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Does anyone ever really wear a bridesmaid dress again? {Crickets chirp}

I thought so. Please feel free to prove me wrong in the comments. :)

I hope that even if my sisters don’t wear their dresses again, that their photos don’t end up in a book like You Can Wear It Again by Meg Mateo Ilasco. (Despite how loud these dresses are, you really can’t deny that there’s something incredibly festive about them all! I think this book would make a great addition to a thank you gift for the maids.)

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Thank you to everyone for the time you took to make suggestions about where we should go on our honeymoon! There were many places I had not even thought of (Croatia, Buenos Aires) and I am glad I threw the question out there to get some feedback I would not have gotten otherwise. We still have not made much progress because we keep wanting different things, but we’ll get there eventually.

This weekend I picked up my dress, and now it’s sitting in my closet hanging off of our suitcases on the top shelf. And it will remain there for the next 6 months until I have my first alterations appointment! It’s a heavy white dress in a thin garment bag, and paranoid little me worries that something will happen to it over half a year. Like the cat will find it one day and decide to yank it off the rack. Or I will trip while holding it, ripping off some of the tulle or lace. Or aliens will come and decide they need an artifact from Earth and will decide that my wedding dress is too pretty to pass up. Totally possible.

A lot of alterations have to be done, including bringing up the shoulders so that I don’t *cough* expose myself in front of 200 people. The associate showed me a photo of a bride who had ties sewn in the back so the dress would stay up, but I immediately cried “Noooo! The back is the best part!”

[Buying a new gown from a bridal salon? They aren't joking when they say order 6 months in advance--it took 5 months for my dress to arrive in the store.]

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This recent New York Times article, 100 Hotels Under $150 by Stuart Emmrich, reminded me that we have yet to decide on what to do about a honeymoon.

[Side note: You should check out the New York Times piece if you're going to Europe on a budget. It lists hotels under $150 in a variety of cities, including London, Florence, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Rome and many others. A great resource for travelers!]

We both love to travel, explore new places, experience new cultures, and eat a lot of food that is foreign to us (but really yummy.)  We have been to Europe (London, Paris, Rome, Florence, Amsterdam, Rotterdam,) and Asia (Bangkok and Hong Kong) which leaves a lot of places to be visited! We’re basically treating our honeymoon as an excuse to visit someplace we have never been to before.

There are a couple of issues halting my research (and I LOVE to research, especially when it comes to places I have yet to visit.) One of the issues we are having is when to have this fantabulous vacation. With me having to work and go to school, and him having to…well, work and go to school, you can imagine that time is a bit difficult to coordinate.

[Our vacation to Paris a few years ago]

The second problem is that we’ll be having a Chinese banquet a week after our San Diego wedding, so that rules out skipping town for any extended period of time.

That means that we are most likely waiting to have this trip, I just don’t know until when and I don’t know how with our schedules, but we’ll be waiting.

I’m honestly a little scared that time will pass and I’ll randomly remember 2 years later–oh yeah. We never took a honeymoon.

Two questions:

1. Are you planning to wait to take your big trip, and if so, how long are you waiting? Months? A year?

2. If you were in my shoes, knowing the places we have traveled to together, where would you go?

Sometimes when I’m roaming wedding blog land, I am amazed at what bridal bloggers can do in their spare time. How do they keep up with their wedding and have a full-time job? How did they make their own wedding dress and stay sane? What do you mean they baked their own wedding cake?? I am so impressed by all the talent out there, so much so that I often feel like bowing in front of the computer hailing “I’m not worthy!”

Well, y’know, not really but it makes for a funny and geeky visual. :)

Last week I started graduate school part-time. I have a pile of papers, two empty Starbucks cups and a bag of chips to prove it. In addition to my full-time job, some volunteering, wedding planning, and blogging, I’ll be reading theory and writing papers at night. As I embark on this new chapter in my life, I thought it’d be an appropriate post to throw out to the wedding community–how do you fit planning a wedding into your life? And if you’re already married, what would you have done early on in the planning to alleviate some of the stress in the final days before the big event?

[Blooms from the Heart, San Diego, California]

In the wide world of wedding blogging, I feel as though flowers get the rep for being the most disposable, the one part of the day that very easily dies and ends up in the trash bag along with the plastic forks and paper plates used for the cake. For this reason, we’re doing potted plants for centerpieces, with the hope that 1) people will bring them home, or 2) they can be donated. Since the first will unlikely happen since most people are from out of town, I am very excited that our florist, Paula Rae of Rae Florae, introduced me to Blooms from the Heart, a San Diego organization which repurposes your event flowers by bringing them to hospitals, homeless shelters, senior care facilities, and other organizations in which they can be enjoyed and not tossed. This is a 100% volunteer run program, and Paula describes it as a top-notch non-profit with a big heart. They even take pictures of your flowers being delivered so you can see your flowers being given to a new home.

Are you planning to donate your wedding flowers?

I still remember the day I learned about Facebook. It was sometime in 2004, and I was walking back to my apartment with my friend Matthew after history class. We were dodging the usual suspects on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley, when he enlightened me.

“Hey, have you heard of Facebook?”

“Facebook? What is that, some way to check people out without them knowing?”

