Wedding Planning Extravaganza

Aside from a year in my twenties when I swore I'd never get married, I'd been thinking about my wedding day for most of my life.  When I met Eric, I immediately knew he was "The One" for me.  Once we got engaged, and even before he popped the question, we'd envisioned our wedding day as one that was personal.   So, it's no surprise that through the year of planning, we both had some ideas that we wanted to incorportate into our day.  

Eric defintely had a hand in much of the wedding planning process, but I'm much more detail oriented and with some things he was happy to have me "take the reins" a bit and leave him out of some of the small detail decisions.  When I arrived back in NY on June 1, it was full speed ahead.  We had 40 days to get all the last minute things done that we couldnt do that far ahead of time (place cards, menus, programs, etc).  Those of you who know me, know that I'm not totally a "do it yourselfer" but I have gotten more crafty recently and wanted to add some "DIY" elements to the wedding day.    Thankfully my absolutely amazing mother was with me every step of this process.  I cannot thank you enough mom!!!  Especially in the last month, through my indecivness to my outlandish requests to the time it took to make each and every single element of the wedding something that we'd be proud of, my mom was there, never complaining, or telling me I was foolish, just supporting my every wish and desire.    This truly made the wedding planning such a memorable time in my life. 

   I wish I had taken more photos of all of our DIY elements.   First, Eric and I decided we wanted to give out the Italian/Jordan Almonds at the wedding.  I had looked on line for something that would suit the ocassion but ended up finding little white boxes with matching white ribbon at Michael's.   Our colors were white and navy so we jazzed up the all white with double face satin navy ribbon.  The ribbon at Michael's was super expensive so I searched online and ended up finding ribbon sold in increments of 50 yards online for $6/50 yards.  It was a steal!   Inside the boxes, we put a message for each guest with 5 Jordan almonds.

Message: 

 Five sugared almonds for each guest to eat

To remind us that life is both bitter and sweet

Five wishes for the new husband and wife

Health, wealth, happiness, children and a long life

These almonds are an Italian tradition so we wanted to incorporate them into our wedding day.  

The boxes also doubled as escort cards.  We had names and table number attached to each box. 



Starting the project



We're getting there!





Assembly line work





Thankfully Kathy came over to help us!  She's very detail oriented and was up to the challenge of tying the bows. 



And Madge was there to help too!  Thank you so much ladies!!!





Some of the finished products!





The Finished Product!!!



I really wish I had taken more photos of this process.  We also put together welcome boxes for each guest.  We ordered gable boxes online and put some goodies including "hand made" personalized water bottles.  We orginally were going to order them online but after hours of figuring out exactly what we wanted, we went to order and the total was over $1,000.00!!!   That quickly scrapped that plan!  So, we found some "do it yourself" adhesive water bottle labels at Michael's...seemed easy enough.  We'd get them printed at Office Depot, peel off the original water bottle labels and stick on the new ones.  Well, the printing took forever, we couldn't get the color right and many of the labels got ruined in the printing process.  Then, we spent an evening putting the labels on the bottles.  Well, they turned out terribly!  They looked awful!  We thought we could get away with it, but after a few days, we realized we needed to change it.  So, we did it all again, this time, cutting the labels individually then using double sided tape to put attach them to the bottles.  It was extremely time consuming but the bottles looked great!  Wish I had a photo!   Inside the boxes, we had little snacks for everyone, of course the water bottles, mints some information about the area and the wedding day, the shuttle, etc.  Luckily my wonderful mother in law and sister helped put all the boxes together, and transported them all down to the basement where they stayed cool until the day of the wedding. 

The finished gable boxes that went to each guest who stayed over night plus the vendors...in total we made 100 boxes!  I ordered these labels online as well and loved how they turned out!

Photos of family weddings

We went back and forth so many times with "guest book" ideas...we wanted to do little notecards, then a quilt, then a polaroid camera and the list went on and on.  Finally, a month before the wedding, Catererer/Miracle Man, Gary told me it was time to simplify!  Ther was much room for error with any of the ideas, especially the quilt which we were leaning towards.  I had envsioned the quilt squares still sitting in a pile for our 1 year anniversary!  Thank you, Gary for your expertice in every way... I couldn't agree more! 

Our guest sign in book (blurb.com).  We had a photo session done here in Doha before I came home so we used the photos from that. 

We had little "love" quotes above each photo

Each table had a little blurb about places Eric and I had visited together.  Poughkeepsie, NY was of course #1 because that is where we met and fell in love.   The map backdrop was because of my love of maps and our mutual love for worldly travel.



I designed the menu myself




and the program

For us, it was one of the most special times/years of our lives together.  Planning the wedding from Paris and then Doha was made simple because of our parent's support and love.  While we thought we'd be a bit sad that the planning process was over, we're not.   We feel so fortunate each day that we had the opportunity to plan such an unforgettable affair and now we're on to new adventures together with our families and friends on this journey we call life.