~ ABOUT US AND OUR WEDDING PLANS ~

My FI and I really want our day to be like a party! We want people to have fun and enjoy the meaning of the day. We wanted to get married at a place and celebrate at a place that would mirror our personalities, and this fit the bill in so many aspects. We are both so excited! We are also incorporating a baseball theme into our wedding because it is one of our favorite things. (too bad we love rival teams)!

~ VENUE ~

We are getting married at the Altamont Manor House. The minute we visited this venue, we KNEW this was the place. It is a very old restored home with so much character and plenty of fun nooks and crannies to hang out and steal a kiss! :-D

There is a vintage bar that is huge, so plenty of room for our guests to kick back and have a cold one!

The top photo is shot from where our ceremony will be held. (yes, i am having a catholic ceremony outside. what a feat to work through). The other image shows a ceremony from another wedding. I just love the stone stairs. There is plenty of lawn to hang out on too.

These images at the manor house show the veranda where part of our cocktail hour will be held. You can see in the other photos how some food looks set up here. It is such a great place to chill out! There are even adirondack chairs out there. ( i am such a sucker for those).

~ LOOK OF THE DAY ~

This is my dress. (Watters Bride) I just love it

It took me a bit to find just the right "one". I wanted something very simple, elegant and classic.

My shoes are Nina Zartan. (Zappos)

This is what i am going to get for my wedding day "bling" :-D Bracelet and earrings from Sparkle Forever. I love the elegance of each piece and how vintage they look. I think they will work well for a simple garden wedding.

I LOVE soon2bmrs.stone's hair. I don't want an overstyled look so i thought this would be perfect. ( I have already lived through the 80's, i didn't want to go there again with "wedding hair"! :-)
I also changed my mind and have decided to wear a flower in my hair. From the recommendation of knottie kateaud i am going to order a custom hair flower from Noesis Boutique.

TA-DA!!! The bridesmaids dresses finally came in. (not in all these colors, i promise). We took a day trip to Boston to the Aria shop where we got the dresses. (minus my one sister because she had just been in a skiing accident and couldn't go). I have NO idea why they have such bizarre looks on their faces. These are the styles they choose and they are pictured below them. They got them in expresso silk and my 2 sisters (matron and maid of honors) will both have the pink sash around their waists. I loved them so much when they got delivered that i hung them in my office so i could look at them all day!

So this is the flowergirl ensemble! We have 2 little ones. My niece Ellie who is 3 and my fiance's niece Ari who is 5. These are not the dresses we ended up with, but very close. The basket is from a hawaiian company. (Ailana Kai). We wanted something very untraditional. This is actually a half wine bottle holder. I have some pretty polka dot pink and brown ribbon to tie around the baskets.

This is the look we are going for the handsome men! :-D knottie lilschenk accomplished the exact look we are after so i "mooched" a photo from her. (thanks!)... we still haven't decided on chocolate brown ties or the pink ties yet. The two pink ones are Brioni Ties and the patterned one is from Burberry. My fiance is a huge flip flop lover, so he may even wear leather flip flops!

~ ALL THINGS PAPER ~

All of our paper pieces, (invites, labels, programs, etc) will use the following motifs to work with the garden venue. The lace flower is an oversized stamp that i bought from Impress Rubber Stamps. (My newest addicion)! The other flowers were images i scanned, and turned into bitmaps and colorized for everything else.

These are our invitations!! They were designed by me and letterpressed. I used chocolate brown envelopes for both outer and return and custom made wrap labels with a combination of pink and brown fonts. The back of the outer envelope was embossed and has a pink round circle sticker to keep the envelope closed. (i didn't want to lick the envelope, plus the envelopes were lined). I got so many compliments on these and for anyone concerned about darker envelopes, don't be! I had no problems with the post office whatsoever! If you notice in the lower right image, i had a chocolate brown belly band with a custom sticker that stated who the invite was intended for. All the inner pieces were tucked behind the belly band on the back.

Here are a few more pictures of our invites. (They didn't photograph well). The envelopes are chocolate brown and looked so fun with the pink. The top picture shows the pink bandana print that the envelopes were lined with.

These are our rehearsal dinner invites. I just decided to keep them simple and follow through with the fork, knife and spoon theme on the invite and the label for the envelope! They were fun to make too!

~ DECORATIVE IDEAS ~

Here are some of our decorative ideas! I have been having alot of fun with this part...i could totally overbuy! It is pretty scary. The top row of images will be our wheatgrass centerpieces. We ordered the seeds and soil from Dogwood Garden Organic Farm. The woman that i spoke to was SO helpful in giving me tips. The boxes we will put the finished wheatgrass in are the wooden boxes. I ordered them from Jamali Garden. The other galvanized containers were our original idea but we will just use them for decorations on the bar and other areas. We were afraid they would be too high for the tables. So the galvanized bins and the pink leather vases from Crate and Barrel will be filled with flowers and used throughout!

These are some of our flowers ideas. Everything we use will be pretty simple, and very natual and garden-like. Nothing too sculpted i would say so it looks like it was just picked! I definately got more excited about flowers than i thought i would, ESPECIALLY since i am no green thumb! LOL..

