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Monday, July 18, 2011

Month of May, Memorial Day Weekend & Floral Frenzy!

May was going by like a whirlwind, and we had a lot on our plate for Memorial Day weekend. To begin, we were excited to be in town this year for one of my besties' birthday (and bridesmaid), Katie O'Shea. We had a great time at her fav Cuban restaurant, followed by a night on the town. The next day, we had plans to drive to Sarasota bright and early for vendor appointments, then finish the weekend off with a side job to help with the wedding fund.

Happy Bday to Katie!

Around Memorial Day weekend, we started picking up the pace and knew we needed to begin exploring florists. We kept hearing the name "Flowers by Fudgie" (isn't that a cute name?) from all of our other vendors as a recommendation. They were also on the list of popular choices from Ringling, and as we mentioned in an earlier post, this was the florist we saw setting up another wedding on our last visit to the venue. Definitely someone we wanted to explore. We actually had a chance to briefly chat with them and felt they would do a great job, but we wanted to setup a formal appointment. With my annoying tendencies, I also felt it necessary to make a few other appointments with different florists to explore options....you know, confuse the situation of course. :) That put us for a loooong weekend of appointments.

When we go to Sarasota, we always try to book as many appointments as possible to maximize our time there. Exhausting? Yes. This trip was no exception with three back-to-back florist appointments, meeting with our caterer Mattison's, our coordinator at our venue, and the plan to explore hotels and rehearsal dinner locations...all in about 1 1/2 days including traveling there and back.

I won't bore you with details of our trip, but I will say that although we liked all of the florists, we decided to go with our gut choice of Flowers by Fudgie! Our contact Becki was very helpful, and we scheduled a followup trip so we could make final decision on design direction. Things were really starting to come together!

THE CRAWFISH PARTY

As I mentioned earlier, we had a gig to get to the next evening. There is a gigantic annual party in Orlando called the Crawfish Party which is comprised of beer, crawfish, music, and a TON of people running around outside in the heat. It's awesome. Anyways, a group of our friends founded/works the event every year, and Gary and I luckily got to join in for our first time. Besides being fun, it was a great way to earn extra cash for the wedding!

We had the job of selling t-shirts to intoxicated people by the port-a-potties, and we were setup on prime people watching real estate. At one point, there was even a guy who climbed up the port-a-potties and proceeded to run across the top of every one, jumping off at the end with his "tail between his legs" and hands extended for the cops waiting. Just one of the interesting things that evening!

Although I don't have any visuals of us at the event, I found a random video on YouTube which captures the vibe of what you'll find at the Crawfish Party. Check it out!


Anyways, that's my story. We'll be cranking out a few more posts soon in an attempt to catch up to real-time. :)

<3

Krissy

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Setting Up Our Registries!

I've always seen people in movies take those fun gun scanners and run around the store scanning everything under the sun. Unfortunately, the gun is just a movie thing, because both places we went had a square hand held scanner. The worse part is that you're not able to spin those scanners like a gun around your finger. But I digress.

The first place Kristen and I went to register for presents was good old Bed, Bath and Beyond. BB&B is an essential to most wedding registries. Kristen and I already have a lot of random stuff for laying around the apartment, so we really thought there wouldn't be too much that we needed. Well going into the store, I soon realized we wanted everything in the place. We went to the front, got set up with our non-gun scanner and headed onto the floor.

I'm clearly filled with a frenzy of excitement here.....

who knew pots and pans were so fun!

Not wasting any time, Kristen immediately ran to one of the most important things she could find....

A dinosaur cake mold. or jello mold if you want to get real frisky

 After we tore our way through Bed Bath, it was off to Macy's.  We were basically going to fill the gaps and also see if there were better versions of things from Bed Bath that we could switch out.  We didn't spend quite as much time in Macy's, but we did end up registering for more than I thought we would.  We liked some of their kitchen items more and decided to swap them out. 

This was definitely one of the fun highlights for us.  I don't think we'll ever just walk into stores like that and buy that many house related items at once.  Unless I hit the lottery;  which I estimate will happen within the next 3-4 years.

Buying this stuff also started to give us a little bit of house fever. Knowing we're going to have all these home goods, the urge to get a bigger place is starting to increase. 

Lastly, in addition to the 2 store registries, we put together an online Honeymoon registry through Sandals. We debated between having the honeymoon as our main registry, or deciding on china, but in the end thought the honeymoon was more fitting for us. With the honeymoon registry, we're looking forward to a great trip, excursions, and unforgetable memories. Stay tuned to hear all about the honeymoon in the next post, and here are the links to get to all three:

Honeymoon -- Sandals at Montego Bay, Jamaica.
http://registry.sandals.com/Honeymoon-Registry-111121-.html

Bed, Bath and Beyond
http://reg.weddingchannel.com/registry/view.action?r=320418830&a=994&cm_mmc=Affiliate-_-WWS-_-The_Knot-_-Bed_Bath_%26_Beyond&st=WWS

Macy's
http://reg.weddingchannel.com/registry/view.action?r=320418010&a=994&cm_mmc=Affiliate-_-WWS-_-The_Knot-_-Macy%27s&st=WWS

- Smitty

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Tastings, Stomach Aches, Music and other Weddings!

