Where's Weezy? (Wedding Edition): September Update!

Less than a month now! Here's what we've finalized in the past month!

JAMES' RING

Labor day weekend I took James shopping for a wedding band. We only needed to check out 2 shops before he found a ring that he loved. And because I've been working such long hours recently, I bought the ring with my own money.

It felt really good to buy James something for a change. He's bought so much for me over the years...

FLOWERS

I had originally planned to pick up flowers for my bouquets and boutonnieres at Trader Joe's the day before the wedding. Have you priced wedding floral packages recently? RIDICULOUS. But then I realized trying to put together floral arrangements last minute is going to put a lot of unwanted stress on me during an already super stressful couple of days. My solution? Paper flowers. Beautiful, inexpensive, and they will never die. Thank you, Etsy!

HAIR AND MAKEUP

I am very fortunate to have friends that are extremely skilled at both of these things! My friend Kelley is going to do a practice run of my wedding hair this coming weekend. The following weekend, my friend Cocoa will try some wedding day makeup out on me.

MARRIAGE LICENSE

We haven't actually picked up the license yet. But we did make an appointment to do so. Orange County has a really handy website. You can fill out the paperwork, set up an appointment time, and select a pick up location all online. It was so simple!

We'll be going to the Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana. Fun fact about this courthouse: The exterior might look familiar to some of you. That's because it doubles as the Briarcliff asylum on American Horror Story: Asylum. Good times. :)

WEDDING DRESS

Had a couple of small hiccups with my wedding dress. It arrived on time and in good condition and everything! But I learned that the boutique (Bonny Bridal of Brea, CA) only does appointments for alterations on Tuesdays 12-7. OUCH. Since I live and work in West LA, this was just not doable. I would have had to take off work 2-3 consecutive Tuesdays to drive out to Brea, which is 80 miles round trip. I'm already taking off work essentially the entire month of October for the wedding and honeymoon. I NEED those 2-3 work days.

So I drove out to Brea to pick up my dress over the weekend, thanked the girls at the boutique profusely (they are AWESOME), and Monday I took my dress to a local alterations place: R & L Tailoring. Their reviews are fantastic! Several reviews even mentioned it was the most reasonably priced place for wedding dress alterations in LA! And Linda, the main tailor, is sweet and very friendly. But even with a sweet shopkeeper, awesome reviews, and "reasonable pricing"; I couldn't help but be frustrated that the alterations on the dress will end up costing me MORE THAN THE ACTUAL DRESS.

Frugal Bride - 0

Capitalism - 1

Aw well. You win some, you lose some. I had initially set my wedding dress budget at $500 anyway. Now it IS a $500 dress. :P

ACCESSORIES

As I mentioned in the last blog, I found my dream shoes a couple weeks back. But I was still needing other accessories to finalize my wedding garb. So I did a bit of shopping while I was out in Brea over the weekend.

I started at Bonny Bridal, but unfortunately they no longer had the hairpiece I had my eye on when I originally tried on my dress. :(

No biggie. I headed over to David's Bridal. Though I hadn't had any luck with their dresses, accessories were a different story. I found a great earring/necklace set and a hairpiece that was 40% off!

To top it off, my matron of honor is loaning me a bracelet to give me my "something borrowed". And I ordered a garter set online.

My wedding day outfit is now complete!

VOWS

James and I had originally discussed with our officiant doing something a little nerdy/a little silly for our ceremony. But the more we thought about it, the more we liked the idea of a short, but sweet, fairly traditional ceremony. Great Officiants had a lot of ceremony samples that you could pull from on their website. We found a style that spoke to us, told our officiant Alan about it, and also set up a final appointment to meet up with him in person. Since we are not having a rehearsal, I thought it would be nice to at least do a "talk through" of the ceremony.

We've also re-started communications with our photographer and the event coordinator at our reception site just to make sure everything is in order and we're all on the same page about everything.

Still to do...

CAKE. I know, I know! This is something I started researching a LONG time ago. It surprises me too that I still haven't finalized something. Our first choice is still just using the bakery at Ralph's Grocery, which is only a couple businesses over from our reception site. We're not planning to do anything complicated with the cake, so I'm sure 3 weeks will give the bakers plenty of time.

We've also got to make some reservations at a restaurant for our rehearsal dinner. (Even though we're not having a rehearsal, we still want a dinner dammit!) We'll also need to get the caricature of us enlarged to poster sized so we can display it at our reception.

Oh! And since pretty much all of my friends and family have seen this wonderful caricature, I feel safe in sharing it with the blogosphere now.