. It's called Graystone Quarry, and it has been in construction for many, many months. It was not supposed to be ready in time for our wedding, but I kept dreaming about it because it was only four minutes from our church and looked like it would turn out so beautifully in the pictures. 

 

A couple in front of the quarry wall during their engagement shoot // via Leah Michelle Photography on Graystone Quarry's Facebook page

 

The grounds at the quarry are so lovely and will make beautiful pictures. // Via Graystone Quarry's Facebook page

 

 

  

Sketches of some of the buildings that are being constructed // Via Graystone Quarry's Facebook page

 

I had reached out to the owner of the quarry a couple of times to check on its progress, but it really seemed like it would not be ready nearly in time. So imagine my surprise when she reached out to me right after the holidays to say that we might be able to work something out! 

It turns out that the smaller of the two buildings, which will typically be used for ceremonies while the larger building is for receptions, will be ready in time for our wedding! And though they are not booking couples until October, when the entire facility is scheduled to open, she let us book because our guest list is small enough to have a reception in the small building. It will look something like this inside: 

Via Graystone Quarry's Facebook page

I think that the wood beams and chandeliers will be so beautiful, and they are using rock from the quarry to do the walls and the rock wall outside. I never dreamed that we would be able to score such a beautiful venue, but Graystone Quarry has been great about helping us stick within our budget and answering all of our questions. Though the search was long, I think we really found the best option for our wedding! And I am so excited for Mr. Blue Moon and I to be the first to use the venue.  

What was your thought process as you picked a reception venue? Are you going all-inclusive, or picking your own vendors?