Preserving the bouquet and cleaning the dress

Drying or preserving your bouquet(s): 
I didn't know what to do with my bouquet, or what I'd eventually do with it, but I did know that I wanted to have it dried in case I thought up some idea later on. So I asked my mom to take my bouquet and my sister's bouquet home to hang up to dry. She took the bouquets apart and hung them with ribbon on hangers in the guest room closet, where they dried over the next month.

 

 

 

They are still at my parent's house, but I'm hoping to put the bouquet back together, spray it with some dried floral preservative spray from Hobby Lobby, (which I'm convinced is just hairspray) and leave it in a vase next to a picture from the wedding. 

Source

Cleaning your dress: The last thing we had to think about was getting my dress cleaned. By the end of the wedding, the bottom of my dress was filthy!! My mom was too scared to take it to the dry-cleaner for a few reasons. For one, her friend from work recently went into her closet to get her wedding gown for her newly engaged daughter to try on. When she opened up the garment bag, the entire dress was yellow! It hadn't been preserved very well and she thinks the chemicals from the Dry Cleaner reacted to the dress over the years. Another friend of mine had some damage done to her dress when she took it in for dry-cleaning! After our dry-cleaner recently ruined a white shirt that I had dropped off to them in April my mom said "No WAY am I taking your dress to the dry-cleaner" and she began researching how to clean it yourself. Unfortunately, I don't have any before and after pictures, but let's just say that my mom did a great job of getting the dirt out of the bottom of the dress by gently hand washing it with mild soap and water!


What are/did you doing/do with your bouquet and dress after the wedding?

Wedding Recap: Our Flowers

Meet our florist, John, from Flowers by Burton. John was one of the cutest, and nicest people to work with throughout our whole wedding planning process.

I put a lot of faith into him and his team with my flowers because unfortunately - I didn't get to see my bouquets at all before they were delivered on my wedding day. This made me very nervous, but that was the way they worked. I only got to see our centerpieces two days before the wedding and that was it.

The bridesmaids bouquets were just how I wanted them to be: Simple, not too big, and a mix of whites and greens. I loved how these looked against the green and black dresses:

Unfortunately, my bridal bouquet was one of two complaints I had with my flowers (I'll share the other complaint in another post) I  had hoped for a similar bouquet to my bridesmaids, but larger and with small hints of purple here and there.  Instead, this is what I received.

Purple and white with small hints of green

This wasn't really a part of my color scheme at all, and was not how I imagined it would look. Throughout the whole flower picking process, I wasn't too picky or resolute with what I wanted. I think as a result...I didn't really convey what I wanted as well as I should have. Obviously, this is a fine bouquet, and this is no way ruined any element of my wedding day. It's just not how I imagined it would be, and that sometimes bums me out.


We had alternating high and low centerpieces for our reception. I went pretty simple with these as well, since the room was already very ornate. My favorite element of the tall centerpieces were the pink ginger flowers.

The low centerpieces were mixes of purples, whites, and greens, much like my bouquet:

All in all, I was happy with all everything looked once it was all put together.

Did you know exactly what you wanted for your flower arrangements, or did you leave a lot of it up to the florist?

Engage-aversary Surprise!

We had a whirlwind, BUSY weekend. Friday we did happy hour with friends, then went to a dueling piano bar in Times Square with our newly engaged friends afterward, which was so cool and so much fun! I had never been to a dueling piano bar before, and I'm so glad we decided to go! On Saturday morning, Chris had an eye appointment early in the morning, so I was able to sleep in a bit while he went to his appointment. When he came home at 10:00, he woke me up, and I was greeted with these beauties!

Chris brought home a dozen red roses for our 2 month anniversary/2 year engage-aversary. I was certainly surprised to see this, (since..well...you know, it's not really a real anniversary, lol).

With my bouquet!

Definitely so pretty and such a sweet surprise!

The rest of the day we spent shopping (trying to use up some of our gift cards from our wedding). Mike and Kerry had a great party for their bridal party that night, and we went to New Jersey on Sunday to finally meet our friends Erin and Derek's little baby, Dash! He is the cutest little thing.

 

So that's all for today...back to some more wedding stuff on Wednesday!

Flowers Booked

Ladies and Gentlemen we have booked a florist! Wahoo! One more thing off the checklist!

I talked to 4 different places for flowers: Pedestals, Celadon and Celery, Flowers by Burton and Flower Barn. All four of these places would do a fabulous job on flowers for our wedding. Pedestals came highly recommended by many friends and through word of mouth. Celadon and Celery operates out of the Flower District in Manhattan and Bess, the owner, came up with an awesome flower proposal with cherry blossom centerpieces, which was an idea I loved. Flower Barn and Flowers by Burton both had positive reviews on various websites and message boards I read. We had a great meeting with John, at Flowers by Burton, who was a very nice man who listened to every concern, idea, thought I had. The truth is...how do you know? It's all fine and good to sit down and discuss flower arrangements and see some pictures, but until you actually see the mock-ups of your particular pieces a month before the wedding...how do you really know what to choose?  In the end, we went with the best price and to be honest...Flowers by Burton beat them all by a long shot.