The first week of April we had a ton of plans in the SRQ;  for those of you unfamilar with this term, it's how the natives and all the cool people refer to Sarasota. 

On the agenda we had meetings/tastings at Fete, Simply Gourmet and Mattison's.  In addition we had a brief meeting set with a potential DJ.  On top of all of that, we also had one of my old college friends' wedding to attend in Venice (this is just south of Sarasota).

We got to the area early Saturday morning and headed straight to Fete for the first tasting -- or so we thought.  They are an upscale-ish restaurant located in the Lakewood Ranch area.  We were impressed by their restaurant and our contact Erin.  She was helpful and really sweet, one major problem -- these guys have a stance of getting a commitment out of us before letting us taste the various options.  They were nice enough to comp a lunch, but I would have preferred small samples of various things from their menu.  That made it really hard for us to go with them, so we looked to the next 2 options as higher possibilities knowing that they would go further out of their way to earn our business.

Our next stop was more of a "Mom and Pop" operation called Simply Gourmet.  Simply Gourmet was really good.  They had a table set up for us and a whole tasting prepared.  Kristen and I were both super impressed with their salad.  I mean, look at this salad!



The appetizers were also fresh and well prepared.  Lastly, the shrimp and grits were really tasty.  Kristen was hesitant about a few things like presentation on some dishes;  I'm a bit more simple and was extremely caught up in the taste.  They honestly could have served it to me in a coffee mug and I would have been equally impressed -- it was good!

We liked Simply Gourmet, but there were a few other issues beyond food presentation that were potential set backs.  Doing 99% of this wedding on our own, we needed our vendors to be as full service as possible.  There were a few things they could not roll into their services that would have been a big help (i.e. additional lighting).  Our contact Jamie was super helpful and seemed extremely knowledgable, but we still had one more caterer to visit...



In between the tastings we had a chance to go look at the venue again.  We had not seen it in months and going back out there and taking pictures was refreshing. Much to our surprise, the next caterer we were meeting with and potential florist were setting up a wedding for that evening! It was great to get a sneak peak of the setup and what our event could look like. We also had the chance to head over to the Ritz Carlton and check out the grounds as we had been considering renting a suite for the wedding night.  Once the day concluded and our stomachs were on the verge of literally exploding, we headed back to our hotel for some much needed rest.

The following morning before our tasting with Mattison's, we squeezed in a quick meeting with Craig at Black Tie DJs.  In all honesty, the thing I was most concerned about was personality and pricing.  We thought about a band, but with being limited on hearing specific songs and of course being higher cost, we thought the DJ would be the best route. 

I am also so into music and have such a strong opinion about what will (and more importantly will not) be played at the wedding, that hiring a DJ was more for the MC function and to bring life to the party.   Any fans of the Village People and Nickelback will not enjoy our playlist.  There is certain music I hear at weddings and bars that makes my skin crawl.  I made it clear that if any of these songs were played during our wedding, I would be throwing him in the moat....well I didn't say that, but I've thought it several times.

We met with Craig for about half an hour and that's pretty much all we needed.  He was a cool guy, seemed to have a good personality and his pricing is really in line with competition.  In addition to that, they have a great local reputation and were on the preferred vendors list with the venue.

After that it was on to Mattison's.  We went to one of their 4 local restaurants to meet with the owner and executive Chef, Paul Mattison.  To say the least we were blown away.  The presentation and the food this place makes is nothing short of phenomenal.  I'm not even a big Salmon eater, and the Salmon they prepared was one of the best pieces of fish I've ever tasted (hint hint -- I recommend it!). 

In addition to the food being awesome, Paul was a super nice guy and completely made us feel at ease.  I usually have a "good people" detector and it's usually accurate for the most part.  He just seemed like a laid back, intelligent, down to earth person and we both felt comfortable from the very beginning.  He was also able to leverage things that really helped us such as additional lighting, better pricing on rentals and a potential rehearsal dinner spot.

Looking back on it, we didn't make the decision that weekend, but I think we did subconsciously.  It took a few weeks but we eventually caved. After we had a couple of conversations with Paul where he really moved the needle and threw in a couple more fun surprises for us (you will see these at the reception!), we could no longer resist booking.  It was difficult because we did really like Simply Gourmet;  but in the end, we made the right decision for us by going with Mattison's. Here's a sneak peak at their awesome bruschetta which you'll see during cocktail hour.



