The invitations are complete and ready to go!

Once we finalized the meal situation and the guest list was cut down a bit more, I could finally go ahead with the invitations. You will read a lot of websites that give you wedding invitation etiquette and it will bore you to tears unless you are into doing things the traditional and apparently polite way. This, on the other hand, is the "I dont give a shit" method of doing invitations. So as you may remember I got my invitations from homesense and got an excellent deal. For a set of 50 invitations, with response cards envelopes and all that jazz it was $9.99 comparable to about $50 at Michaels and they aren't ugly, they're actually quite nice.

Most people ask for help with invitations and I'm here to tell you that would have been a good idea for me to try. Unfortunately I went it alone, and by alone I dont mean Josh helped me, I mean ALONE. It took me about two solid days of printing, writing, stamping, licking, tying to get to them all finished. I worked from an excel file that I started when I got engaged with everyones names, partner and children's names, email addresses and mailing addresses. I highlighted each person green when I finished their invitation and when I get the RSVP back I will highlight it some other colour. Why? Because I am the most unorganized person in the world.

How our invitations are working is that everyone is getting an invitation. Some people say we should have done e-vites but lets be honest the older population just dont get that and dont appreciate it. People like paper invitations. With that said we are asking everyone who has access to the internet to rsvp on our wedding website under the rsvp page. For those without the internet, yes those people still exist, they can send back the response card but if i'm being honest I didn't include a stamp, because as far as I'm concerned they can call me and i'll put them in the website.

Three pieces of advice when doing invitations:
1. Buy extras because you will screw up on some of them
2. Buy an address stamp for your return address, I didn't do this until after all the response envelopes were addressed. BIG MISTAKE. 23 bucks at London Rubber Stamps for a personalized return address stamp on Kempt Road, saving your wrists from Carpel Tunnel --- Priceless.
3. Hand deliver as many as you possibly can. I made my invitations a couple weeks early (they should go out 4 months prior to the date) because my graduation is this week and my nephews birthday is next week, which means I can hand deliver a huge chunk of the invitations within the next two weeks. Its a little earlier than the norm but I trust that people can protect that one piece of paper with the website they need to rsvp on which I will remind them of on facebook. NO BIG D.

 Finished Product

The food is confirmed!

We've finally made a decision on food. Can I get a hallelujah?

Originally we wanted to do finger foods like I mentioned in a previous post. That idea was just doomed from the get go. The hall didn't have options for us, they couldn't really give us a price to work with and it just became too frustrating. So I made the first not so budget friendly decision of the wedding. Unless you dont feed people at your wedding, which people dont seem to take kindly to, it is challenging to make food cheap.

We decided to do the full dinner after a lot of conversations and frustration so tada if you're coming to the wedding you will be getting a roast beef dinner. The price per plate is $15.95 which compared to the city is like heaven on earth, but compared to Cape Breton is pretty steep for a hall meal. We cut down our guest list even further so that we could pretty much guarantee that no more than 200 people will show up so we should pay around $3000 for the meal and that doesn't include the wine on each of the tables.

Will it be an extravagant meal, I would highly doubt it, but its a meal and its confirmed and I couldn't be happier that I never have to think about it again!

Dollar Store/Kijiji Decor

Dont hate on the cheap ladies. If you want to walk away with no debt from your wedding the decor is one of the easiest ways to cut costs. Now I'm not talking linens here because thats basically a guaranteed cost and a necessary one in my eyes. It just doesn't look like a wedding without linens. I always have to suggest my main lady love Caitlyn Dorey-Conrad and her company Table For You Linen Rentals and Decor, here is her business facebook page https://www.facebook.com/tableforyou?fref=ts. Caity's prices are extremely reasonable and she has very modern linen options like damask and burlap which are huge right now along with any other colour under the sun. All in all, she's the bomb and she will make your wedding look incredible. We decided to do Burlap table runners which I am beyond excited for since it is a fall wedding and burlap SCREAMS fall.

As for the centrepieces the plan is as follows:

LOTS OF WHITE LIGHTS- Try to get them right after Christmas if you can, mainly because they are on sale, but also as I learned the hard way they are hard to find any other time of year. You literally can't have enough white lights so overspend on these rather than cheap out on them because they just make the space look more romantic and warm. Make sure that you buy the one with white cords as opposed to the christmas tree ones with dark green chords because that wouldn't be a very nice standout colour in your wedding.

Dollar Store Centrepieces- Okay at the dollarstore they have at least 7-10 different styles of vases that are $1 each. This made me happy because nothing makes me more pissed in this world then when something at the DOLLAR store costs 2 bucks. So I got 22 large cylindrical vases for 22 dollars at Michaels this would have easily cost me over 200 dollars. I will eventually also buy my candy bar jars from the dollar store since you literally can't go wrong with a dollar. Are they perfect quality, nope, but really if anyone is going to criticize my $1 vases i'll probably just puck 'em in the face in my wedding gown lol. I have faith that my guests aren't that caddy. I also bought stones to put in the bottom of these vases. 1 bag of stones fills 2 vase bottoms so I only bought 11 of those at $1 each.

