our wedding: the bridal party

Gah, I am so excited to share these pictures with all of you! I'm splitting up some of the pictures into different batches to keep it all organized - we had over 600 pictures to pick from, so that would make the longest blog post of all time! So today we are going to talk about our wedding party.

Both CR and I are the oldest of four, and actually have the same number of boys/girls, but just switched! So it goes me, my sister, my brother, and my youngest sister, and in his family it goes CR, his brother, his sister, and his youngest brother. So obviously they were all going to be in our bridal party. We decided to have two more people on either side, as our friends are just as important to us as our family. On my side, I felt really conflicted about who to have, as I've had so many great friends from my past lives. In the end, I asked my best friend Caitlin, who is my friend from medical school, and my friend Lizzi, who remains a close friend from college and marching band. CR had his two close friends from college on his side.

I asked my bridesmaids to be in our wedding last year - I made them little boxes with personalized champagne glasses, champagne, and champagne gummy bears, and gave it to them when I saw them...or in Lizzi's case, I had to mail it to her and ask her over FaceTime.

Having my bridesmaids spread all over the country made it more difficult to figure out details for dresses and so on. I spent a lot of time looking on Pinterest for dress ideas, and online for different bridesmaids dresses. We knew we'd have to eventually buy online, so I really focused on that. In the end, I decided I really liked the look of having everyone in the same color, but letting every choose their own style of dress so that my girls could wear what they felt most comfortable in.  We decided to go with Azazie for the dresses - I love that you can filter by color, fabric type, and then any other requirements. I also really liked that site because the girls can order styles to try on, so they could try several and not be afraid they were committing to one style they may hate. We had a lot of text messages going between the six of us picking out our favorite dresses. In the end we went with full length chiffon dresses in dusty rose. I initially thought my girls would wear knee length dresses, but I liked that with long dresses, you can wear whatever shoes you want, so all the girls could just wear their own sandals and it wouldn't matter. For their bridesmaids gift, I gifted each of them with a simple pair of pearl earrings for them to wear the day of. I wanted to give them something they could use in the future, and I figured pearl earrings are about as timeless as it gets!

The day of the wedding, we had quite the whirlwind of getting ready. We basically had three groups of women, between me, my bridesmaids, and my mother and mother-in-law getting our hair down and our make-up done. Part of my gift to the girls was paying for their hair and make-up - I feel it's a lot to ask someone to be in your wedding, to buy an expensive dress they very likely will never wear again, pay to come all the way out, and then on top of that expect them to drop $150 on hair and make-up, so I chose to pay for the hair and make-up for everyone.  We had groups of us getting our hair done while some of us got our make-up done, and then just round robined it until we were all done. For our hair, we all chose to have our hair put up. When my mom got married 30 years ago, she had roses and baby's breath in her hair, so even though my parents got divorced last year, I wanted to pay tribute to my family, and have all of us have a few roses and babys breath in our hair as well. I'm going to talk about that a little more in a future post, but I love how it turned out. Our make-up was done by Tierney, and I love how she made everyone just look like the best version of themselves rather than a different person all together.

The boys, on the other hand, were a lot less complicated. We decided to have the boys buy navy suits instead of renting. The groomsmen were also spread literally from coast to coast, so again we couldn't do anything local. CR and I went to Macy's, and had him try on a few different navy suits, picked the one we liked best, and then let the boys know when a good sale came around so they could get a good price on it. We had them wear their own white button ups, cognac belts, and cognac shoes, and then provided them with their ties (The Tie Bar from Nordstrom actually has quite a few great tie options, if you are ever looking for inexpensive ties!). They had a bit more work to do before the wedding at the actually ceremony/reception site, so they got ready there!

After the ceremony come the staged pictures. There are lots more of the individual pictures too, but I love seeing everyone together!

^ these goofballs!

