les shoooooes

I've been looking at shoes, more shoes, and way more shoes in the past few days. In my opinion, there is just too much going on with shoes these days. If you have a floor-length dress you can wear pretty much anything, but since my dress is tea-length, the shoes have to go with the style of the dress, and they have to be cute. The dress is vintage-ey, so the shoes can't be ultra-modern. These are the only pair under $500 that I love:


I found a coupon online that gave me $30 off the price at Bluefly, and if they come and I don't love them any more I can easily return them.

That look...

Without giving too much away, I'll say that my dress is very 50s.

So I'm thinking - set my hair, matte face, red lips, defined eyebrows.

The right amount of eyeliner.

And lots of sit-ups between now and then...

All images from myvintagevogue via mustard & sage.

first bunch of invites out

There are a few more to send, but some people have already received theirs! This is probably bad etiquette, but don't get me started about all the crazy etiquette...

Can you tell how happy I am to get these in the mail? Verging on the maniacal, some might say. No invite photos until they're all received, though...

some of my favorite bouquets...

Well... there have to be hiccups in wedding planning, and one of these unavoidable things hit us. Our lovely invitation designer/florist trainee is now gainfully employed and now unable to do the wedding flowers.

I could feel the crazy coming on when I got her sweet and sad email, but then I realised that it's just flowers for one party and it's not something to get bent out of shape over. So, a few phone calls later we've got a new florist - Poppies, on Queen west west. I've been in there a bazillion times and particularly admired their potted arrangements, so it's a happy ending. It's turning into a very Queen W W wedding - but I'm glad we've got Wanda's Pie in the Sky to throw some Kensington Market into the mix.
So while our first florist and I had crazy mind-meld with regards to flowers, now I pull together some inspiration images to bring to our meeting next Monday.

Hence, these lovelies from Brooklyn's Saipua. Their arrangements just SLAY ME.

grace kelly

Martha B. over at Nibs did a post today on Grace Kelly's wedding dress.  All I can say is oooooh. The dress reminds me very much of this Vogue pattern:

I've loved this pattern for ages and thought about having it made for our wedding, but then I realized that I don't have Grace Kelly's waistline and that it requires about a million yards of fabric and that good lace is rather expensive and chose another pattern that's perfect (and secret).  But there you go - if you want to look like Grace Kelly and you have a good seamstress - voila!

One more picture via Nibs, though, just to provoke another oooooooh:

Blommorna

This lovely arrangement from Skona hem makes me think of firecrackers. Those Roman Candle-esque blooms look rather like alliums, which I'd forgotten I like over the winter.

We're headed to Stockholm a couple of days after our wedding so really, checking Skona hem is like research, right?

Crazy-making lists

Meg wrote an absolutely fantastic post on A Practical Wedding today about how the various checklists out there can drive you mad with prompts to "bond in a creative way with your wedding party" or "go for cake testings" as in multiple tastes of multiple cakes from multiple bakeries. Once again, she has cut the cr@p and figured out how to do what needs to be done in a sensible and meaningful way: use a local bakery, simple chocolate and chocolate cake, done and done.

We're going to do something similar. We'll be getting a cake or two, some pies, some cookies, and some squares from Wanda's Pie in the Sky.  I was absolutely shocked at the price of cakes. I had thought that since we weren't planning on having a giant tiered wedding cake but rather a selection of normal cakes etc. for people to choose from. Compared with the venue and the rest of the catering it's small, but still!  But Wanda's is reasonable, nummy, we've actually BEEN there before, our friends like them, and we only have to order like a week ahead of time.

Take that, crazy-making list!!!