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My sister is making our dresses (hopefully at this very second since time is kinda running out!) so we didn’t really need to go wedding dress shopping.  I looked at pictures, told her what I want, and was ready to go, or so I thought.

The problem is that I’ve secretly always wanted to go try on dresses.  A couple of times in college I even made semi-serious plans with various friends to go try them on while wearing fake rings and lying through our teeth.  So I was a little bummed that I wouldn’t get the opportunity.

But my bridesmaid and best shopping buddy, Katie, understood the sad little piece of me that really wanted to go and play princess for a few hours, even though we both knew that I wasn’t actually shopping.

My sister, of course, was a little nonplussed.  Last year she had offered to make her best friend a wedding dress only to have the girl go shopping a week later ‘just to look’ and buy a dress on the spot.  Caroline was understandably afraid that I might do the same thing and her hours and hours of work would be wasted.  She had nothing to worry about.

The first thing I noticed at the dress shop is how ALIKE everything was.  Oh, sure, you can have puffy or not puffy, and you can have beaded or not beaded.  But if you want sleeves, or a different waistline, or anything at all that isn’t popular at the moment your options are really limited.

Even so, I found a number of dresses that were fun to try on (the best–covered in crystals and ostrich feathers and including see-through panels on the sides–unfortunately got taken off before we got the cameras out).  So for your entertainment, I present myself in a plethora of bridal gowns.

This first one doesn’t really do a whole lot for me, but it came the closest to having the neckline I’d like.  As my father said when I made him look at my favorite wedding dress options in high school (I was a weird kid), it’s too plain.

The second one was better from the front, and had an interesting train that attaches to the collar instead of the skirt, which means you can take it off rather than having to bunch it up and drag it around all night.  This is probably the one i would have bought if I were buying from everyone’s favorite bridal gown big box store.

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One of the problems with holding a wedding halfway across the country is that a lot of our local friends aren’t able to make the trip.  With that in mind, one of our lovely bridespeople decided to throw us a bachelorette party to give the locals who can’t make it a chance to hang out with us and celebrate our nuptials.  It was a hoot!

Now, I’ve always thought that bachelor(ette) parties were a little weird.  I mean, if you’re getting married you’re obviously pretty far from being single, so it seems sort of strange to go out and hit on people all night.  If I’m going to get drunk and hit on someone all night I know who I want that person to be!  So I was glad she was coming with me.

So instead of getting plastered and playing bride-to-be-bingo, we started off the evening with a show at The Baton, Chicago’s drag cabaret.  About 20 of us went to see the ladies—who came in all ages, shapes, and sizes, all of them lovely—and get in the celebratory spirit.  It was especially nice to go to the early show since some of our friends have kids and couldn’t stay out all night.  I’d recommend spreading the night out that way if you can arrange it.

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Finally, a project I can do from very far away!  It’s a little late to post our invitation-making process, since we’ve already gotten all of the responses back, but we have been hard at work this week making all of the other paper things we’ll be using for the wedding.

Paper is the least important thing to either of us when it comes to this, so we kept it a little on the low-effort end of things.  I think it still looks pretty decent, although I’ve got nothing on the beautiful invitations Derek’s got going. But! Think of this post as proof that you, too, can have wholly fine-looking paper products for very little effort if you also aren’t that big into paper (cake is my preferred medium).

We started off with some print-your-own invitations that I fortuitously found at a thrift shop for $5.  A little experimentation with fonts and wording choices, and some fun with Paint to make the map and voila!  Our invitation suite!

Here are the two vintage postcards that we made copies of to use as our Save the Date and RSVP cards—the choices on the RSVP were quite a hit!

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Go. Right now.  And look up all of your vendors on the Better Business Bureau’s website.  I’ll wait.

Done?  Feel better?

A couple days ago I realized that things were getting close and I still had no schedule for the wedding day.  So I set about calling everyone to confirm when and where they’d show up.  My first frantic call was to the jewelry store that was engraving our rings—they were a week late because of the valentine’s day rush and I was afraid we wouldn’t have our rings to use at the ceremony.  But they’d rushed them through for us and were ready, so I ran over to pick them up on my lunch break.  Before I left I got the phone numbers for our minister and photographer.

The minister was fine—I left a message at the church to have him call me back and dialed the photographer’s number.  But it was disconnected.  I had a brief flash of fear when I thought about how his website hadn’t been working on my computer—I’d had to find the number in an email since the site wouldn’t open.  But I thought I’d just written it down wrong.  Nope.  Phone line, gone.  Website, gone. $500 deposit?  Oh, yeah.  Gone.

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