1 Day

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here I am.

I will be married tomorrow forever after. I am not nervous, but the butterflies in my tummy are Amazonian.

I feel so many, many things.
I am happy to tears constantly; I am so excited; and I am so sure of Shawn and Me.

I just know that Shawn is the right man for me; everyday I am reminded when we discuss everything from having kids to what to eat for dinner. It helps that we agree on most things, but it is nice that even if we don't agree we always work through everything in a respectful and loving way.
We have worked so hard for so long at this wedding that we are strangely ready to be over it! Don't get us wrong; we are looking forward to the wedding more than anything we have anticipated thus far in our lives, but we're ready for the marriage. We want life to be quiet again so we can snuggle down like bunnies with our animals and watch Adult Swim at night until we fall asleep.
Honestly, we're just ready to take our life back from wedding planning! Before wedding planning, being bunnies daily was our Common law Status. After we're married things will go back to that status but we'll be able to do things we want to do like fix up our (soon-to-be found)New House together and get scars from it. We want to have babies and raise them into big people. We want to walk together, holding hands forever. We'll be living just like it was, but now it's in 3-D! WE are not changing, the status of the RELATIONSHIP will be.
We are making a promise to be together forever no matter what. Just as people change, feelings change; you cannot simply marry for emotional reasons alone. It is not enough. Marriages go through periods of YEARS where things might be just "not the same as before" but the couples who stay together during those rough spots usually fall in love with their spouses all over again.
My only advice to married people: love the other person as you want to be loved, and stay together. For better or worse.
You swore!

So on this day, my last day as a single lady, to all my single ladies: Just don't rush your life to get to any point, whether it be married or any other status. Waiting forever for Mr. Right is better than having a beautiful short-lived wedding with Mr. RightNow.
And always remember that everything happens for a reason! Everything.

I love you all, and all your words of support and kindness have really changed my life. I wish I could hug you all in person and share what you each have personally given me. You're beautiful!

Verbal RSVP's - Painful!

24 Days!!!

Shawn and I made and sent around 115 invites total. Of those, around 80 were mailed with stamps but all 115 included RSVP cards with pre-stamped envelopes with which to mail them back. Currently I believe we have around 80 RSVP's total. Shawn's friends and some of our family members are not RSVP'ing! We spent SO much on stamps for all those RSVP envelopes because we need a headcount for food! I thought it'd be no problem having the cards returned by including a pre-stamped envelope, no matter what the answer is.
Verbal RSVP's are only okay for immediate family like our parents because they only got keepsake invitations and I don't expect those RSVP's back.
It is much more thoughtful not to verbally RSVP to someone who is less than a month away from getting married and tying up the ends of the wedding and purchasing a home. I can't keep track of 20 verbal RSVP's; my mom needs those RSVP cards!

Colored Wedding Dress Crinolines + Part 1: DIY Colored Crinoline

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My favorite thing to see on wedding blogs (besides chuppahs!) is a bride with a colored crinoline. Some brides are women who wanted a colored dress but for whatever reason ended up with a white one. The colored crinoline is a way to wear a pop of the color in a fun way.
I originally wanted a yellow / green dress. Yellow is just my color!

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We all know I ended up with a (most beautiful) ivory dress so I immediately wanted to adopt this detail into my own style for the Day. Problem is... finding these is no easy task!
When searching you are faced with 3 options: Have a short dress, pay the price or buy a white one to dye! Having a short dress is by far the easiest option. There's no shortage of pettiskirts and square dancing petticoats the perfect length! Here's one superb website I found. 

Swank Underpinnings

Good old etsy has a few shops that cater to the colored-crinoline bride. The prices aren't too* bad but $0 is my budget, sooo...! One excellent shop is Swank Underpinnings. They range between $35 to $225 (custom orders!). They make them in all lengths, which is really not easy to find. Some of her custom stuff--swoon!
Loca Loves Pirate has some cutie pastel babies, too. They're even full length!

So what's a budget-spent bride to do?! It involved massive preparation research, scissors, and blind faith. A couple weekends ago when I was making our invitations, I asked my mom to enlist in helping me cut my crinoline out of my dress. With scissors. She surprisingly did not look at me like I was too crazy, but we both felt aprehensive about the whole thing. If I had thought about it much more, I wouldn't have done it.

