A Sincere Thank You.

Well, the big day has finally come!  I just wanted to sincerely thank everyone for following along with this blog (even though my posts have been sparse in the months leading up to the wedding) and for supporting me through my journey to being Mrs. Eric Maxwell.  Today I feel a great sense of peace knowing that all the pieces of the wedding planning puzzle are falling into place, and we're going to have the most amazing day on Saturday.  From here on out, it's just fun times and smooth sailing!  I.  SAID.  SMOOTH.  SAILING.

Fear not, this blog has not come to an end!  I will still be blogging after the wedding about all the little details of the big day, and who knows?  Maybe I can still find some funny things to write about after that...

Thanks again for reading!  And for those of you who will be there on Saturday, get ready for the party of your life!!!

 

Yayyyy!

Now I'm off to get hitched!!!

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!!



~M

A Fun DIY Project (Alternatively Titled: How I Cut My Thumb Open)

Hey all!

So we are getting married two weeks from Saturday.  The clock is ticking and the countdown is on!  I have to admit that for these past four or five weeks I've felt overwhelmed with stress at the sheer amount of things we had yet to get accomplished for this wedding (and naturally the blog has suffered).  But Eric and I have worked through the list slowly but surely, and have delegated a lot of tasks to our awesome family and wedding party, and the day is coming together wonderfully.  I am at the point now where I am just so excited to say I do!  I want the day to be here NOW.

 

Get to call this handsome man my husband in 2.5 weeks!

Now that it is closer to the wedding, we are needing to get done all the tedious tasks that we have been putting off until the end stages.  One of those tasks was our corkboard seating chart.  You may recall this post where I first unveiled it.  So, Eric and I have earnestly saved every cork from every bottle of wine we have shared together, from the day we got engaged until now, with the plans of creating a seating chart made from the corks of our wine bottles of love.  Well those plans tanked pretty fast when we realized we would have to drink three bottles of wine a day in order to have enough in time.  Riiiiight.  So we came up with a new idea for the corks that they would hold our place cards at the tables!

 

Cute!

At 155 guests, we needed far less of them, so Eric went through the (embarrassingly full) bag of corks and picked out the best ones to use for this project.  Then I lured Tara and Melissa over to my place to watch the premiere of the Bachelorette with promise of wine and food, and then dropped the bomb that they would be helping me do crafts all night.  Mwahahaha...

Turns out I have the same patience for crafting as I do for shopping.  10 minutes and I'm sooooo done.  On a project that takes several hours, this was bad news bears.  But I had my lovely besties to help me through, and we ended up doing a pretty awesome job! 

 

We diiiiiiid it.

The first and most ridiculous step was actually cutting the wine cork in order to put the place card into it.  We tried a utility knife, butter knife, steak knife and bread knife, and finally settled on the bread knife, but not before my hand slipped and I dug a newly sharpened Henckels blade deep into my thumb.  After a 15 minute break to stop the bleeding we resumed, but needless to say I was off cutting duty for the rest of the night.  And, I must have nicked a nerve or something because my thumb is still numb around the cut even 10 days later.  Weird.

 

Obbbbbbviously when you craft you need a big glass o'wine.

 

The next step was getting the wine cork to actually stand up and not roll over with the place card in it.  To keep it upright, we went on a rather pitiful run to Dollarama to locate some bling to glue to the cork.  We found some big fake gems and voila!  Cork stands upright.  We used E6000 which is the same glue I use for strassing, so I know those suckers will stick.

 

Troubleshooting like a boss....

Next was glittering the ends of the corks because, let's face it, I like glitter.  I bought one purple and one black container of fine loose glitter, mixed them together in a bowl (to tone down the purpleyness of it all), and the girls brushed the ends of the cork with white glue and pushed the cork into the bowl.  Et voila!

 

Note the bandaid from the aforementioned knife incident.

Tara made the actual place cards using her vast and impressive supply of scrapbooking tools including a cutter, and some other thing, and these sticky things, and something called cardstock, and glittery paper.  I don't ask questions.  So here is the finished product!  And then we will stick little coloured dots to the place cards so that the wait staff know who is eating what. 

