The Oyster Wedding: Recaps are Coming

I may or may not have jumped for joy upon receiving our digital files, because it means one thing: I can finally begin recaps!

Before I begin to re-experience of the wedding on your behalf, let me show you just a few of the wonderful works of art given to us by our photographers:








We've been married several months now, and there must be a bunch of you who weren't yet hanging around when I got married... last summer! For those who might not know me, I've been blogging for Weddingbee since March of last year, and our wedding was originally an outdoor one before we came to our senses. My tastes tend toward the classic, and I only had a couple of DIY projects. I talked a little about being in an interracial relationship, and what it would mean for my husband to jump the broom with me.

I wrote about the importance of family, what it meant to be getting married without a father, and how awesome it is to be from several generations of amazing women. Choosing a dress was difficult, for all sorts of reasons, so I designed it myself. I even told you what I was planning to wear on our honeymoon. Besides my dress, my most difficult wedding planning decision was finding a photographer, but I managed to find two: one for our wedding and one for my bridal portraits.

One of my favorite things about writing these recaps (I've written some of them in advance) is seeing all of my wedding plans come to fruition, and contrasting the reality with the ideas I initially had. Prior to the wedding, I wasn't able to finish posting about all our chosen details and wedding specifics. I hope you don't mind if I include some of these in the recaps. It's been so much fun to see the result of 18 months of planning and hard work!

Blogging for Weddingbee has been such a nice addition to my wedding planning process, and I'm happy to have something to write about again! We had a wonderful wedding, and I can't wait to share it with you!

*Photos by Chicago based photographers, David Wittig Photography.

The Oyster Wedding Look: Inspirations

While I was planning, I spent so much time describing to you my process with the dress, that I never really shared the rest of my bridal look with you! I figured I'd let you know how I came about my bridal "look." It's interesting how, in the planning of this wedding, I drew my inspirations from soooo many different places.

In general, my look evolved quite a bit. Originally, I was thinking to have an outdoor wedding, with a form-fitting lace dress and my hair down with a flower in it. This look is captured pretty well by America Ferrera's character in Our Family Wedding, actually (well, at least on the cover -- savvy readers know that in the actual movie, her hair is up):

photo property of 20th Century Fox

photo from VivirLatino.com (which has a pretty good & insightful review of the film)

But you know what happened to those plans. We shifted to a formal, black tie wedding, so I changed my look to fit that -- and I'm so happy I did!

Hair:


I initially planned to wear my hair down, but started freaking out about potential humidity or heat ruining it and having my curls fall out (which always happens). I couldn't deal with the uncertainty of that; also, I really, really love the "classic" bridal hair bun. My hair isn't quite long enough for that, but I showed my hairdresser some inspiration photos anyway. We contemplated adding a hairpiece, but my hairdresser said I could trust her, and she'd figure it out.

Here's the inspiration for my hair: something formal, but loose enough to be "romantic." These photos are from Project Wedding.

photo by Natalie Buketov for Natalie Buketov Bridal Makeup Artistry & Hair Design

photo from projectwedding.com

from Project Wedding reader ChildofHope, who did her own hair

Makeup:


This is a pretty contentious issue. I plan to write more about this later, but my time spent trying to find a makeup inspiration was the time I came face-to-face with the lack of ethnic representation in bridal magazines. Sure, I could turn to Essence or something for some photos of black women in beautiful makeup, but that wasn't the point; and besides, most "celebrity" looks don't come close to being what I call "bridal." I wanted something very subtle, not too colorful, and very elegant. Here is what I came up with:

uncredited photo for Entertainment Weekly/EW.com; photo from concreteloop.com

If you are going to find a celebrity whose makeup you want to emulate, it helps to find someone with a similar skin tone and eye shape to yours. My hairdresser (who is also my makeup artist) thanked me profusely for finding a celebrity who looks, at least on paper, similar enough to realistically imitate.

