Easy breezy?

We're a little bit less than ten months away from our wedding, and people have started asking the Big Question: "Are you totally stressed out yet?"

Until this week, my honest answer has been, not even a little bit! I've been really lucky so far - our venue was available on the date I wanted, the vendors I've booked have been incredibly lovely to work with, our financiers (read: Mumsy and Daddy) have been astonishingly generous and hands-off, our families have been entirely drama-free and my groom has answered all of my wedding related inquiries with "whatever you want is fine with me, babe." Until this week, I was all, so what is this wedding stress that people speak of? Man, I've even drawn up a schedule of errands, projects and dress fittings for the next ten months just to avoid the possibility of finding myself knee-deep in DIY and losing my mind the week of the wedding! I've got this thing down!

Until this week, that is. I had two things to take care of this week: hotel room blocks and a makeup artist. Pssh, simple! Monday morning, I contacted the three local hotels we'd selected to set up room blocks, figuring the whole thing would be done by the end of the day. Uh, not so much. The first hotel - our fancy-pants, high-end hotel where I was planning on spending the night before the wedding with my bridesmaids, then my wedding night with Mr. M - was BOOKED. Fully booked! Ten months in advance! No room at the inn! There would be no sneaking out with the girls for French pastries at the great little bakery nearby on my wedding morning, no last-minute-jitters-calming cocktails at my favorite bar in the neighborhood... what a bummer! Well, at least the other two hotels would come through.... right?

No dice. I can't get an answer from the second hotel for love or money, and the third hotel apparently doesn't do room blocks. Oy. Time for Plans B, C and D.

My search for a makeup artist didn't fare much better - did you guys know that most makeup artists have minimums for Saturday bookings? And extra fees for turning up at the butt-crack of dawn in my hotel in God-knows-which-borough-at-this-point? Yikes. I must have sent thirty inquiries this week, only to get the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag from most of them.

 

Only the bride needs makeup? I don't think so!

                 (.gif from wakejake on gifsoup.com)

But finally I found someone who has a beautiful portfolio, great reviews and was willing to work with just me... yay! So I immediately and eagerly booked a trial with her for next month, and unless it's really truly atrocious (and from what I've seen of her work, there's no way it will be) I am totally booking her on the spot. And then giving her a hug and a really big tip.

So while this is definitely nothing like the kind of OMG-level wedding stress that everyone talks about... this week was my first little taste of it. And if this is as bad as it gets... well, then I'm pretty lucky. (Fingers crossed!)

All Weddings, All the Time

Mr. M strolled into the living room today and found me sitting at the computer with five browser windows open at the same time - my wedding planning spreadsheet, the boards at Weddingbee, a wedding blog, my Pinterest page and the embossing tools selection at Paper Source. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if I wasn't also printing out the contract to sign and send to our florist, writing out a check to the trolley company and downloading the Brides magazine app to our iPad... all while watching Say Yes to the Dress.

 

He was nice about it, of course, letting me get away with just a bit of gentle teasing... but I really couldn't help but wonder whether my Type-A tendency towards over-planning was getting the best of me.  I've really got a one track mind these days! I found myself at Grand Central last week, browsing the magazine selection at a huge newsstand before a long train ride and looking for a new bridal magazine to keep me entertained. Much to my horror, I realized that I had already read them all.

Every. Single. One. 

From Bridal Guide to Martha Stewart Weddings to the Knot, and even dipping into the slightly more obscure Manhattan Bride and Destination Weddings, I had completely exhausted the available supply of wedding magazines. Um. Oh, man. I'm embarrassed for myself. 

We're about ten months out from our wedding day now, and I think it's time for me to take a little tiny bit of a step backwards, stop dropping wads of cash on stacks of glossy ads and start reading the New York Times... at least more often than I read Ruffled. Otherwise, I think I'm in danger of becoming The Girl Who Only Talks About Her Wedding. And noooobody wants to be that girl! 

So for now, I'm gonna call it a night, get into bed and read an actual book. One that has no lace, no fine china ads and absolutely no etiquette tips. Oh, Lyndon B. Johnson biography... you are exactly what I need right now!

I'm sensing a theme...

While it was fairly easy to pick wedding colors - I settled on navy and fuschia after a brief flirtation with blush and gold - it was considerably harder to decide on a theme. I know you don't really need one and plenty of people have beautiful weddings completely devoid of an articulable theme, but I'm a lady who needs some direction. Otherwise, I'll just be adrift in a sea of Pinterest pins, mixing rustic favors with classically romantic escort cards and whimsical table numbers. Oh, the horror that would be!

When Bridesmaid J and I went to my first consultation with a potential florist, she asked about our colors and our theme.

 "We're going to do navy and fuschia for the colors, and the theme is... uh... is, uhhh...." Quick, lady! You can't let the florist think you don't have a theme! She's a wedding professional... don't let her think you're some sort of bridal slacker! Come up with something! "Um... gardens? Cause it's in a botanical garden?" Yes! Quick thinking, girl. Crisis averted.