 

Whee!  A DIY success!

It's very cool to see all the smaller details of the day coming together.  Here's a couple other things that have been going on this week!

We have the favor tags for our imperial cookie favors....

 

Awe!

My brother chose the dinner wines for our wedding, and naturally Eric and I had to taste them first, and they are AWESOME...

 

Red:  Hacienda Albae 'Seleccion' Cabernet Merlot 2007, Castillo, Spain

White:  Adi Badenhorst Secateurs Chenin Blanc 2013, Swartland, South Africa

 

 

My bro is also hard at work choosing the wines for the wine tasting during cocktail hour, so I hope everyone enjoys that!


And Eric and I have also decided on our late night fare.  This is obviously really important at a wedding, because it's been 4 hours since you've last eaten, you've burned off your dinner cutting a rug on the dance floor, and you're wasted so naturally you want to stuff your face.  We decided for our wedding that although we both love a good cheese sandwich on rye with the cheese on the outside, that we wanted something a little more upscale that the usual deli-style social food.  So our guests are going to be scarfing down none other than gourmet mini sliders with aged cheddar and onion confit, and mini poutine with smoked gouda and a herb glace!

 

 

Basically small cheeseburgers....

 

 

...and small fries and gravy with cheese.  Dee-licious.

We're so excited to share this day with all our friends and family.  Can't wait!!!


Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

Online Shopping Saved My Life

Hey everyone! As you can see from my lack of blog posts, I am busy and stressed.  This time of year is always a killer.  BUT, it's April 30th, which means I am close to the light!  Normally I would have reached the light by today but because of the good old Heartbleed Virus, the tax deadline has been extended to May 5th.  Yayyyyyy. 

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

Between dealing with tax season, trying to wrangle RSVPs out of everyone, spending the last five days shuttling between a dance competition and work, and tackling our wedding to-do list as the weeks fly by, I've been more than a little frazzled.  We do have a huge support system around us and people are always offering to help, but there are some things you just can't delegate and I seem to be smack in the middle of a giant list of those types of to-dos.  I even took this selfie the other day when I was right in the thick of accomplishing wedding tasks like a boss:

 

Straight up.

What has been my saving grace throughout this experience has been the magic of online shopping.  If there's two things I have very little patience for, other than the flagrant misuse of the words "your" and "you're", it's shopping and running around.  I'm not someone who likes to spend an entire day driving from store to store, meandering around inside looking at things, humming and hawing over what to buy, and coming home with carefully and painstakingly selected purchases.  I like to get in, make a beeline for what I want, haul ass to the cash register (bonus points if I walk extra fast to beat someone into the line) and get outta dodge.  And nothing gets my blood boiling faster than if a store doesn't have something I want, or worse, they do carry it but are out of stock.  ANGER. 

This is why online shopping is the single greatest thing ever.  You can peruse from the privacy of your own home, where your path is not blocked by people who are too lazy to support their own body weight so they lean on their cart and sloooooowly amble through the aisles.  If something is out of stock, it's listed right there on the website and you know not to buy it, instead of driving all the way to Polo Park only to make it out of the parking lot, through the mall, into the store and to the devastating sight of an empty shelf, only to be cheerfully told that the store on the other side of the city has one in.  You click on a few things, enter your credit card info and it's sent right to your doorstep.  Heaven.

 

WIN.

So here are some of the things that have been delivered to me and some that are in transit!


Guestbook, Schmestbook

I'm not sure why I abhor the traditional wedding accessories so much.  Maybe it's because I am naturally rebellious, maybe it's because I hate the idea of being the same as every other bride out there, maybe I just want to be different for the sake of being different. I dunno.  But when I thought about a guestbook, I just thought, for what?  Yes, absolutely it's nice to have the names and well wishes of all the people you invited to your special day.  But in an ugly white book with lace and ribbons on it that you're never going to look at again ever in your life?  No.  Enter the magic of online shopping.  All you have to do is Google "guest book alternatives" and voila!  You have access to every creative idea that every creative bride has ever come up with.  So I ordered this:

 

Awe!!!