Jewelry:
My accessories were very special to me, especially since, aside from my ring, I only had two of them. My idea was to have a beautiful dress, one pair of spectacular earrings, and some kind of flower. I remember staring at this photo for a long time, and it was a prominent image in my mind when I was finally putting together my wedding look. Except, I wanted the earrings to be larger -- I have a larger head!

Photo by Aaron Delesie; featured at Style Me Pretty

Veil:


I do believe it completes the bridal "look" to wear something on your head. Here we have the bridal veil: the timeless symbol of innocence, the veiling of the bride, the... whatever, I so don't care about any of that. I wore a veil because it photographs well. Shallow? Maybe. But it's true; I only thought of a veil after seeing photos like these:

by Christian Oth

There goes Darcy again (photo by Holger Thoss).

These two are from our photographers, David Wittig Photography:




We originally planned to add some beaded lace to the edge of the veil (as shown in one of my favorite dresses), but the sparkles ended up being too heavy. So we went to my other inspiration, which was this beautiful drop veil worn by Anne Hathaway's character in Bride Wars. I've watched that scene where she walks down the hallway so many times!

Photo by Claire Folger from her website

© 2008 Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises

This veil is incredibly simple; it just attaches to your hair with a pin. No pleats, no sparkles, and it's most formal when it's very, very sheer. You can find beautiful drop veil examples all over the Bee... but the most famous "drop veil" bride right now is probably this person.

Shoes:
I had a pair of cute bridal shoes, but during my bridal portrait shoot, they were so unbelievably painful that I ditched them. I spent several weeks trying to find shoes that were in my size, comfortable, and the exact heel height as the first pair (because the dress was already finished by that point, and it was made to go with those original shoes -- learn from me, and think of this before you have your dress hemmed!).
It was an arduous search, but it turns out that a pair of black espadrilles in my closet were not only the exact perfect height, but were comfortable enough for all-day wear. However, they are made of straw and canvas and look ridiculous, so there are no photos of them. I changed into a pair of Born brown leather sandals for dancing. You have to do what makes you comfortable!

So there you have it, The Look. After the wedding, I have this whole file folder full of photos, marked "Wedding Beauty & Fashion." It has been so much fun to compare and contrast this with how I actually looked. With so much time gone by, it's amazing to me how much time and effort I spent on decisions that seem like no big deal... but it was all worth it!

How did you find your wedding inspirations?

An Abundance of Albums, Pt. 2

This installment of my little series marks the arrival of our "official" photo album from our photographers.

I'll be completely honest here and say that I initially was not emotionally invested in this album, which is probably really sad and not something most photographers would want to hear.

I'll fully admit that when we chose our photographers, we placed our priorities more on the personality of the photographers and their actual photos than on the albums (what good is a beautiful book if you don't love the photos in it?). Their albums are definitely a part of their artistry and they sell some beautiful products, but we were really stretching to get them at our wedding, and so we could only afford the smallest album they offered. In fact it was so small (just 30 small-ish photos, although beautifully printed) that I just couldn't get excited about it. Kind of like when you see something expensive, and you love it,  but you know you can't have one, so you don't let yourself think about it too much.

Luckily, a delay in processing led our photographers to offer us a slightly larger album, which we were excited about. This is good news for all those photographers I offended a minute ago, because this meant that in the photo-choosing process we really did become attached to this album. This album is very simple, with just one matted image per page, so we decided that it would be more of a "showcase" for our most favorite shots. When I make a larger scrapbook, I'll use that to really tell the story of the day.

It's a Cypress album and it is very beautiful. My husband, who has a graduate degree in printmaking, turned it over and over again and declared himself especially impressed with the craftsmanship. Here are some details:

This is the box that the album comes in. The album is inside, and covered with translucent vellum paper.





Our names are embossed on the cover:


You can see the deckled edges here. They are wonderful to touch, also.




I forgot to get a photo of the whole book before I put it away, but it looks very similar to this one.

Though the album is lovely and its presentation is wonderful, there are a couple of things I'd change if I could. Maybe some of you can learn from my mistakes:

First, I declined to order the Cypress fabric swatches, which is totally my fault. The "Platinum" color, which I expected to be, well, platinum, is a brownish beige; it's still pretty, but quite different from what I expected. Second, the images aren't quite in the order we envisioned them (we were supposed to have a chance to check it before it went to print, but that somehow never happened), which bothered me at first.

