Bachelorette Party Survival Kit

This past weekend, I had the opportunity of celebrating one of my oldest and dearest friend, D's "last weekend as a single gal." The Bride and all of her Maids had a wonderful day lunching and wine tasting and reminiscing. I ducked out before the nighttime festivities but I wanted to give all of the ladies a little gift to get them through the night/next morning so I put together some bachelorette party survival kits. The kits were made up of these supplies -

Water | Sweet and salty snacks | Gum | Wisps | Barbie Band-aids | Vitamin Water : Revive (the hangover cure I live by) | Tylenol | Kinky nip

I love the way they came out. #PerfectlyPink !

Wedding Recap {Wrap-up}

Thank you to everyone that read this week (and always, of course!) I had such fun going through these pictures and I am so glad I finally immortalized our wedding in the blog-o-sphere! Here are some forgotten items from this week's blog posts and a list of all our vendors which are all obviously local to the RI area. -

Forgotten Items - 

I mentioned this briefly in yesterday's blog post, but I thought it ended up being too vague in my explanation...We did not have a cake. My family owns a bakery and provided us with dessert for the wedding as well as the desserts on our table that we toasted with. Fun Fact - They also provided us with calzones and pizza for cocktail hour as well! Another little personal touch.

These are two pictures I forgot to include in my Wedding Recap {Getting Glam/Send Off} post -

I think I forgot to include this one because it's been posted on social media so many times that I think people are sick of it! This is one of my favorites though. I was inspired by the first Sex and the City movie when Carrie's Vivienne Westwood dress is on a dress form the night before her big New York Library wedding to Mr. Big. I knew I didn't want the dress simply hanging on a hanger in a door jam. It was too pretty for that.

This ring was my "something blue." It was ceramic and handmade and one of my first purchases towards the wedding. I thought it deserved a little shout out!

Wardrobe -
1st Dress - LightInTheBox.com
2nd - Vintage | Shoes - Betsey Johnson | Hairpiece | Etsy
3rd - JuliusBridal.com (does not exist anymore and even if it did, I would not recommend going through them.) Shoes | AMIClubwear.com | Ears | DisneyStore.com | Gloves | Vintage

Tuxes - Men's Warehouse

Locations -
Chapel - South Ferry Church, Narragansett, RI
Reception - Roger Williams Park Casino, Providence, RI

Photography -
LeFebvre Photo

Day Of Wedding Coordination - (I can not tell you how important "day of" wedding coordinators are. Especially if you have a venue that is basically just a building and you have to bring in all of you vendors and set up you own decor. Since I did all the planning, I needed people there on the day of to pull everything together and allow me to relax and enjoy the day) - Stela Parties and Events

DJ -
Engagements DJ

Hair - Laura Rothwell
Make Up - Kristen Marrah Lemoine 

Trolley -
Newport Wedding Trolley

*All pages in any frames (cocktail menu/love is sweet sign/Meet the Maids and Men signs etc) all DIY'ed by me on Microsoft Word.

Etsy - 
Programs
Invitation suite
LOVE Canvases
Bouquets & Bouts
Just Married parasol
Chapel door wreath (another forgotten picture)-

Thanks to everyone for reading! #Xo

Wedding Recap {Reception}

Sorry for the late blog post y'all! The Mister, Cy and I just returned home from a week in Delaware! It was a ton of fun, but I am happy to be home to my Mouse (Minnie Mouse, the cat, that is).

Without further ado, here is our reception -

My mama helping me in my cupcake dress (her wedding dress, reconfigured).

#CostumeChangin' - The Mister (& the groomsmen) also had a costume change (which I totally forgot about until I found this picture). He changed out of a white bow tie and vest into a black bow tie and black cummerbund and also changed his shoes into those black and white beauties. They were the perfect change for the party!

The Mister and I's introduction song was "Informer" by Snow. Ya know..to get the party going.

And, our first dance song was "Lucky" by Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat

As you can see, the upstairs of the Roger Williams Park Casino is very Renaissance-y and visually stunning. It was one of the reasons we picked the Casino. Once you left cocktail hour and headed upstairs for dinner, you are basically smacked in the face with the gorgeousness of it all. Which brings me to the centerpieces. It was very hard to choose what these were going to be. I didn't think we could do any type of dramatic floral centerpieces as I didn't want them to compete with the room. So, I decided to follow our loose "vintage" theme and decorate the tables the same way I would decorate a set of floor to ceiling shelves. By piecing things together from various antique stores/items that we found along our travels of wedding planning (so deep, I know).

I still wanted fresh flowers on the tables so I incorporated them within the vignettes. I also wanted pearls every where so I incorporated those as well. We had votive candles within all the centerpieces too, to tie everything together. Having centerpieces like this definitely took a little bit more work/organization but every.single.table. was different and unique and it was worth the work and creativity that I put into it. You won't find this on Pinterest..unless you decide to pin these pictures, of course!

I was pretty adamant about not stopping the party/dancing for anything...including the typical wedding things (cutting the cake, the garter etc) and we did all the parent dances/speeches during dinner. We did a small little "feed each other the cupcake" situation but only for pictures. We specifically told the DJ not to bring attention to us during it. And I did want to throw the bouquet...ya know...to ham it up, of course. Which brings me to wedding tip #8 - If you don't want people wandering off during your reception don't play a ton of slow songs AND don't do any of those traditional wedding "things" where you have to stop the party to do. Those are the times people take smoke breaks and don't end up coming back to dance.