It's a shadow box that has our initials and wedding date personalized on it, and inside are paper hearts that guests and sign and put their well wishes on.  Then when the wedding is over, there is this insert that you can arrange the hearts on into one big heart, and display it in your home!  Comme ca:

 

Super sweet.

The only problem was, these paper hearts are literally the size of a quarter.  There isn't enough space to write a first name on one, let alone anything else.  So luckily I enlisted the talents of a very awesome lady with a Cricut to cut me out some decent sized paper hearts.  Yay!

 

So cute, but WAY too small.

Bridesmaid Swag

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  Being a bridesmaid is the worst.  It's a thankless, expensive, tiring pursuit of nonstop work and even if you are lucky enough to be in the wedding party of a bride who's not batshit crazy, you still want to tear your hair out at the end of it all.  So at the very least, you should walk away with some decent presents.  I bought these bags from The Wedding Shoppe to hold the gifts:

 

These totes are totes awesome.

 

And these robes from Wedding Prep Gals to wear the morning of the wedding:

 

Anything with rhinestones and I'm in.

And not to leave my buddy Grambo out, but he doesn't have any use for a white tote bag or a satin, bedazzled robe (and least I don't think he does).  So I got him this ultra masculine initialed man's toiletry bag:

 

Super manly.

And then I'm going to fill the totes with all kinds of cool gifts!  And probably just fill Graeme's with a bunch of liquor bottles, because that's kinda how we roll.


Sparkle Sparkle

My "something new" is coming from my grandmother (GOB....I guess?) and she graciously offered to buy me my earrings for the big day.  This one was a no-brainer.  To the Swarovski website I went!  Gah....my love for Swarovski knows no bounds.  And when I saw these Talesia drop earrings, I was smitten.  

 

Even the packaging is lovely!  Sigh...

 

 

 

 

Squeeeee!

 

I love sparkly things!


Pillow Schmillow

Again, the idea of the normal white pillow being carried by the ring bearer didn't appeal to me.  I honestly cannot put my finger on why.  It's not that I don't like the pillows.  I like them okay.  I just want to be different.  It's weird!  Anyway, I found this ring box for Matthew to carry that I LOVE, from Flowers and Favors.  It's sleek, it's personalized with our names and wedding date and has a cute little Mr. and Mrs. division in there.  It didn't come without its challenges, because of all the sites I found this on none of them shipped to Canada and I was getting ready to send FOB down to Pembina to pick this up.  But then I got reckless and paid $33 for shipping on the last site I found because some tasks just need to get DONE already.  Like Eric told me, it's a good thing I'm cute.  ;)

 

 

 

Adorbs.

 

That's all for now!  But there is more coming in the mail so stay tuned!  ;)

And just because I'm feeling SO EXCITED because I just came from a dress fitting, here's a peek at the blingy hairpiece I got for my wedding ensemble:

 

Wheeeeeeee!

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

Shower Power

We're rounding the final corner toward the wedding and up and coming is Big Event No. 3 - the Bridal Shower.  And of course, this installation of Inspired Bride wouldn't be complete without a not-so shocking reveal from yours truly...

...I don't like bridal showers.  Or baby showers.  In fact, I kind of avoid them at all costs unless absolutely necessary that I attend.

(And in other news, water is wet and the sky is blue.)

So when it came time that my MOB and MOH and bridesmaids started talking to me about a shower, the idea was a little scary.  My first thought was, "Who the hell would want to come to a bridal shower for me, those things suck."  And then the idea of ME being the one sitting up on the lily pad being worshipped with exorbitant amounts of presents and wearing a hat made of bows?  Forget it.

 

Never.

 

 

I guess the reason why I don't enjoy myself at bridal showers and the reason I struggle with my own, is that the typical bridal shower is SO not me.  I'm not a girly girl, I don't ooh and aah over things, I don't enjoy crustless sandwiches, small talk, being in a room full of people I don't know, tooty-fruity punch with .05% alcohol, laughing at the guest of honor's abject humiliation, or spending a Sunday afternoon in a hot church basement smelling diapers that have pretend shit in them and trying to guess what kind of pretend shit it is.  But like so many other things involved with weddings, you're expected to do what is typically done and not deviate from the norm, unless you want people staring at you like you've just suggested you want to go do naked cartwheels in the church parking lot. 

