What the mom's are wearing

So Mr Fix It and I are not spring chickens at 47 and 37 years old.  Which means our moms are also a little older than maybe your average bride's mom :)  But who knows?  Maybe not.  People always say my mom looks like my sister.  She's only 18 years older than me.  Mr Fix It's mom is actually his step-mom as his real mother passed away years ago.  However, his step-mother has been married to his father for 40 years now and he calls her mom and thinks of her as such, so we don't make any distinction.  She is, afterall, the mother to his three half siblings. 

Anyway, I wanted our moms to feel comfy *and* dressy on our wedding day.  And I wanted them in age appropriate attire.  (My mom can tend to go for things that I think are a little younger than her years should allow.)  But I also didn't want to put any huge restrictions or demands on them.  So I was thrilled when we found a dress for mom that is truly flattering on her figure that we actually both love!  Not only that, but it is a very complimentary color to my girls' dresses and our wedding colors.

My mom will be in this Marc Bouwer Glammit draped gown with a little chiffon bolero:

But hers will be in this pretty dark teal color:

And Mr Fix It's mother has opted to wear a dress that her daughter picked out for her at her wedding a few years ago.  I think it matches the style and formality of my mother's gown well:

                                          

We scored on the Marc Bouwer gown as it went on sale right after Thanksgiving for $200 less than what it was listed at!  And since Mr Fix It's mom already had her gown, she obviously didn't have to come up with any extra cash. 

Have you ladies decided what your moms will be wearing on the big day?  Did you have much input or requests for them as to how you wanted them to dress?

There's no backing out now...

Well, it's official...our invitations were dropped in the mail today.  So I guess there's no way that Mr Fix It and I can back out now ;)

Here's a few final photos of the finished product.  I showed the original invites when I received the mockup back here.   However, after showing them to Mr Fix It, he had one main request - change the font on the invites to something a little bit more 'formal' and not so simple and plain.  Whatever...I accommodated his request and here is the final invite as we sent it out:

* As always, note the colors are not represented well at all...they look green in this pic instead of the aqua color.   :(

Did you see that I added some little crystal rhinestones to the invites to bling them up a bit...love it! 

And here are the envelope wraps my sister and I created as well as the fun little personalized photo stamp I bought from stamps.com.  Yeah, they're heavy invites and so we had to pay $0.61 per envelope.  BE SURE TO TAKE A SAMPLE OF YOUR INVITE INTO THE POST OFFICE TO HAVE THEM WEIGH AND CONFIRM POSTAGE NEEDED BEFORE YOU MAIL YOUR INVITES!!!

I didn't take a pic of the back side of the envelope but it wraps all the way around to the back where our return address is on the back side.  The graphic also wraps around to the back as well.

Sorry the stamp pic is blurry...I really need a new camera.

All boxed up just before I left for the post office:

Well, that's it...98 invitations from our 'A list' have been dropped in the mail today.  This is 11 weeks before our wedding...about 3 weeks earlier than when they typically suggest you mail them out (6-8 weeks).  But we are giving them 5 weeks to respond.  I know that's early to respond to a wedding that's still 6 weeks away, but we won't be sticklers about people absolutely returning their response by that date.  We just needed to do this to assist with confirming those that absolutely will not be coming (most likely because they're out of state).  This way, it allows us to confirm those that cannot attend so that we can still mail out a few 'B list' invites to local friends we had to cut :(  At the same time, it gives us plenty of time to call people who are lazy about returning their RSVP card.  Especially since our caterer needs the final head count 3 weeks before the big day.

As the no's roll in, we'll mail out a few additional invites to our B listers (hopefully) and then give them an extra 4 weeks to respond (since they didn't get their invite as early).  Either way, the guest list is stressing me out big time...but that's a post for another day.  All I will say for now is let's just pray that at least 23 people out of 221 will respond that they cannot come.  Fingers crossed!

What do you think of the finished invite?  Are/Did you go the envelope wrap route or did you use calligraphy, handwriting or computer printed envelopes?

My flowergirl - the Diva!

Ok, so if you haven't figured it out by now, children (at least the ones in me and Mr Fix It's family) are a *huge* part of our big wedding day celebration.  I have a 2 1/2 year old nephew, PJ and Mr Fix It has a 19 month old nephew, Caden (his sister's son), and two nephews, Luke (5) and Christopher (3) (his youngest brother's two sons).

When it came time to pick a ring bearer, we couldn't choose between the 4 of them so we just decided to include all of them.  I will post soon about how we are going to provide 'tasks' for each of them as they come down the aisle.  But again, I digress...

The flower girl selection was sort of easier and sort of not.  My sister just had a baby girl last year who will be turning 1 year old two days before our wedding (check out my post here about my past dilemma regarding this little princess).  But Analeigh (that's her name) is not really walking yet and a 1 year old certainly doesn't understand or can't handle any FG tasks.  My sister was fine with us not including her and was happy to not have to worry about keeping her occupied throughout a long day of photos and such.  (And yes, I know some people push or pull their little baby girls in strollers or wagons down the aisle but just not our thing.)