Our flowers bouquets were a mix of peonies, english roses, hydrangeas, baby's breath, and greenery. The girls had slightly smaller versions of my own.

my gorgeous sisters <3

bridesmaid dresses: Azazie
groomsmen suits: Alfani
my dress: Augusta Jones 'Yazmin'
bridal hair: Tru Salon, Pittsford NY
bridal makeup: Makeup by Tierney
florals: Rockcastle Florist
location: Twin Silos

our wedding: the invitations

Hi guys! I am so excited to finally share details from our wedding with you guys! You were there with us for the planning parts of it, from picking a venue to finding our photographer to buying my wedding dress to trying to decide what we wanted for decorations, so I'm pumped that we now can share all the pictures from the big day. In the next few weeks I'm going to share parts from the day and the days leading up, from bridesmaids dresses to what I did to prepare for our wedding to decorations to just sharing a few of our favorite pictures. Today to kick it off, I'm going to start with sharing our invitations!

One of the big things we spent a lot of time on was our invitations and everything that comes with that, from finalizing the final guest list to sending out the invites to chasing down those last RSVPs.  I spent sooooo much time thinking about what we wanted our invitations to look like (one of the first pinterest pictures I ever saved was a wedding invite from Minted!), but the actual process of finding the perfect card wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.

You may remember that for our Save the Dates, we were really fortunate to work with Minted, and I was every more excited when we got to work together again on our wedding invitations. Minted has always been my go-to for invitations, Christmas cards, and personalized gifts, so the fact that we got to pick from their wide selection of beautiful wedding invitations was like a dream come true.

I spent several weeks poring over the options. Did we want the classic wedding invitation where there are lots of envelopes and sleeves and multiple things all together? Did I want the 3-in-1 option, where the RSVP is attached to the invitation (and most costing around $1.75 per card)? Did we want our pictures on the front? How were we going to have people respond to the invite, and how were we going to get their answers for what they wanted for dessert? I spent a lot of time playing around with all of the options!

In the end, I wanted something that represented us, to be similar to the style of the wedding, and have it be pretty. I really gravitated towards white backgrounds, lots of greenery, and simple font.

The design we finally decided on was "Paradise" - I love the simplicity of this design! Our florals for our actual wedding were a lot of greenery with pink and white flowers, so I thought this would be a perfect homage to that. I really love that so many details on the Minted designs can be customized when picking out invitations, and you can even request changes to be made! I asked that the Minted artist change the little white flowers to be blush pink flowers instead, which was a simple change that really made the whole invite more personalized and reflective of our wedding day flowers.

My favorite detail? The gold embossing for our names and the ceremony site - a bit of a throwback to our Save the Dates that also had a touch of gold on them. 

My second favorite detail? One of our engagement pictures on the back. I wanted the front to be simple and include all the details for the actually wedding, but loved using one of our engagement pictures on the back. I figured most people would have the front of the card on their fridge or wherever, but this was a way to keep a bit of "us" on the invites as well. We also used the free service of having a wedding webside on Minted so our guests could get a bit more information about the actual wedding day that we didn't include on the invites, like where to stay, the bridal party, and our registry, so that website address was included on the bottom of the backside of the card. 

The cards themselves were printed on a beautiful thick paperstock, and the envelopes were thick and sturdy. We, of course, used the (free!) addressing service through Minted, so we didn't have to hand address anything, and had our address printed on the back of the envelopes as well. I loved the cute little RSVP cards, and getting those back for three weeks was so much fun - I always looked forward to getting the mail! Our dinner was buffet-style, but we choose to do individual pies for the desserts, so we had our guests initial their dessert choice. Here's my mom's - I can't believe she chose berry over apple!

I am thrilled with how our invitations turned out, and am forever grateful to Minted for being such an important part of our wedding planning process. We have loved working with them over the past several years, and will continue to be paying customers of theirs. 

Next up - decorations (spoiler: these little candles were the perfect compromise for a no-flame-allowed venue), and then my gorgeous bridesmaids!

PS. Have you seen Minted's adorable monogram maker? You can download any style, and use it for wedding things (like decorations or print on napkins or whatever), or just as a cute background for your phone like I did ;)

wedding planning: the decorations

Our wedding day is in exactly three months! I can't believe how quickly it's all happening. When you have a longer engagement, you think you have all this time, and then it's 13 weeks away and you're like...omg, what things do we have left to do?

