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Hi!  I am absolutely STOKED to be hanging out here at EAD and to start sharing all my crazy wedding planning-ness with you!  Back before getting engaged I was a closet wedding-blog stalker.  EAD was one of the first sites I stumbled upon and I have been reading daily ever since!  In fact I’m pretty sure my productivity at work decreased exponentially when I discovered the library of wedding photographers.

Well I guess I should start by telling you all a bit about myself!  Born and raised in Nebraska I am a true Midwest girl.  I love Husker Football, Runzas, micro-brews, corn fields, and a lot of other stuff but this could get long…  After graduating from the Univ. of Nebraska in 05 with a bachelors degree I decided to attend grad-school at the Univ. of Utah in SLC.  Thats where i ran into a cute boy from North Dakota who just happened to be a HUGE Husker fan like myself…needless to say I was smitten.  We quickly became inseparable and spent pretty much every night hanging out together from then on.

When Lance finished his Masters he decided to take a job out in Virginia, and six months later I followed.  Through connections at school we were able to get jobs with the same company…so we were literally together 24/7…eating, sleeping, working…all of it.  As one of my friends once put it, “Man…you guys are like BFFs!”  …well yeah isn’t that kind of the point!?!  So one thing led to another and now we’re engaged and living in Salt Lake City…again!  (Haha…I’ll dive into more detail on how that all played out in my next post…don’t want to turn this one into a yawnfest by going on and on and on…)  However, if you are sitting on the edge of your seat and simply MUST know right now…you can skip on over to my personal blog Run, Knit, Get Hitched!…where I tend to ramble on about weddings, cats, knitting, etc, etc, etc.

We are so excited to be back in Salt Lake and planning our June 2010 nuptuals in the destination wedding hotspot that is Nebraska.  Planning a wedding in a different state has been tricky but as of yet we haven’t run into too many problems…thanks to some very helpful people back home.   I can’t wait to share all my stories with you…bridezilla-ness aside!  We’ve been engaged for 8 months already…and we’ve got another 11 to go so this could get interesting.

I never thought it would feel this good.  Frankly - I was worried I would be disappointed.  After all the years of lusting after this ring, and months of waiting for it, I thought - for sure - I would feel a twinge of disappointment once I put it on (a twinge I was ready to hide for the rest of my life).  Contrary to my suspicions, I’ve literally been weak in the knees and downright dizzy when looking at my shiny new ring bling.  Nothing, and I mean NOTHING – not even my mangled finger – could dampen my mood when I look at it on my finger.  It feel so attached to it already, I’ve had to give it a name, Ringo.  And Ringo is the most beautiful (material) thing I have ever laid eyes on in my entire life.

My fiancé proposed with a placement ring in January since he was worried about bringing valuables when he visited me in Africa.  We picked out the ring together when I got back in March.  Since then, I’ve been happily engaged and planning our wedding and didn’t really feel anything missing.  But Friday I nearly fainted like a Disney damsel in distress when I put the ring on for the first time.  Since then I have had a mile perma-grin on my face that cannot be erased.

Both of us were in Chicago last weekend for our engagement party (another blog entry coming up).   The morning of the party, after meeting with our DOC (another blog entry coming up),  we took a walk to the place near where we first kissed and he got down on one knee for the second time this year and asked me, “Do you still want to marry me?” -  a loaded question after you’ve been engaged to someone for 6 months and seen their transformations.  I feel like I should have been asking him, “You sure you still want to marry me!?”

Frankly, I feel lucky and relieved that my man still wants to marry me :) And he and Ringo was the truly worth the wait.

Showing off Ringo to friends for the very first time

Me and Ringo writing this blog entry

Salutations EAD readers!! My name is Mo, and I am a quirky, creative, and thoughtful girly-girl living in San Diego with an adorable boy and a really crazy (but cuddly) cat. I am thrilled to be a blogger here at EAD. I’m embarrassed to say how long I have actually been reading wedding blogs, but let’s just say it was way, way, way, way…WAY before I was officially engaged. ;)

We are having a large vineyard wedding in San Diego on July 3, 2010. We’re hoping for a laid back affair with a lot of charm, a lot of whimsy, a lot of creative details, and a lot of chilled wine.

But before I talk about the wedding more, I should tell you a little more about us! Let me begin with how we met. It was a dark and cold September night…

The Time: Friday the 13th, 2002
The Place: Wheeler Hall, the University of California, Berkeley

[Photo via Flickr user CTG/SF]

The Characters: Mo and the boy, bumbling students ready to take on the world

[Berkeley, CA, 2003]

{Read the rest of this entry…}

Tomorrow we are welcoming two new brides to the EAD family - Mo and Stephanie.

Keep a look out for their first posts - can’t wait for you to meet them!

xo,
E.

Remember last week and my meltdown with my wedding dress? I was having second thoughts about my wedding dress and wasn’t sure if it was the right one.

Through the advice of all of you fabulous girls, I got an overwhelming response of suggestions of what to do! Thank you so much!