Though there are many boys in the family, there's not as many young girls...except for my little second cousin, Tatum.  She was the FG in my sister's wedding three years ago and now at six years old, she's still totally FG material today!  Back then, she was so darling when we took her shopping for her dress...she kept raving about how she wanted a princess dress and anything we put her in she would twirl around in.  Such a cutie patootie!

Well, her mom (my cousin-in-law) is one of my Bridesmaids and she cried when I asked her to be in my wedding.  So when I called her and asked if she would be okay with Tatum being my FG, she immediately put Tay-Tay on the phone so I could ask her...silly :)  Of course, Tay-Tay was super excited.

So we took her along when we went to show the ladies my wedding gown back in June.  We browsed aroudn the salon looking for FG dresses and they had a good selection but nothing was jumping out at me.  Then Tatum found this pretty little number - look at how she is rockin' the model pose!

And here is a photo of Tay-Tay in her little FG dress next to the sample gown of my own wedding dress

(I realize I've never posted pics of me *IN* my dress - this is not the same color as my gown but a full dress post is coming on Monday/Tuesday).  I loved this dress on her because the little gathers along the bottom sort of matched the pickups in my skirt.

But when the dresses arrived, I have to admit, I was truly disappointed with how Tatum's dress looked on her.  The dress was fine, but it didn't have the same 'oomph' as the sample did.

See how the pickups are so much flatter and 'hang' more rather than being all poofy and bunched up?  Plus, the stupid salon ordered the dress a size bigger than what we had asked for and before you ask, yes - I did in fact have a copy of my order to show them they were wrong.  They said they'd return it if I wanted but I was so over it (future post to come) that I just wanted out of the salon.  I figured I'd deal with it later.

Then as the months went on...I began to ponder how I *HATED* Tatum's dress.  I mean I was finally in love with my gown and the ladies' BM dresses but Tatum's dress was depressing me.  When one day I came across this post by a Cupcake Wedding.  She showed the cutest little chiffon flower girl dress!  And so I made the decision to pick out a different dress for Tatum.  When I called Erin, her mom, to tell her that I was going to buy a new dress for Tatum and ask if she'd be okay with that, Erin said it should be fine.  Then later, Erin told me that when she told Tatum "Stacey is going to change your flower girl dress," Tatum responded with "Ugh, she's going to change my dress?  Really?"  LOL  Seriously - what a DIVA!  I laughed when she told me she responded that way.

But when I showed up at Thanksgiving with her new dress and her try it on, everyone (her mom, my sister, my mom, and even little Tay-Tay) all agreed that the new dress was much better and would be much cuter with our wedding colors:

It's still not quite perfect, we have to take her in next month to get it taken in just a bit and to maybe hem up the bottom some so it makes it a little 'cuter' but I really love it.  Thanks to Cupcake Wedding's post, I found it online at a shop in LA called http://www.girlsdressline.com/.  And it was cheaper than the first dress we bought!  Which by the way, I am now trying to sell on Craigs List if anyone is interested :)  It's a size 8 and can be used for a bigger FG or a Junior Bridesmaid and the sash is detachable.  :)

Did you ladies have any hiccups or problems when trying to select your FG dress?

New Trends in Color Schemes

So just when I think I have come up with something very unique and different that no one has ever seen at a wedding before, it suddenly ends up on all the blogs and in all the magazines!  (sigh)  Oh well, I still LOVE my color scheme.  It is an aqua/turquoise with cranberry deep red accents.  You have to be careful with aqua and turquoise because there are so many variations - some even think of tiffany blue as an aqua which is truly not the color I chose.

It came to me while browsing through wedding web sites for coordinators.  I found a picture that I absolutely fell in love with not just the colors but the little favors and napkins and place cards.  And the funny thing is, it was from my very own venue (will blog on that later this week).  And so after confirming that was my color scheme, I began searching for dresses, favors boxes, ribbons, etc all to coordinate - but not overly done.

I eventually found a florist and while browsing through her books, realized that the florist I selected just so happened to be the same florist who did the flowers and deco for the wedding I used as my inspiration!  How awesome is that?  And then while browsing the blog about the wedding I found a company in Illinois that did all their stationery for the wedding and fell in love with her, too!  So now I have my colors, favor box ideas, florist, stationery company and inspiration all from the same wedding.  So funny. 

In some ways I don't want it to seem like I am just 'copying' it, but honestly, I always say there are no original ideas...only knock offs and twists on a previous thought.  So I am definitely putting my own twist on a lot of the elements I am incorporating.

But enough chatter...here are the pics from Joyful Weddings and Events:

My centerpieces will be totally different incorporating red tulips in some sort of simple spray like this:

My bridesmaid's are wearing these Jasmine Bridal B2 dresses in this berry color:

Photos:  Jasmine Bridal
My daughter (a bridesmaid) is wearing this dress (hemmed to match the other girls) from Jasmine B2 Juniors in Bahama Breeze color and the flower girl will have a white dress with a matching sash in the Bahama Breeze:

And finally, they will all be carrying bouquets very similar to this with blue hydrangeas, burgundy cymbidium orchids, black magic roses, jade green roses and kermit mums:

Yes, my wedding is still 6 months away but I pretty much have everything planned and booked...now all that's left is some tweaking as I finalize details with vendors and purchasing the fun stuff like favors, gifts, jewelry, shoes, and so on.  What are your colors and what do you think of these?