They have been in the business for 30+ years, and have some very positive reviews written about them on liweddings.com. All I can do now is wait until I see my mock-ups in early May, but I am confident that they will work with me to create the best possible arrangements for us and make any changes I ask of them at that time. I was still uncertain about many flowers and what I wanted when we met with John, but he assured me that we can finalize particular flowers as we get closer to the date.

One of our groomsmen suggested that we use these as our centerpieces. Chris Lovesss Transformers (I know..he's 2 years old right?) I'm a little concerned that Chris might call the florist and venue behind my back and request to have these instead.

Optimus Prime- Transformers

Happy New Year

Happy New Year Everyone! Have a SAFE and fun night tonight. We have booked a florist, and our flights for the honeymoon so lots of exciting posts coming up for early 2011!

Have you made your Top 10 of '10 List yet? Link up here!

My 2010 Slideshow!

Anniversary, Flowers and a Race

Happy October!! I think it's safe to say that Fall has officially arrived. I had both a relaxing and intense weekend. Firstly as you know, our 6 year anniversary was on Friday. I told you we had BIG PLANS, and I meant it. We had decided early on last week that all we wanted to do was stay. in. We have been running around nearly every weekend for the past month. Plus, I'm going to be in PA for the next 2 weekends so I really just wanted to stay in, have a nice dinner, and watch movies with Chris...which is just what we did! I came home, put on some Eva Cassidy, which is some of the most calming music in the world, poured myself a glass of pinot grigio, and made mashed sweet potatoes, risotto, and meatloaf (I had made and froze the meatloaf a few weeks before so that was just a matter of reheating, but still it was homemade!).

I loooove Risotto

We sat down and had a nice meal together. No rushing around, no t.v., no having to get ready for work tomorrow, just us. After dinner I rushed over to Stop and Shop because I had a hankering for pumpkin treats this weekend...I'm in full Fall mode. So I bought everything I needed to make pumpkin chocolate chip muffins and pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I made the cookies while we watched Get Him to the Greek (sorry if you liked it, but that was the worst movie I've ever seen) and went to bed at the decent hour of 12:30!

On Saturday, my parents came to spend the weekend. We headed right out to my flower appointment at Pedestals in Long Island. My parents got a little stuck in traffic coming out to New York and we were juuust going to make our 2:00 appointment if we skipped lunch. So, I called pedestals and asked if it was at all possible to push my appointment back to 2:30. They told me it was no problem. However, when I arrived...I felt rather rushed through the appointment because we quote "only have half the amount of time to do what normally takes an hour" unquote (I realize the actual "   ''s are unnecessary in this instance). If I knew I was going to be rushed through my appointment, I would have just had my parents meet me there! So not only was I extremely overwhelmed by picking out my flowers (because I don't really know what I want), I was a little annoyed, too.

We sat down with the consultant and he definitely knew what he was doing, but I'm realizing picking flowers means going by blind faith that the person's suggestions will look good, because heck if I know what any of this will look like! It's very "we can use this type of flower, with this filler, with this accent, and put in a tall vase that will sort of look like this" and I have pretty much 12 different images floating around in my head as to how this could look. I can only hope that I trust the consultant (which I did) with every suggestion he made and say "Yes, that's fine." Luckily, I would see a mock-up of my centerpieces 3 or 4 months before, so if I wanted to make changes I absolutely could.

No surprise here, but I'm going to check out a few more florists before actually signing anything. Not only to do some price comparison shopping, but for "idea" comparison shopping. Think about it: I was able to walk out of there with someone's complete floral vision of my day on paper. If I can get some other people's "visions" based on my colors and what I need, I can pull from each of those and hopefully have a better understanding of what actually is "my vision". So though it was overwhelming, I'm glad I at least have an understanding now of what I need for the wedding, what flowers fit well into my color scheme, and what to look for when I'm scouring over pictures. It was very helpful.

On Sunday I ran the DIVA Half Marathon on Long Island with my friends Mandy and Kate!!!I know this is supposed to be all about wedding, BUT I can't not talk about this amazing experience! Plus, all this running has to do with staying in shape for the big ol' dress fitting in January! We were fabulous and I couldn't be prouder of all three of us, especially Kate and Mandy for completing their very first (of hopefully many) half marathon!

The last half marathon I fully ran was the More Half Marathon in Central Park last April 2009 (I bailed last minute on this past April because of our engagement party, and before that in the Queens Half Marathon my knee bothered me so much I had to walk the last 4 miles!) Though I didn't get an "official" time for the More Half Marathon (due to excessive heat they had to call it a "fun run"), I'm pretty sure I clocked in at about 2:11. I wanted to at least do better than that this time around...so I was aiming for 2:10.

My official time ended up being 2:03:06!!! I seriously did not even remotely expect to knock off that many minutes from last time. All that crazy interval training and tempo runs I did following Hal Higdon's training schedule really paid off without me even realizing it! Here was my official time and placement:

I am so happy with my time and definitely have a new goal for my next one: To break 2 hours! I would absolutely do the DIVA half marathon again next year. It was a lot of fun, it was a great smooth, flat course, it was awesome getting a tiara and boa for the last mile (even though I held my boa because the feathers kept flying into my mouth!), it was very empowering, and I'd love to try and recruit more friends to do it with me and make it a tradition.


Read all about my whole experience running the DIVA Half Marathon on my running blog by clicking here.