A lot of decisions were really easy - once we chose our venue, it locked a few things into place for us. We have to work with the catering company they partner with, and they provide all of the food, drinks, and linens. Our venue supplies all tables and chairs. That's a lot of planning we didn't have to do! Then a lot of other parts fell into place - we booked our photographer, I bought my dress, we figured out what our bridal party is wearing (more on that in a future post), and re-booked our DJ (our first one flaked on us after having committed to us over a year ago...). 

I had talked to a few florists, and picked the first one I really talked to as I liked their work...and honestly, it's difficult to plan a wedding in a city you aren't from or currently live in, so sometimes you just have to go off "vibes". We had a long discussion about what our (mostly my) vision was for the day. Although we are doing a barn wedding, I did not want to go with anything too rustic, so no burlap, actual barn items, or anything like that. I also feel like "wedding colors" aren't a thing as much as they used to be - I feel like 10 years ago, everyone had very specific wedding colors, and everything from the bridesmaids dresses to the napkins to the invitations to the flowers were all in those two colors. Now I feel it's a lot more fluid, and more about the vibe of everything going together rather than everything sticking to two exact colors. So our colors are really just about being soft and pretty - lots of whites, blushes, gold, and navy. 

So I started pinteresting away, and since nothing we are doing is crazy out of the box, of course there is a ton of inspiration out there. So here's what we're thinking!

For my bridal bouquet, and for the flowers for my bridesmaids, I asked for a mix of blush and white flowers, with a mix of bigger flowers. Peonies will be at the end of their season, so lots of ranunculas, english roses, a tiny bit of baby's breath for sentimental reasons, and then lots of green! My florist's instagram has several of these types of bouquets, so I have a good idea of what it will look like, and I can't wait! The men are going to get simple boutonnieres with probably an english rose. 

All the fingers crossed that the weather cooperates and that we will be able to have an outside ceremony. Our venue supplies the chairs, and has an arch at the ceremony site. Our florist is making a floral piece for the arch (something like the one above, at least that's the picture I sent!), but then I'm a bit lost on what else we should do! I don't want to spend a ton of time buying and making things just for down the aisle, so I'm thinking getting flower petals, and having them be scattered down the aisle. When I brought that up on Instagram stories, several people said that makes it hard to walk down the aisle, so maybe we'll do it like the flowers in the right picture, where they are denser along the chairs. Just a little something to make it pretty, but doesn't require much work (or transport, because we're getting married 5 hours away from where we live). Any ideas? 

The only other real outside directions we are planning on is a welcome sign! I love the style of the one on the right, especially because we could hang it in our entry way at our house! But, we desperately need a sign that says the things on the sign on the left, so...we might have two? Maybe the welcome sign right by the parking area, and then the second one closer to the ceremony? Our guest list is very unbalanced (I have 10 family members coming, CR has 65...), so we need to sit scattered. I also really want the ceremony to be cell phone free, so looking for a polite way to express those requests. My mom and I will be making these, so I'm already looking forward to a little crafting season!

The Christmas after we got engaged, CR's brother made us this amazing set of cornhole. He stained them a beautiful dark wood, and we just love them. It gave me the idea of having several other lawn games at our wedding during happy hour! I just think it would be so fun for our guests. I think we're going to get some of these decals for the cornhole boards, and then make giant jenga and yahtzee, and staining them a similar color. Again, fingers crossed the weather is nice!

For the reception, we are doing long tables instead of round tables. I love the idea of everyone being a bit closer and being able to talk to more people. I feel when you're sitting at big round tables, you can only really talk to your date and the person on your other side, and this way, you're directly in contact with 5 people! So instead of doing a large center piece, our florist is making long green garlands with flowers scattered throughout. I'm a bit nervous about this, as I haven't see my florist make one of these (although they say they do them all the time). My big sticking point right now is that our venue doesn't allow any flames, so I can't have real candles. I still want the pretty light though, so we're currently trying to find some kind of votives to put little fake candles in. I don't want to see the fake flame, but I do want to see the flickering light, if that makes sense! On the edge of the tables, we will have some kind of simple way of displaying the table number. 