I'll be honest and say that these issues are magnified, because by the time it arrived, it was a loooong 5 months from the time we placed our order (we were quoted 6 to 8 weeks). Apparently this is a common experience among brides, so you've been warned! Of course this meant that our digital photos were delayed as well.

It really didn't matter much to me (I mean in the long run, I won't remember how long it took) but I seriously didn't expect to be so excited to get our wedding album, and I certainly didn't realize I'd be so concerned about the digital photos!

Is there anything you became unexpectedly attached to during your wedding planning process?


*Part 1 of my album adventure describes our basic 4x6 book, which you can see here.

An Abundance of Albums, Pt. 1

Hello, Hive! It's Mrs. Oyster here, the one who got married a looong time ago. I'm back... almost. :)

While waiting for our digital photos, I've been starting out in our quest to DO SOMETHING with these hundreds of wedding prints. The first step was deciding to put the proof images in something other than a shoebox. (If you haven't booked your photographer yet, proof sets are just prints of every photo from the wedding.) Our photographers offered the proofs in two formats: a pre-printed book and the loose 4x6 prints. Personally, I prefer the prints, because I love that we can take them out and frame them if we want. Later, I overheard one of them talking, and she said that customers who order loose prints often complain because they are unwieldy, and because family members and friends will come over and steal one or two of them.

Well, we had no such problems, mostly because we never told anyone that we had any prints, and because our house is too messy to invite anyone over to. Also, the photographers made it very easy for our geographically spread-out family to buy their own prints online, so that worked out well. And in the beginning at least, I love that we have them to pick up and look at when it's time to do things like choose album shots, select photos for enlargements, or whatever else (like writing Weddingbee recaps!).

But eventually, I needed to put the prints in a format that made it easier to look them over. I had put them in a cute photobox, but after we'd selected images for the album, I figured we needed a book for long-term storage.

Aaron Brothers was having a sale, and I met another recent bride there as I was checking out. For 50% off their regular price, I purchased their "5-up" Trevor album, a refillable album which holds 500 photos. It comes with 50 sheets, which hold 10 images each (5 per side). I bought 4 extensions, which brought the album's capacity to 900.



The cover has a 4x6 insert, so I just picked a photo and stuck it in there. It immediately looked great -- this was already way too easy.



The album's black pages are a nice backdrop for the images, and definitely a good fit for our photographers' style. Almost immediately, I was struck by how dramatic the photos look on the pages, even behind plastic. I also loved how the 5-to-a page album displays both horizontal and vertical photos. It worked very well for keeping photos of one theme on a page:





This is a post album, which means that when you're ready to add pages, you just lift the flap in the back and unscrew it. The packets of extra pages come with their own extension posts. There is a little cardboard/vinyl binding to cover the edges, but it is very cheap and came off before I got the album home. As it turns out, it doesn't matter -- it has no role in the structure of the book, and since I nearly doubled the book's original size, it wouldn't have fit anyway. Here's the spine of the book, looking a little full:



It took me a couple of hours to fill the album, which was a nice project for a chilly Saturday afternoon (especially when accompanied with some hot tea and an episode or two of Murder, She Wrote... I love that old show!). I left a few blank spaces here and there so that I could keep a nice flow to the album, and group photos together by theme and by category (Getting Ready, First Look, etc.).

After an extra 30 pages, the album is full to the brim with over 800 photos:



Mr. Oyster liked that I had done this. He's not very computer literate (by his own admission), and upon seeing this album, confessed that he felt looking at the proofs online was "too much work." Well, I certainly have no problem looking at images online, but I've recently gotten back into the idea of having physical photo albums after storing all my photos digitally for the past ten years or so.

The next album I am likely to work on is what I call our "engagement album," where I plan to put the engagement and rehearsal dinner photos. The next album to arrive, however, was our "official" wedding album, and I'll write about that one next.