 

At first I just thought I was going to skip it.  There's no way I can pretend for an entire afternoon that I'm enjoying myself in a room that looks like it has been decorated by a monster that vomits pink streamers.  And the eye-rolling, long sighs, constant checking of the iPhone and too much wine consumption?  1000x worse for you to do when it's your OWN shower, methinks.  However, I was filled with a little bit of hesitation because I had an overwhelming feeling that I did want to do something - all my best lady friends in one room at once?  YES.  With cupcakes?  RIGHT ON.  So I started talking to my bridal team and we came up with a way for me to still have the full bride experience of a shower while cutting out all the lameness.

 

 

Hahaha!  I just can't.



 

So number one priority:  Booze.  This is a must.  Re. Quired.  Sorry if this makes me look like a raging alcoholic, but wine makes most things better.  I can't deal with a stuffy, hoity-toity afternoon event where we are served mesclun greens and puttanesca if there isn't at least a mimosa within reach.  And for myself, if someone wants to stick me in a room with 30 people I don't know, there better be some means to liquor me up.  So it's only fair I extend the same courtesy to others.

 

Second, no lame games.  No bridal shower bingo, no "take the clothespin when someone says wedding", no mad libs, nothing of that nature.  It's bad enough being invited to a bridal shower, without being forced to participate in some ridiculous exercise like "let's see how many of these incredibly common items are in your purse."  I'm intensely competitive, and any of my friends will admit I'm not any fun to play games with because of how seriously I take it.  I once schooled a group of 12 year olds at Harry Potter Scene-It.  At Christmas.  It was their game they just got for Christmas.  I take winning very seriously.  And even I can't get into these pointless games that are played at showers.

 

 

 

Let's not.

 

 

Next...music!  To me, silence can get extremely awkward.  It's usually during long drawn out silences that I will break the tension by saying something inappropriate because I just can't take it anymore.  And the hush that falls over the crowd at a shower when the bride is opening her painstakingly wrapped shoal grey bed linens?  Probably right before I spill my wine, break the glass, slurringly giggle "whoooops" and get the death stare from the trio of women in polka dotted dresses who finished their mad libs 15 minutes ago.  So I am all for having some sweet Top 40 tunes at the shower.  If I'm gonna eat a crustless sandwich, at least I can do it while shimmying to "Blurred Lines".  It's a party!  We need some music!

 

And last, you can't beat MOB's cupcakes and you KNOW they're going to make an appearance.  So now, this is sounding awesome to me.

 

 

Am I right?

 

 

I have to say in all seriousness though, that the outpouring of love and congratulations that has come in since we got engaged has been absolutely wonderful.  And it has been awe-inspiring to see my family and bridal party come together for me and put together these experiences for me that have made this process even more amazing.  Just look at these insanely beautiful shower invitiations:

 

 

GAHHHHH

 

 

This process has made me so incredibly grateful and happy - it's one thing to feel loved by the people closest to you.  It's on a completely different level to feel loved for exactly who you are and to have it celebrated and to feel totally supported.  Not once did any of my bridal team tell me that I needed to change my views and alter my plans.  I never once have felt pressure to conform to societal bridal norms.  You don't want to do a bouquet toss?  Cool.  You want to have beer at your bridal shower?  Done.  You want your bachelorette in Vegas?  Let's go.  You want a guy in your bridal party?  He's game.  You want to put shoes on your bridal registry?  Power to you!  How COOL is that?  I love everyone!  I'm so excited for what's to come in the next two months.  And I can't wait to knock back a few with all the wonderful awesome women in my life at my shower, which I know is going to be totally rad.  ;)

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!

 

 

~M

Wheeee!

Quick post today, but I just wanted to share a shoe update! 