The last couple pieces are for displaying the seating arrangement, dinner, and drink menu. I don't want them to look just like the other signs, so we will have to play around with this for a bit. 

Gah, writing all of this out makes me realize we actually have a lot more decisions to make, and projects to do! Hoping that my off-service month in May gives me the time to finish all the little things :)

What are some things you loved about your wedding, or weddings you have been to? Anything I'm missing? 

our save the dates!

I am so excited to finally share our Save the Dates! I am so so happy with how they turned out :)

Once we took our engagement pictures, we debated for a while about which picture to put on there. I wanted it to show us equally - there were lots of pictures where one of us was more prominent, but I really felt that it was important that we were both equally a part of the picture (rather than CR kissing me or me nuzzling his neck). I just love the picture of us that we chooose, plus the lilacs in the background are just so beautiful!

Once we choose the picture, I probably spent a good week looking at and comparing different options on the Minted website. There are just so many beautiful cards to choose from, but I eventually narrowed the options down to portrait cards with gold "save the date" with our information under it, and our favorite in the end was the Modern Script Save the Date. I love the crisp white edges and print, with the gold script across the whole card. One of the amazing things about Minted is that you can really customize the card, so if you don't like the font on the information part of the card, you can change it or move it! We ended up going with a different font than the original design had, just because I wanted a bit more juxtaposition between the gold script and the white lettering.

The next step after we finally finished designing the card was collected addresses. I love that Minted includes free recipient addressing. Instead of hand writing all the names and addresses, you collect that information in an excel spread sheet, and then your envelopes are printed...for free! It's seriously amazing. Luckily there have been several engagements/weddings in CR's family recently, so it was really easy to collect a large majority of those addresses since his cousin just sent out their Save the Dates! As far as the return address, you can pay a bit extra to either have it printed on the card or pay for stickers. Since we had just moved into our new house, I actually chose to do neither, and ordered this stamp from Etsy with our new address on it! I figured sending out 80 cards was the perfect excuse to finally get one!

My sister, in her first official duties as my maid of honor, came over to help me stuff and stamp the envelopes. For the actual stamps, I ordered these boutonniere stamps from USPS.com. They are pretty and fit the general theme of the Save the Dates/our wedding, but didn't cost as much as custom stamps would have. And then we just dropped them off at the post office, because it's more fun to put them in this than in your own boring mail box:

We got such great feedback from our friends, and I loved seeing all of their snaps that they sent us! I love seeing my friends' smiling faces on my own fridge, so I'm pretty honored to be on someone else's!

Overall, the process of picking out, customizing, and finishing our Save the Dates was a really fun and seamless process. I'm so thankful that we got to work with Minted on such a personal project, and that we ended up with such beautiful cards to share with our family and friends. A huge thanks to Minted for working with me on this project. I couldn't be more excited to work with one of my favorite paper brands on such a personal project!

In the next Wedding Wednesday post, we're going to discuss bridal parties, and bridesmaid dresses...something I may have been putting off for a while....

wedding wednesday: engagement pictures

I'm so excited to share a few of our favorite pictures from our recent engagement shoot! We've had them for a few weeks now (we even already ordered our Save the Dates!) but it's been so busy that I'm just now able to share them with you guys.

I always knew I wanted to do something really soft and pretty outside for pictures. When I was looking for inspiration online, everything I liked were taken outside. But I also wanted us to be a bit dressier, so finding a location that made sense for both was a bit difficult because we wanted to take them with our wedding photographer, who is located in Rochester, NY, where I'm not from. I was researching picture locations online, with one of the places suggesting Highland park. I asked CR about it, and he said that that's where the annual lilac festival is...and wouldn't you know it, the weekend we had planned to take pictures was the weekend the festival was supposed to happen. Our photographer wasn't initially convinced it was going to work because the area of the festival is full of food trucks and people, and if the lilacs were even in bloom (they aren't always blooming the actual week of the festival), there would be so many people around. I was somehow convinced it was going to work out anyway, so I insisted we try it.