Steps

1. Put on your dress.
2. Have a helper pull up the top layer(s) so that you can only see the crinoline layer.
3. Make a guide snip at waist-height where you'll be cutting accross the crinoline.
4. Take off the dress.
5. Lay out the dress on the bed and pull all the layers up over the top of the dress, making sure the only layer exposed is the crinoline layer.
6. Just like with cutoff shorts, find your guide snip. Now read: DO NOT CUT THROUGH BOTH LAYERS. ONE LAYER AT A TIME ONLY.
7. Just like with cut off shorts, cut in a straight line across the front.
8. Flip the dress over. You'll see why you don't cut through both layers.
9. The back of a wedding dress is almost always where it zips, laces, yada yadas... and there will be a panel back there you don't want to cut that separates the dress closure from your bare skin. So taking care to cut AROUND that part, Cut straight across the back, around the panel and back straight across to finish.
10. Pull out your crinoline, hang your dress back up and committ yourself. Not to your fiance(e)... To an asylum. You're officially NUTS for doing this DIY.

The second part of the DIY is dying and the third is adding an elastic waistband so you can wear it under your dress. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3!
In the meantime, there is a whole SECTION of Offbeat Bride that features just weddings with colored-crinoline brides. Enjoy!

Foreground-Set Fore-/Hind-sight Advice

I'm literally losing my mind. I'd say it's funny or lol but I'm having a seriously hard time right now at the last stages of planning the wedding. It's like I'm having cold feet about everything but Shawn_bunnay. I think this was brought about when I listed all our DIY projects and counted them yesterday. It made me feel... it gave me the sensation of sinking. What's more sad: most of the projects are done and I still feel like this.
Everyday I take my role in the blogging community very seriously. I'm not a professional... yet(Omaha brides are my favorite!), but I think it all starts with conducting yourself in a professional way with everything you do. To me this means returning the favor of compliments and growing the collection of blogs that I read into a well-rounded-topics-including-random community. So everyday on great blogs like Style Me Pretty, Hello Gorgeous, lovely little details and Grey Likes Weddings, I see wedding after wedding of gorgeous gowns, high-end venues and mind-blowing photography. This leads me to naturally compare our wedding to those weddings, and the problem is right there. Each wedding is very different, just like the people they are for. You cannot compare people so why would you compare weddings, the epitome of a personal celebration, to anyone else's?! I'm crazy for even going there, I now know that!
I just started thinking about how we planned: in a budget. We didn't plan by what we liked. I didn't want a $10,000+, artistically documented, couture gown, and Pantone-coordinated wedding planned by a design firm (That combination sounds like something I'd like to see, though!)
I wanted a $0, handmade, outside-y, heartfelt and candidly captured wedding that would have people driving home in their cars saying, "They really love each other."

And I think we have created that.

SHAWN+HILL JO

Sure our venue is the most affordable in town, but it's a higher-end restaurant; no bad wedding food for us! Plus our guests won't have to go anywhere else once they're there. It's a one-stop-shop celebration, which was #1 for me.
No, my photographer isn't "professional," but she's only such in the sense she currently doesn't have an office. She describes her business as "accidental" because she's really a nurse. The demand for her photography services at weddings is the only reason she's still doing her business. She's currently doing a wedding in Spain!!! Looking at her photos, I see that she thinks in pictures when she's looking at real-life. Who wouldn't want a photographer who can do that?!
Yes, I'm making our cake. I have tasted and tried every single cake I have ever seen and I won't apologize or backtrack when I say "My cakes are rockin'-- visually and taste-wise..." I haven't been beaten so far. Ask Shawn's friends...

35 DIY projects including design aspects of styling (people + spaces+events), graphic design, pastry design, textile design (including embroidery, hand-dying, pattern making, sewing and crocheting) is INSANE but people, this is what handmade wedding in under a year looks like. It is insane. Anyone who DIY's their wedding without a full year is nuts as well. I've been here to know!
Looks like I have some foreground advice set in the hindsight mind, but I hope that this helps anyone not to compare their wedding to anyone else's and simply love it in conjunction to the other weddings you see simply for what it is.

It's a celebration of the start of a marriage.