"Gardens! That's a great idea," said the florist, ever gracious. She whipped out a catalog of centerpiece stands and, before I knew it, came up with some brilliant ideas for an English garden themed celebration. My panicked last minute gotta-have-a-theme theme? Not so bad after all!

Armed with a new sense of direction, I started thinking about the details. Although we're still ten months out from the wedding, I want to get a head start on some of our DIY projects so that I don't wind up spending next spring freaking out, up to my elbows in felt and glue and misery. Escort cards seemed like a good place to start. I loved the idea of paper flower escort cards - and frankly, I've been dying for an excuse to get one of those little paper flower kits from Paper Source - so I picked up the Mini Magnolia kit. I wanted to see whether assembling 180 of those suckers was going to be a fun, crafty thing to do... or a paper-based system of torture that would drive me slowly over the edge. 

Turns out it's the former... at least so far. The flowers come together pretty fast and are really, really cute! But now the problem I'm running into is how to turn these cute flowers into functioning escort cards. At first, I thought I could just print the names and table numbers on the leaves:

Nice, but not so functional. The flower petals obscure the names and the table numbers. No dice!

My second try fared a bit better, but still not really perfect:

It's a little bit easier to read the pertinent information, but the bloom really covers up a little too much. I think part of the problem could be solved by gluing down the flower a bit closer to the edge of the paper... but honestly, I feel like there must be a more attractive solution out there. Any ideas?

Shutterbug!

With our DJ plans solidified, next up on the decks was our search for a great photographer. Finding a great photographer was really important to me; besides being a little bit vain, I'm also a total photography enthusiast. While I'm no great artiste myself, I've definitely learned enough about good (and bad) photography through my years of mucking about with cameras that I knew exactly what I wanted - someone with a photojournalist style who could also deliver great portraits, someone who was great with composition and color, was excited about using different film formats and above all, someone who could make simply beautiful pictures.

I dove headfirst into researching local photographers. Living in New York, we're lucky enough to be surrounded by talented people. I briefly considered asking a friend of mine, who is a professional wedding photographer, to shoot our wedding, but decided that I'd rather have her attend as a guest and not a vendor. So onwards and upwards, through a ton of websites and portfolios and recommendations. Many of the photographers whose work I loved were well out of our price range, and a lot of the folks who were more affordable just didn't have work that really moved me. I was worried that we would have to choose between splurging and settling - until I came across Daniel Krieger.

Daniel's portfolio is incredible, and while his prices aren't exactly bargain basement, he could easily get away with charging twice what he does. He is an immensely talented photographer with a really amazing range. Seriously, how many photographers are as good at capturing intimate moments....

 

... as they are at capturing spontaneous ones? 

Daniel's pictures are so perfectly composed, they don't scream "wedding picture!" so much as "gorgeous piece of art that I would totally hang on my wall and love to death."

And his talent for taking truly gorgeous portraits of people? Incredible. You know how sometimes people are just really talented at getting what's really beautiful about a person into a picture? Daniel's totally got that down. 

 

His work makes stunning use of the interplay between light and dark....

 

... and he even has a Hasselblad! Oh man, I love me some medium format. (And look at the way that he turns what could be a regular old posed photograph into something really beautiful and cool.) 

I am so cuckoo-bananas excited to be working with Daniel Krieger as our wedding photographer. Our engagement shoot is coming up in a couple of months, and I totally can't wait. In the meantime, I'm feeding my inner photo junkie by checking his blog at danielkrieger.com quite frequently - and you should too, as these pictures are really just the tip of the awesomeness iceberg. 

All photographs are copyright Daniel Krieger, posted via danielkrieger.com.

Hey, Mister DJ!

After we got our venue settled, it was time to move on to selecting the vendors: a DJ, a photographer and a florist. One of my uncles is a professional DJ, and he did the music for my brother's wedding. He was fantastic! Everyone was on the dance floor all night, the announcements were cool and not super cheesy and he patiently accepted all of my requests for more Notorious B.I.G. - what more could you ask for?! But I was worried that if he spent his time working at our wedding, he wouldn't really get to enjoy it - though he definitely seemed to enjoy my brother's - so I started looking around for other options.

In all of my wedding review searches, one name kept popping up: DJ Gaza. Folks said that not only was he lovely to work with and reasonably priced, he was also seriously amazing at his job. They said, even guests who don't usually dance were grooving on the dance floor all night! So I emailed DJ Gaza and set up an appointment for the next week.

The day of our meeting, Bridesmaid N texted me and said, "Don't sign a contract with a DJ until you meet my friend Gary! He's the best!" That's funny, I thought - DJ Gaza's name is Gary! I wonder if it's the same guy?

Turns out it was! Gary and N know each other through a mutual friend, and between N's recommendation, DJ Gaza's sample playlists and my conversations with Gary, who really couldn't be more lovely, we booked him on the spot. Now I totally can't wait for to hear him spin at our wedding - we just know that he will make the party amazing.

One big vendor down, and two to go!