I finished one of my shoes last night, and I am so happy with how it turned out.  I have been stressing about the whole shoe thing, because I really, really wanted them to be perfect.  I'm definitely happy about my shoe choice, but I was nervous about how they were going to look with the heel strassed.  

 

Wine?  Check.  Let's get down to biz.

I love strassing at my dining room table, because the lights overhead are halogen bulbs and they really bring out the sparkle in the Swarovskis.  It's like being immersed in glittery heaven.  Once I started, I got on a roll pretty quick and finished the heel in about three hours.  I was in the zone, seeing only this -

 

Yay!

 

 

And this - 

 

Necessity.

 

 

And of course this -

 

Zero personal space.

So without further adieu, here is a little video of the finished product!  The sparkle factor is amazing, I can't wait to finish the other one!

 

And then, it will be on to little Aislin's shoes!  Strassed like Auntie's, to match.  :)

 

Gah!!! So tiny and cute...

 

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

 

~M



#postagefail

YA OKAY.  So I've been MIA on the blog the last little while.  It's tax season....back off!  Wait!  Don't go.  Please keep reading.....

The wedding is less than three months away, and while it's not too bad yet, I can feel the stress creeping up and ready to strike.  We're in the "three months before" category of our wedding checklist now and all of a sudden the number of items on the to-do list triples.  And inevitably, as soon as you feel like you've checked something off the list as done, it just reappears for you to "confirm" it again in another month or creates three more things you have to do.  Wedding planning is fun, don't get me wrong, but it can feel never ending at times!

I do have wonderful news in that we sent our wedding invitations out this past weekend.  Our stationer Ashley did such a wonderful, beautiful job, and I couldn't be happier with how they turned out.  Here's a peek!

Front...

Inside...

 

 

The whole beautiful set!

When I started addressing the invitations, I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of anxiety because first, handwriting on beautiful paper is nerve wracking because you want it to look perfect and second, I was deathly afraid we would miss someone on the list.  Thankfully my wonderful fiance put together a foolproof spreadsheet with all the addresses and guests and it was easy to double and triple check the list.  (Spreadsheet whiz....reason #6548 that I adore Eric!)

What I didn't anticipate was all the bloody problems we would have with postage!  (Seriously, who mails anything anymore.  Whatever.)  First of all, if you want to put a stamp on something and you go to a post office to buy a stamp, these are your choices:

1.  Gophers.

2.  The Queen of England.

3.  Winnipeg Jets logo.

Wow, really?  So I have to slap a rodent on our beautiful wedding invitations, fine, whatever, not a big deal.

Then Eric smartly realizes that the invitations, with their heavy cardstock, probably aren't going to be the same price as a normal letter being mailed due to their weight.  So after I've lovingly placed a gopher stamp on all the wedding invitiations, I take them to the post office and the girl working looks at me as if I'm just the dumbest human being on the planet and is like, "ya, they don't have near enough postage on them".  Wonderful.  So I go to buy 100 more gopher stamps (potentially bringing the total number of gopher stamps purchased to 200 more than I ever wanted to buy) and they are out of gophers.  What?  So now I WANT the gopher stamps and I can't even get them?!  This is what I've been reduced to?  At this point I don't even care anymore so ultimately, the invitations get sent out with the Queen of England mean-mugging three gophers on the upper right hand corner of the envelope.

So they all finally get mailed, and I start receiving text messages from our guests letting me know how nice they think the invitations are, and I start breathing a sigh of relief that my postage woes are over and everything has ended up where it should have.

 

Success.

Then Canada Post decides it's not quite through with me yet, and rears its ugly head again in the form of my reply cards.  Yes, reply cards.  You'd think with my views on mail as an old, antiquated form of exchanging information in this digital age, that we would have just went with email replies.  If not for one thing - I love getting mail.  And when the time came to make the decision to do mail replies, I just imagined myself sprinting to the mailbox like:

 

WE'VE GOT MAAAAAAAIL!!!!