For our second favor, we had a Bloom Bar. We set a table up with different types of flowers, scissors, and twine and let people go crazy. I am still looking for another party to do this again...Not only was it eco friendly, but it also wasn't a chincy favor that people would forget about the next day. It also added more fresh flowers to the over all feel of the wedding since we had feather bouquets.

Another little touch - our wedding bands have each other's finger prints on them.

For our third and final looks (and since we were headed to Disney World for our honeymoon the next day) we both put on our Minnie and Mickey bride and groom ears. And I of course needed another pair of shoes to go with this look.

I finished off the night with a very Housewife-y outfit. A blazer and tea length skirt finished off with the perfect, vintage wrist length gloves. 

Random wedding tip # 9 - When you are planning out your playlist, stick to newer, party/dance songs. The reason why I say this is because the older crowd will dance to anything whereas the younger crowd will sometimes shy away from older songs. I had a strict "do not play" list that I gave to our DJ. Most of the songs on this list included all the typical songs you would hear at a wedding.#NoYMCA/CongaLinePlease

Obviously you can tell it was an amazing party.

Stay tuned tomorrow for a wrap up and vendor list!

Wedding Recap {Costume Change & Cocktails}

You'll have to bear with me with this post, it's going to be a long one! I wore three different dresses on my wedding day (well before Kimmy K even had the thought of sinking her lovely teeth into Kris Humphries). I had the typical bridal princess dress for the ceremony and pictures, then I wanted a shorter one for the reception so I could dance my you know what off! The shorter dress was my Grandmother's wedding dress, then my mom's wedding dress and then my second wedding dress! When I went into the dress maker I told her I wanted to look like a cupcake (surprise surprise!) and she delivered in the greatest way! And of course I needed amazing shoes to wear with said short dress so I decided on a pair of amazing (and sky high, duh) Betsey Johnson's. I also had my glam squad come back to let my hair out of the chignon and put a new headpiece in. This was a H to T (head to toe) costume change.

I had all my (unmarried) bridesmaids sign the bottom of my shoe and who's ever name wore off the most my the end of the night was the one to get married next!

#GlamSquad

Hairpiece purchased on Etsy.

#SkyHigh

The reason why this second dress was so major was because of the back of it. It has vintage buttons running down the whole back of the bodice. Real buttons, not buttons with a zipper underneath.

#CupCakeDress (more on that tomorrow)

Cocktails - 

Our reception venue was two floors. So cocktail hour was downstairs in a very masculine, fireplace-y, dark wood, over looking the park type of room. It was so fun to come up with a decor story for this room!

We had photo props as the centerpiece of all of our tall cocktail tables for our guests to play around with. (Again, before Pinterest ruined photo props for everyone)

#MeetTheMaids&Men - There was a very long blank shelf in the cocktail hour room. It took a while for me to come up with the plan for this space but once I did, I knew it was the perfect idea to give everyone in the wedding party a brief "about me" page. Guests loved finding out a little bit more about all of our friends in the wedding party!

We had two favors...a bloom bar (more on that later) and these tiny, vintage-y picture holder chairs that held the seating assignments. On the back they had our names and wedding date.

#EatDrink&BeMarried - Our cocktail napkins and stirrers had our date on them.

We had cigars with personalized match books set up at the guest book table. The cigars and personalized match books took place of the cigar roller booth that I wanted at cocktail hour. Alas, we DID save some money there. 

Instead of a full open bar, we instead had an open signature drink menu. It included - A Grey Goose dirty martini (my favorite drink), Balvenie Scotch (The Mister's favorite drink), Barefoot Bubbly Rose (my other favorite drink) and a bunch of local RI (Sakonnet Vineyards wine and Narragansett beer) beer and wine. I know open bars are a hot topic in the wedding community. Many wedding experts say that cash bars are tacky and equate it to inviting your guests to your house and making them pay for drinks. I agree with this to an extent. So, wedding tip # 6 - If you can not afford to have a full open bar, at least have one type of signature drink to offer yours guests for free and/or have wine on the tables.

In the cocktail hour room, we had a mantle that was just calling to be decorated. We chose to put up wedding photos of all of our close relatives married before us. It was a big hit.

(You'll have to forgive the quality of the picture above. Our photographer didn't get a picture of it in the frame)

Since our reception venue had a wrap around deck, I knew we needed something to be outside right before you walked into the reception. So, I decided to put a Dels table for our guests to enjoy. Dels is an RI institution, so this was the perfect touch for the cocktail hour!

Random wedding tip #7 - As I mentioned in one of my previous wedding recap posts...you need to walk into wherever you are getting married/having your reception with a very judgmental eye. When we first went to tour the Roger Williams Park Casino and after I did some stalking around the internet for other wedding pictures at the casino, I noticed these fake trees throughout people's pictures. They were literally the grossest thing I have ever seen and I demanded to my "day of" wedding coordinators that they be relocated to the back deck of the Casino where no one would see them. They obliged and as you'll see in our reception pictures tomorrow, there are no fake ficus' accidentally in any of our pictures. Those things should be burned as far as I am concerned...don't even get me started as to how many unknowing brides and grooms had those hideous trees in the back of their first dance pictures. #Yuck