The flowers on the top left is what we will have in a glass pitcher on the center of our escort card table and the idea under it willl be on the tables with the wheatgrass. I have very small bud vases, 2 for each table and random hand picked flowers will go in each of the vases. The 2 pictures on the right are from Calicayman's bio. We will have 2 galavanized buckets with just dangling flowers (that is what i like to call it). I thought this picture was pretty similar to what we will create. The buckets will hang from shepard's hooks as you walk down the stone stairs. The image under that is similar to what our florist will create for our candy buffet table to spruce it up! A mossy bakset filled with natural looking vines and flowers.

~ CEREMONY STUFF ~

We are having a unity candle ceremony. I am so excited about it. I purchased these hurricanes from Pottery Barn, along with the brown runner that i will use on the table outside where they will set. Knottie calicayman had very similar hurricanes as well, so i used her image to show what ours will sort of look like!

I love the look of having the programs in a galvanized bucket as you walk into the garden. I found this image (i can't remember whose bio i got it from though) and i thought it showed a good example of how fun it will look. I got my bucket at JoAnnes with the wonderful 40% off coupon! Gotta love the coupons!

~ RECEPTION STUFF ~

We are having our guests sign baseballs at our reception as opposed to a book. Since we are huge baseball fans, we thought this would be a fun alternative to a book that we probably might not look at again. Then we are going to store the baseballs in a huge shadowbox that i bought from Pottery Barn. It was tricky to find baseballs without a logo on them. I also showed the basket that we will use to hold the baseballs at the reception and the fabric to line the basekt!

All of our table names will be positions on the baseball field. This is my early mockup of it. I am using a combo of the 3 papers shown to line the back of each name to add a tad more color!

We are not having cake at our reception, we don't like it! hehehehe.. instead, we are having an ice-cream bar and we will serve each other our first ice-cream in the nostalgic baseball hats here. (our favorite teams).. we will also serve italian pastries for anyone who won't like just the ice-cream. i'm so excited about this part since i have always loved ice-cream!

These are our menus to put into the napkins. We are having multiple stations, but i thought it would be a neat idea to use these so people would know where to head for their favorites!

~ FAVORS~

We are doing the ever popular candy buffet. I"m very excited about it, since i have such a sweet tooth. I think i may eat just as much as everyone else! I love classy1's candy buffet and used it as inspiration for mine! These are the containers i have colllected so far. ( You can see my pieces of paper as i try and organize what candy i want in what dish). I ordered my scoops from Able Kitchen. The ribbon i have had for awhile, and i have started tying it around the handles of each scoop to dress them up a bit! I also made labels for the top of each box. I ordered my boxes from Uline. They were wonderful, inexpensive and i got my product really quickly!

~ GIFTS ~

These were the Thank You gifts that i made for the girls for my shower. They did an awesome job and thought of every detail, so i wanted to just give them a little something! I bought the chalkboard flower pots (to keep with the garden theme) at Pottery Barn and filled them with soaps, scrubs and such for the back from the Body Shop. They LOVED them. I made them all pink things too!

I made these fabric bags for the girls to put their new "dancing shoes" in! I found the pink flops at Old Navy early in the season for a whopping $2.50 each! You can't go wrong! Then i made a little tag for them and will have them on their chairs waiting when we start the reception.

These are my gifts to my bridesmaids. I purchased the bath wraps from Bed, Bath and Beyond and had them embroidered by a local business. (Mom's Perfect Embroidery) I chose each girl's favorite color to have their initial embroidered in. She was so quick and it was inexpensive to do 5! (one was for me too) :-) Then i got them white flip flop slippers to go along with the wrap.

I also got each of them a fun Coach tote at the outlet. Each one got a different color/pattern. I got really lucky with these on sale!

This is the start of our flowergirls gifts. I bought the buckets in pink at PB KIds and have started filling them with fun goodies for the girls. I love the bug jumpropes!

For my bachelorette party, we are going to Sacandage Lake where one of my bm owns a camp right on the water. We thought it would be just as fun to be on the water all weekend and eat, drink and be merry! :-) My friend and i designed this illustration that i am having screened on ribbed tanks for all the girls to wear that weekend. I can't wait to see them done.

Here are a few fun photos from my bachelorette weekend. It was a blast. The upper left photo is me doing a solo dance with the band to my favorite dance song: ac/dc.. shook you all night long, the top right are my 2 sister; the bottom left is my friend erika (a bm) and the bottom right is the group of us!

~ FUN STUFF ~

Just a few fun things. Yes, i just love the Soon to Be hoodies. I ordered mine from Spool of Design. I also ordered my something blue undies from Custom Glamgirl. I always call fi by his last name. He will love these!

This is the card i made to send to my four girls to invite them for mani and pedi the day of the rehearsal. Then i am going to make them lunch afterwards. They have been more than generous to me through my engagement, so i thought this would be a fun way to treat them that day! I call them the "Fabulous Four"! :-)

~ HONEYMOON ~

We are going to Greece for our honeymoon! I can't wait! For the first few nights, we will be staying right in Athens and exploring everything there. These images were taken off of the website of the hotel where we are staying. The Titania. I just love how you can see the Parthenon from the balcony of the restaurant.

The second hotel we are staying in for the rest of the time is in Mykonos. (The Mykonian Collection). At this hotel, we have an ocean view room and 4 pools. One has freshwater, one has saltwater and 2 have chlorine. I can't wait to test all the waters! This will be the end of our trip and totally relaxing.