To wrap up the weekend, we headed to the mall to buy me a new shirt (because I forgot the clothes I packed) and head to Julie's wedding.  My friend Julie was getting married to her long-time boyfriend Josh that very same weekend and it was a fun get away from all of our own wedding related tasks.

The ceremony/reception was at a very nice country club in Venice .  We stayed for most of the reception, but unfortunately had to head back early to Orlando to be at work the next day.   It was nice seeing another wedding because it gave us a little glimpse into what we had in-store. Their wedding was wonderful, and again congrats to Julie and Josh!

Right about here, the fun was really starting to begin.  I thought we were ahead of the game at that point.  I had no idea :-)

- Smitty

Sunday, July 10, 2011

E-Session and Save the Dates!

With the engagement session creeping up on us, Gary and I were busy prepping. This included working out and eating healthier (I was seriously counting calories on my phone app, and it worked!), a bit of primping, and completed with a small shopping trip to gather props. Once prepared, we were excited to meet up with our photographer, "D" of Elegant Imagery for our e-session in downtown Cocoa Beach. My mom even came along to help out, plus watch over our puppy Milo so we could get a few shots with him!

March 9th was a beautiful day, and we started at our first location on a dock overlooking the bay. We wanted to incorporate a few fishing inspired shots since that's how Gary proposed. Out of nowhere, as we're walking to the dock it became SOOO extremely windy that I couldn't even walk without holding my dress down, otherwise I'd pull a Marilyn Monroe! That meant my hair (which I spent hours curling to perfection) was swirling around like crazy in this pseudo tornado. Well, D was still able to pull off some great shots, but we had to improvise with the fishing pole since the wind didn't work with our prop plans. Here's some of my fav shots from this location...


From there, we went to a few spots around the downtown Coca beach area. Of course, once we left the dock there wasn't a lick of wind, but the damage had already been done to my poor curls. I guess everything happens for a reason though, because we also took some shots on the beach after, and the "beachy hair" look worked out! lol! We even rented these sweet beach cruisers for the beach shots which were soooo fun because Gary and I love riding bikes. Here's a few of my fav shots from the session...

Gary spliced together a few of our fav similar shots to create this mini collage.

Our little family, look how Milo is posing! <3

D got this on the first shot!

Getting those letters to stay on the umbrella was not easy!

The frame motif goes along with our art museum venue!

Our logo in the sand.
The dress I'm wearing was my Mother's in high school!
I could post a million more of my fav pics, but why don't you check out the rest of our e-session here.

With the pics complete, we were rushing against the clock to get our Save-The-Dates out. We were debating between two pics, but decided that one of the beach ones would be best. The beach kind of defines us, plus we're getting married in a beachy area (although not on the beach). We also knew we wanted to do a magnet so people could easily put it on their fridge. After much research, we found a company called Magnet Street that had awesome layouts! Here's the final product!




Hope you like them!

xoxo,

Krissy

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Bridesmaid Beauties!

Time was ticking, and bridesmaid dresses needed to be decided on ASAP in order to allow shipping and alteration time. With that, Danielle, Katie, and I set out to search for a dress that we could present to the out-of-town bridesmaids. I also hoped this would help give me a clearer idea of what the "wedding colors" would be.

Who would have thought that picking out the bridesmaid dresses would be waaaaay more stressful than my wedding gown? Well it was. The thought of picking something out for six other girls, while trying to stay sensitive to everyone's thoughts made it hard. I wanted them to be comfortable, have something they can wear again, be within a price range, and of course compliment my dress! I had a few criteria such as fabric sheen and color vicinity that I wanted to stay in.

We set out to a few stores, but found the best bridesmaid dress selection at Priscilla of Boston! Here's a few pics of the girls shopping....
Picking out a variety of dresses to try on!

Although this isn't the dress we picked out, they still look so pretty!
After trying a few more stores and texting pics of the best dresses to the other bridesmaid beauties, I made a decision. I was even able to use some sweet negotiating skills to get "Krissy's Crew" a better deal!

Only, as I mentioned before (and I see is an increasing pattern), when I get close to making that absolute final decision I start to rethink it. Soooo after some more back and forth confusing, stressful days, looking at a few other stores I hadn't checked out yet, and revisiting Priscilla of Boston, I REALLY made my final decision about a week later.

The dress we picked out is fun, and I could immediatley see that as they started dancing around the room, twirling each other in the dress when trying on. You'll also notice a variety, as again I can't pick one uniform thing as any other normal person! Ah, I'm weird! But I think it will look good and be a cool way to still have the variety I want in a cohesive manner, and differentiate the maid of honors a bit. :)

And although I won't post a pic of the exact dress (hey, there's no fun in giving everything away!), I will show you the AWESOME bridesmaid shoes Danielle, Lauren and I found a few months later.

BAM!


Phew, glad that one is checked off the list!

XoXo,

Krissy