So we include a return envelope stamped with a gopher with every invitation, and we find out that March 31, the price of stamps is going up from 63 to 85 cents.  WTF.  I don't know what bride checks to see if the price of stamps is going up anytime soon before she mails her invitations, but I sure as hell didn't.  So according to the dragon nice lady I spoke to at Canada Post, because our reply cards don't have a return address on them, if they don't have enough postage they won't be delivered and will be destroyed.  Destroyed!  Not even just, put into a pile somewhere at some mail processing center where I have a hope of actually recovering them.  Just straight up put in the shredder.  They open the envelopes, and if they don't have money in them, into the fire they go.  Greeeeeat.

So if you have received our invitation and you don't drop your reply card in the mail before Monday, I'm sorry to have to make you spend the extra 22 cents to send it.  I hate inconveniencing people so if you want to send us the news by Facebook, email or in person that's okay too! 

Oh and Canada Post?

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!



~M

Change of A Dress

....I have a confession to make.

I wasn't really going to blog about this at all, because really who would know?  But in the spirit of being open about my bridal perspective on this grand adventure, here it goes.

I changed my dress. 

*collective gasp*

I know, I KNOW.  After I posted on the blog about how much I loved the one I chose, and then I posted AGAIN about how I didn't have any dress regret, I go and do this?  But before you start questioning my sanity, allow me to explain.

 

"This one?  Or this one?  Or thisoneorthisoneorthisoneorthisone...."

The original dress I chose was be-ea-au-tiful.  I loved it, I really did.  It had everything I wanted in a dress (which I would love to describe to you in excrutiating detail but I really want the whole thing to be a big surprise for my future husband!) and I was absolutely ready to commit.  In my mind, I already had committed.  I was in a common-law relationship with that dress, in the eyes of the wedding gods we were already bound, and buying it was simply a formality.

So when I returned to the store in early September to officially order and buy the dress, I put it back on to indulge in one last round of swishing and swaying before my dress search experience was over for good.  At first I was giddy as a schoolgirl, and then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and there was one brief fleeting moment where I wondered aloud if the dress was perfectly flattering in all the right places.  After I said it out loud, and the bridal consultants and my MOB started looking at me critically and trying to assure me it was a good pick, my doubt grew a little.  Before I could try to even start discerning if I really was shying away from committing or if I just had a case of cold feet, the consultant said those taboo words, the words you NEVER say to a bride once she's picked a dress.  "Well we have a dress that just came in, from the designer's new line, if you'd like to see it."

 

"UM YEAH I WANNA SEE IT"

 

 

So then I broke the cardinal rule of wedding dress shopping, and tried on a dress after I had already made my choice.  And damn.  Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.  New Dress blew Old Dress out of the water.  New Dress made Old Dress look like a stinking pile of garbage.  New Dress hugged me in all the right places.  Old Dress felt like wearing a potato sack.  Okay I might be exaggerating.  But it certainly wasn't that I didn't love Old Dress, it's just that I love New Dress more!  If possible, it was even more perfect and more gorgeous than the old one.  And then there was the whole "you're the first bride to ever try the dress on, I just took it out of the box yesterday, you'd be the first bride in Winnipeg to order this dress as we have exclusive rights to the line" thing that got me. 

 

 

 

"It's not you...it's me...."

 

 

So after trying on the new dress, it was pretty much a no-brainer.  I had to have it.  And I am happy to say that really, truly, honestly this time I've said Yes To The Dress and I'm 100% over the moon with my choice.  The dress is ordered, bought and paid for and just came in this past weekend, and it is every bit as gorgeous as I imagined!  I tried it on with the shoes and a lovely cathedral length veil and it was the perfect look.  So happy!!!

 

 

 

For real this time.

 

 

And that's that!

 

Eric and I met with our stationer a couple weeks ago and the invitations are picked and being finalized as I blog.  I will say, my fiance has great taste.  Anytime he gives his opinion on anything wedding related I always glow a little because he chooses so well!  And that's not even bride-speak for "he consistently chooses what I want him to choose", he really does give great input which is awesome.  :)

 

So to end this post here's a little sneak peek at what's cookin' over at Sweetness Stationery ....

 

 

 

AHHHHH I'M SO EXCITED!!!

 

 

Happy Wedding Wednesday!!!

 

 

 

~M