So we agreed to meet at 8 AM, hoping to beat the crowds. We got lucky in that sense, because the whole time we were there, we only saw two people. But that may be because it was drizzling/misting basically the whole time we were there! My curls lasted even less than they usually do, but I think you can't even tell in the pictures that the weather conditions were less than ideal - if nothing else, the cloud cover really made for some great lighting. We also got so lucky because the lilacs were actually blooming!  I love how the photographs turned out, and I'm so glad we worked with our photographer once before the wedding because we got some of the kinks out, and feel more comfortable taking pictures together. There are a few pictures that are not our favorite, but those are in the minority.

As far as what we wanted to wear, I knew I wanted a white dress. I ordered and tried on several, but fell in love with the Leith pleated dress. It was just the perfect combination of dressy enough without being stiff. I didn't really know what shoes to wear, but didn't really stress out about it too much because I knew you would hardly see them in our pictures, so I wore my Jack Rogers sandals as they were thin and not really noticeable (also, I just noticed that they are finally on sale! They are my favorite summer sandal, so it may be time for that gold pair to be mine!). I kept everything else simple with just pearl earrings, my diamond necklace, and of course, my engagement ring. I wanted to look like myself, and myself is pretty simple ;) We decided on CR's outfit pretty much last minute, and went with navy pants and a striped dress shirt. We wanted it all to look as timeless as possible, and I think the combination turned out pretty good! We were debating doing an outfit change to something a bit more casual, but we ran out of time. I'm fine with just having this one outfit as the main reason for taking the pictures was for our Save the Dates, and having a few pretty pictures from this happy time in our lives is a great bonus.

all pictures by Blooming Branch Photography

wedding wednesday: saying yes to the dress!

I was debating if I should write this post now, or later but because the dress that I ended up with is actually quite a bit different than the ones I shared here, I wanted to share the post now! I'm so excited about the dress I found, I really wish I could share it with you all right now! But it's my little secret for the next year - I can't wait to show you next June! After the wedding I'll share the other dresses that were top contenders :)

I've always loved weddings. While I didn't even go to a wedding as guest until I was like 22 years old, I've always had really strong feelings about weddings. Obviously Say Yes to the Dress is something I've watched for years and years because there is nothing more fun than judging people trying on wedding dresses.

So as you can imagine, I had pretty clear idea of what I wanted in my own wedding dress when I started really thinking about it. My taste has definitely changed from the time when I first started a wedding pinterest board (yep...like five years before I was ever engaged), so I had a lot of fun looking through hundreds of pictures online for the past few months to come up with what 2017 Fran likes versus what 2012 Fran liked. Since we are having an outdoor wedding and are doing the whole barn wedding thing, I definitely wanted something soft and flowy and appropriate for the venue. I started gravitating towards dresses with lace, sleeves/straps, and chiffon skirts - basically, this was my ideal dress based on pictures I found online. 

We have decided we aren't doing a lot of traditional pre-wedding events for a variety of reasons, but one of the main ones is that both our families and our wedding parties are spread all over the country. I just don't feel like I can ask members of my bridal party and close friends, many who are about to start residency or work really demanding jobs, to travel to Rochester, NY or Ohio for engagement parties, bridal showers, bachelorette parties, and so on. So once I really started coming up with a general timeline of when things needed to be done for the wedding, I asked my mom if she would come to New York with me to go wedding dress shopping. I actually got the idea from Jessica, who went to NYC to go wedding dress shopping when she was planning her wedding. I loved the idea of having a weekend where I spent time with my mom finding my dress, especially because we aren't doing many other wedding related things. 