“Ummm…sort of…it’s like Friendster, except better.”

“Better than Friendster? How is it different?”

“Well, for instance, it lists your class schedule, and then it will show you all the people who are in the class with you.”

“Whoa. Are you serious? How do they know what classes you’re taking, do you list them on your profile?”

“No, they have your class schedule because it’s linked to your school email account. You use that email to sign up.”

“WHOA.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty cool, these guys at Harvard made it. Go sign up, IM me when you have your profile up and I’ll add you.”

So I did. Matthew became my first “friend”. And thus began my Facebook profile. These days, it seems like everyone is on Facebook. Old high school friends. People from work. Businesses. My relatives. I even set up a “Catbook” for my cat. It’s an easy way to get the word out…

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I know what you’re thinking. Wait a minute Mo, aren’t you having your wedding in a vineyard with Italian food? This blog post title says “big fat Chinese wedding”, what’s so Chinese about a vineyard and Italian food? Is your entire profile a sham?? Is your name even Mo??!

I can explain. Yours truly not only is having one wedding extravaganza, but TWO. That’s right, we’re having two celebrations, in two different cities, with two different guest lists, two different invitations, two different florists, two different outfits…I could keep going but you’re probably getting a headache.

It’s insane. I now refer to our events as wedding #1, what my parents refer to as “the western wedding”, and wedding #2—The Chinese Banquet. [If you're unfamiliar or want to know more about Chinese banquets, Chinese Weddings by the Knot has a pretty good run-down of what a wedding banquet entails, plus a lot of other Chinese traditions! Also, The Wedding Banquet, directed by Ang Lee, kept me laughing and is very educational. I love that movie, two enthusiastic thumbs up.]

The good news (or is it good?) is that the banquet is being totally planned by my mother and my future mother-in-law. 300 of our parents’ friends and relatives (and when I say relatives, I mean second, third, and fourth cousins), will be dining on roast pork, shark fin soup, and walnut shrimp. You read right. THREE HUNDRED. This banquet is making both our parents very, very happy, so I’ve tried to get over all the hoopla and am instead focusing on my only task: finding something to wear.

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To save money, we opted to do an electronic save the date. Most people in my life didn’t even think that was necessary, but with 80% of our guest list being from out of town, and a family history of disorganization and lack of planning skills, I totally ignored them. I also thought it’d be a good way to get the word out about our website, which has a lot of information about our event and San Diego.

I used MailChimp, which is FREE for up to 3,000 sends, easy to use, and lets you customize an email campaign with your own artwork. I made a banner with our laid back red/pink/green theme in mind:

I highly recommend MailChimp if you are considering an electronic save the date. It lets you create lists, import them from an excel file, and gives you impressive stats (pie charts and graphs anyone?) about how often your email was opened and by whom. If you’d like to read more about my experience with MailChimp, I’ve written probably more than you need to know on Pink Argyle. This was the final email campaign, sent to about 100 of our guests (sorry, I had to break it into two!):

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Normally I take my camera to every vendor appointment so I can document everything for you lovely readers, but I remember being frazzled the day of the tasting, so unfortunately I have no pictures of the food! But I’m happy to report that the tasting went well, not only because the food was tasty, but because one of the first questions they asked when I first contacted them was “Do you have any allergies?”

Why yes I do, thank you for asking.

Allergies and I are like best friends. I have so many minor allergies to food that when we have tasting menus at fancy restaurants I don’t even bother telling the waiter what they all are because it’s just kinda embarrassing to list off ten items. It’s nothing life threatening, more annoying than anything. My tongue and throat get really itchy for about 20 minutes and I have to gulp water to help make it go away. And it’s mostly fruit. Apples, peaches, nectarines, plums, pears, Asian pears, honeydew, cherries, lychee, kiwi, cucumbers, almonds (fun fact: almonds are a part of the peach family. It’s the only nut I’m allergic to) and probably a lot more I can’t think of right now.

Ordering at Jamba Juice is not fun. (”Could I get the Peach Pleasure without the peach?”)

So when they asked me before the tasting if I had allergies, it was a huge plus in my book. The menu was edited to include mostly berries instead of apples and pears–sweet.

I’m excited about our menu, which is Italian-themed! It includes a pasta bar (yum!), prosciutto wrapped shrimp, bruschetta, beef crostini, grilled veggies, salmon skewers, sea bass and scallop skewers, and a walnut and berry salad. Add a glass of wine and some sweets and we’ve got ourselves a par-taaay. Minus the cucumbers or pears. :D

Is anyone who has bridesmaids letting them wear whatever they want? And what I mean by whatever they want, I don’t mean in a color scheme, I mean, they show up in any dress/suit/skirt they have and just stand up there with you? That was my initial thought for my two sisters, who will be standing up there with me at the ceremony. I’m the youngest, and it just felt contrary to my youngest sibling status to dictate what they would wear.

Well, much to my surprise, they vetoed the “wear whatever” concept and they told me they wanted to 1) wear green dresses 2) look skinny and 3) look hot. So I’ve been on the hunt.

[I LOVE THESE!! Dresses from Tony Chestnut, Photo from red photo co. via snippetandink]

[Photo from Derek Wuenschirs via offbeat bride]

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