The day after I posted my dress dilemma, I made an another appointment at Vera Wang.  I thought that my experience this time would be different since I wasn’t going during a sample sale.  I was the only one in the bridal salon and knew exactly what I was looking for.

Vera Wang only had one of the two dresses that I could try on.

via Brides.com {source}

This is a dress from the Spring 2006 line.  They had the same dress that I tried on at the sample sale.  Apparently this dress is discontinued so there would be no way of buying one that fit properly (unless I found it on other pre-owned websites.)  To be honest, much like the Priscilla of Boston dress, it was wearing me.

{Read the rest of this entry…}

Dr. dave and I were laughing the whole day of the wedding about my “plans” for the ceremony.  I had “planned” this and “planned” that…and the one thing I didn’t plan for, rain, was what happened.

The day before the wedding, Friday, was just beautiful.  The rehearsal dinner went off without a hitch (other than there being quite a few confused people standing around).

I’d remembered to bring everything we needed (including dr. dave’s clothes and shoes…they had a bit of a snafu during their day-long bachelor party the day before and I ended up getting an interesting phone call in the morning. But that’s a whole OTHER story ;) ).  I’d even made myself a little practice bouquet out of sunflowers because we didn’t have the whole ribbon bouquet thing due to my lack of a bridal shower (I made it through without ever having to open embarassing gifts in front of people…huzzah!).  I must pre-apologize for the overuse of parentheses in this post…I’m feeling a bit unoriginal with my writing style today.

{Read the rest of this entry…}

I’ve mentioned that I get a thrill from considering the many different ways to arrive at married, right? Well, I get a more specific thrill from seeing different ways people have gotten married at our Barn.

A Practical Wedding has photos from a familiar site but a snowier season.

I’m reposting the next picture with the full knowledge that once DJ sees it I am toast. You see, I’m a board gaming widow. A strategic board gaming widow. If the gaming boys get the idea this is possible, there could be trouble.

Particularly since one of them is the officiant.

When it came time to think about our save the dates, I knew I wanted something casual yet classy that tied into the vintage feel of our wedding. But the most important thing to me? The budget, of course!

I didn’t want to spend a ton on our save the dates. We looked at some invitation websites and the prices were simply higher than we wanted to pay.

Then I remembered MOO cards. Have you heard of them? MOO is this great printing company out of England that prints business cards, postcards and greeting cards. They’re probably best known for their mini cards that a lot of people are using as business cards nowadays.

We decided to do postcards through MOO but needed a nice picture of ourselves to use. Not having done our engagement session yet, we needed to use one of our own photos. But looking back on all the pictures we have of the two of us, none of them seemed right for the save the date.

So we asked one of my bridesmaids’ boyfriend, Rob, who dabbles in photography and graphic design, to help us out. One freezing cold February morning, we met them for breakfast at our favorite diner in Brighton, and then drove downtown to the Boston Public Garden for our informal “photo shoot”.

It was awkward at first, being photographed in public, by a friend no less, but eventually we found a rhythm and ended up getting some lovely shots. Rob then took a few of the best ones, made them black and white, added our names and wedding date to them and voila! An easy DIY save the date that was cheap too.

60 postcards for $49.99 + plus one pancake breakfast = a classy and affordable save the date made with friends!

The most difficult step in creating our invitations was not coming up with the design, or choosing the supplies, or even printing with the Gocco … it was finding an adhesive that worked!

I went through SIX products in an attempt to secure the invitations to the mats to the pocket folds and the stamped monogram to the cardstock to the ribbon.

Here’s my product review:

• Photo Squares - These are perfect for scrapbooking, but not for anything that won’t be protected under plastic.
• Glue Runner -  This seemed to hold … until the pieces sat in my humid apartment for an afternoon.
• Hot Glue - See comments above.
• Tacky Glue - Way too wet; it soaked completely through the cardstock.
• Zips - Finally! This rubber cement type material held fast to the invitation mats and glossy finish of the pocket folds.
• Super Glue - Yes, I went there. This was my last resort for the belly belts, and lo and behold, it worked!

{Mom and I working late on a Sunday night}

I so hope our future DIY projects aren’t this time consuming — we’re running out of weekends! I apologize if you’re tired of hearing about my invitations … but please stay tuned for one final post — the cost breakdown and finished product!

Have you tackled any projects that have taken way more time than you anticipated? Was it worth it in the end? (I think so!)

image source

At the moment, as I am quite hyped up on caffeine, I’m finding looking at vintage/pin-up and boudoir pictures irresistible. I want to be in a vintage shoot and almost as much I want to buy a bunch of furniture and photograph people with fake eyelashes (you are confused, and that’s okay. I’m in possession of a lot of false eyelashes for the purpose of reviewing them).

miss boudoir

Is anyone reading EAD planning to do a boudoir shoot? Or have you? I’d like to see more inspirational vintage shots. I’m more interested in cute/sweet/coy/sexy than lots-o-skin in your face. Pretty versus vamped up. Not to mention I don’t have a pin-up sized chest. I have a cute yellow bathing suit I’d like pictures in & I love dresses. Of course, stockings and cute little lingerie pieces are a necessity as well.

{Read the rest of this entry…}