Before our scheduled weekend in New York, I wanted to get a sense of what wedding dress shopping is like. I ask my friend Amy to come with me to go try on dresses at the Nordstrom in Cleveland. I had found this Monique Lhuillier Bliss dress online that I wanted to try, and I found that the closest Nordstrom to me has a bridal boutique, so I made an appointment. It was very easy to do - you just choose your location, pick a date, and then tell them if there is a specific style you are looking for. I understand why they do that, because the wedding suite itself is not very big, and does not have a ton of dresses, so they have other Nordstrom wedding suites ship specific dresses that clients are looking for. They also have a small selection of other dresses - I think we had maybe around 40 dresses to look through in the show room and back rooms.

wedding wednesday: save the dates, part one

Long ago, when I first discovered Pinterest, I also found a ton of wedding inspo, from fairytale dresses to venues to wedding invitations. I had a whole wedding pinboard even though I was 22 and years and years away from getting married. I remember I had this one pin of a wedding invitation that I was just in love with - it was white with curly gold foil font, and it was just the prettiest.

Like most gorgeous wedding invites on Pinterest, it was from Minted. I've been working with Minted on some of my favorite posts over the years (see here and here), so when they offered to collaborate on something for our wedding, you guys, I almost cried. I was so excited because I just love their stationery, and every Minted invite we have ever received has always been gorgeous.

Since we're about 14 months out from our wedding, since some of the big things are nailed down (we have our venue and our photographer), and since we have a lot more time right now than we will starting in July, I've been scouring the Minted website looking at their 1600+ options for Save the Dates. There are a couple of things I was looking for when picking out options:

• It had to match the overall vibe of our wedding. We are having a barn wedding, and therefore are all about a bit of a rustic, outdoor, pretty theme. Our wedding colors are probably blush and navy, and I hope to include a lot of greenery and whites into the wedding decor. Therefore our invites should convey a similar theme.
• I would love for it to include gold foil. Luckily a ton of cards have the options of customizing the colors to any color in the rainbow, or about five metal foil options, which I love!
• The main font has to be easily legible. I love the really swirly fonts, but also want it be clear to read. 
• Ideally, our names would not be the center point of the card. Both CR and I have longer names, but go by the shortened version in every day life, so I just didn't like the idea of our full names taking up the majority of the card. There were a couple of styles I loved so much that did have the names larger, but I just liked them so much I let it slide. 

So once I narrowed it down, the cards really started to fall into two categories - ones without pictures and ones with. Here are the final eight cards I settled on that didn't include a picture. I think if you made me choose right now, I would go with the diamante foil-pressed version. I love the greenery and the gold foil - isn't it gorgeous?!

one | two 

three | four

five | six

seven | eight

The other option is one with our picture on it. We have engagement picture session scheduled for mid May, and I think depending on how they turn out, I'd like to include them in the Save the Date. We keep all the Save the Dates we received on the fridge, and I just love looking at our friends and family every day. I also think it makes it a bit more personalized. For these ones, I'm having a really hard time picking out a favorite! I think my favorite is the XOXO card - they have a beautiful font, have the foil pressed option, and our names aren't the focus. I also love the whimsy of the We Do card, but it doesn't include a foil pressed option. But then I also really like the theme of the Vintage Love cards, although our names are the biggest part of the card!

Am I overthinking this? Maybe.

one | two

three | four

five | six

seven | eight

If nothing else works, we can always go with this very appropriate save the date for a couple who met in cadaver lab ;)

A couple of other things I wanted to mention about what I love about Minted. First of all, you can order a sample of any card for $1. Once we decide on our favorites, I'm going to order them in the style we want - I love that you can really get your hands on it before ordering 150 of them before you've even touched them. Also, and this is a big deal, is that they offer free recipient addressing on the envelopes. I sent out like 15 Christmas cards this year, and wrote the addresses by hand, and am not about to do that again x10, so this is definitely a huge perk. I'm thinking about getting a personalized stamp for the return address - we'll see what Pinterest finds for me! For now, I'll work on narrowing down our favorites, finding a dress for our pictures, and collecting addresses!

Please note that we are receiving credit for our Minted Save the Dates, but I was not paid to write this post, and of course as always, all opinions are my own!