So what am I going to do with said vases? Well I am going to buy a long stemmed fake flower for each one from Michaels. Why Michaels?  Because the Dollar Store flowers are atrociously hideous. If you aren't going to buy real flowers (which I think are a huge waste of money) then you need to buy nice fake flowers. I haven't bought the flowers yet but it will probably be around a 100 dollar price tag. Now if you are a bride and you have not signed up for Michael email list, you are not doing yourself any favors. At least once monthly they send out 40% off coupons and those can make or break the more expensive purchases you can only get at Michaels. With the vases I plan to hot glue a long stemmed flower to the bottom of each vase, extra secure it with the stones fill with water and top with a floating candle.

But that's not it:
I am going to be putting these vases on top of square mirrors. I am getting the square mirrors from Kijiji, there are ALWAYS brides selling their old decor on kijiji and always a stockpile of these mirrors because they are so popular as part of centrepieces.

I will also be putting smaller vases around the large one on the mirror for more lighting. I haven't decided if I want to go with smaller vases or with mason jars, it will depend on the deal I can get. Mason jars can be found cheaply on ebay and amazon.

So that is my dollar store/kijiji decor guide!

What to do with my hair

Let me start this by saying that what I am most looking forward to in being married is getting to cut off all my hair the day after the wedding. I kid you not, my fine hair which there happens to be a ton of does not like being long and is punishing me by making me spend like a half hour daily brushing it. In the meantime though I need to figure out what to do with my hair for the wedding. I'm not wearing it down or half down or any variation of down so get that out of your head, my hair frizzes at the first little smidgen of humidity in the air and I am not looking like a lioness for my wedding so here are some updo options that I like comment below on which one is your favorite:

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The Food (Cue Evil Music Here)

The food, the food, the food. What I like to call the worst part of the wedding for the bride and groom. Originally we had planned to serve the full meal of roast beef at 15.95 a plate for 220 people. I dont know why we ever thought that was a good idea. For one, I've never had a meal at a hall that was actually worth that kind of money because I've never had a meal at a hall that was really all that good at all. Hall food is usually bland and nasty. So we scratched the idea of the full meal.

So we opted for finger foods because after all, this is supposed to be the debt-free wedding. We pushed our reception time to later so that people could have a light supper before coming to the reception and since then we have been in a constant battle with the hall, to the point where if it wasn't so late in the game I would probably consider switching halls. The hall claims to do buffet style finger foods, yet they cant give us a price for it. They can't even give us options for what we can have as finger foods. We need to tell them what we want and then they come up with a price, in other words, we are likely going to get severely ripped off. So now we are considering bringing in separate catering. I'll keep you posted on how this battle goes for us!

Bridesmaid Dresses

Oh buddy, let me tell you, there was not a happier day in my life than the day that we found the bridesmaid dresses!

Bridesmaid dress shopping is probably one of the most unholy practices in the world. We had literally been looking online for dresses for months. Its difficult because obviously you dont want them to feel ugly or uncomfortable in their dresses and if you are like me and have girls with a wide array of heights, sizes, skin tones, hair colours etc it is really challenging to find one dress that will suit each and every one of them. I know what you are going to say, let them wear multiple different styles of dresses and yeah sure for some brides they dont mind doing that and to each their own, but for me, I have a minor obsession with weddings looking uniform.

So four months ago we set out in the city of halifax looking for the dress. We went to Always and Forever because I had been to Felicity and Winchesters before and they are crazy over priced like nothing under 250 bucks.

I made the girls try on a bunch of dresses and FINALLY we found two possible contenders by the same designer, Bill Levkoff, that were contenders. One was short, one was long. Going in, I was convinced that we would get a short dress but seeing the long dress made me realize that they screamed fall wedding. So we went with the long ones and we are going to add straps for those who want him. Here's a look at the dress:

Why I Took A Break From Blogging

I know, I know... It's been like six months since my last blog post. Why the break? There are a number of reasons why I took a break from blogging, here they are:

1. Not a whole lot has been happening. You'll find this if you take a year or longer to plan a wedding. The start of the process is busy and the end of the process is busy but the six months in between are pretty slow. There hasn't been a lot to do over the past 6 months but I will catch you up on some thing in the next post.

2. I've been busy finishing my degree and doing my last practicum block which was fantastic but a busy 5 months.

3. The stress was starting to catch up to me and to be honest I went through about a 3 month period where I seriously considered eloping. But as frustrating of a process as it can be, I want my day. So I took a break, I stopped thinking about the wedding and starting focusing on myself and my career and it was a great break. Now that there are only six months left, I dont really have the luxury of doing that anymore!

So I'm back, true Eminem style and ready to motor through these last six months.