I introduced the idea of Wedding Jenga in Part 1 and wrote about how M wanted to build a set of his very own.  It took some elbow grease (and also some floor wax), but in one Saturday M and Groomsmen M cut and sanded over 70 game blocks!  They followed directions from this very thorough tutorial, so if you want to build your own I highly recommend checking it out.

Here’s some action shots:

Cut blocks, ready to be sanded

GM M sanded all the edges with a circular sander….

Then M went over them with a hand-sander.

The (mostly) finished tower!

It took these guys an entire day to cut and sand all the bricks.  Even though the sanding got them nice and smooth, we decided to wax the blocks with floor wax before writing on them, to ensure they would slide easily for game play.

Did you groom and groomsmen get involved with any DIY projects?

Card Boxes were something I wasn’t really aware of until I started reading wedding blogs.  After all, does anyone really pay attention to them besides noticing that there’s a place to put their cards in?  Up until a year ago, I would’ve been in the “no” camp.  But then I became a bride, and of course everything changed.

Suddenly, card boxes were more than just a slotted box – they were birdcages, suitcases, and mail boxes.

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That last one in particular really stole my heart, since you know M and I have a soft spot for Disney.

Then, a few days ago my mom called and told me that they’d found a free card box sitting outside my dad’s office.  Never one to turn down free, I asked her to email me a picture so I could decide whether I wanted her to bring it down in a few weeks.

The box in question.

Well, surprise surprise, it looks like a card box.  I’m not sure what I was expecting, since my mom described it as a white, slotted box.  Maybe that a perfect vintage chic box would just show up in my dad’s lobby?

This kind of fabulous doesn’t just turn up. (by etsy seller NHWoodsCreations)

So, decision time – do I keep looking and pick a different card box?  Or should I take the free box and maybe spruce it up a little?  Any decorating ideas?

After our disastrous first experience registering, we avoided our registry for another nine months.  Finally, the “TBA” space on our wedding wedsite was starting to bother me and I realized it was time to finish the job.  Over the last 9 months, we’d left a notepad on the refrigerator and every time we realized there was some household item we were missing (or in need of replacement), we added it to the list.  By the time we were ready to face our registry again we’d added a roaster, muffin pans, immersion blender, picture frames – and after I dropped a bowl in the dishwasher and chipped half our plates – new dishware.  In addition, we’d started weeding out some of our excess “stuff” and trying to establish actual decorating styles in each room.  We now had a better idea of what colors to buy, even if we still don’t know where we’ll be living after we wed.

Ready and willing, we logged onto Kohl’s registry page to start adding items through the website (we were not going to deal with their scanner drama again).  Only to find that most of what we’d registered for the first time had been discontinued!  Annoyed, but still willing to make it work, we started searching through their site to find good brands and well-reviewed items to add to our registry.  Only to find that most of the brands I trusted – Kitchenaid, Black & Decker, Cuisinart – had been discontinued in favor of their Food Network brand.  Now, I have no problem with buying a Rachel Ray spatula, but when it came to buying a toaster oven, I wanted more choices!

Annoyed, we finally decided just to move our whole registry to Bed, Bath, and Beyond.  They had everything we were looking for and more stability and options.  We even decided to head down to the store so we could look at linens and dishes in person and had a drama-free scanning experience!

So, without further adieu, here’s the short list of what we were most excited to register for:

Noritake Colorwave Raspberry Square 4-Piece Place Setting

We decided to forego the fancy china and get a set of plates that we can use for both every-day and entertaining.

5-Piece Nesting Mixing Bowls

I’ve been needing new mixing bowls ever since one of my Bridesmaids burned a hole in the bottom of mine!  I’m hoping the porcelain bowls will hold up better.

Kamenstein® Magnetic 12-Jar Spice Rack

For some reason, M is obsessed with these magnetic spice containers.  I don’t really get it, but he’s convinced these will change our lives for the better.

Microdry® Ultimate Luxury Memory Foam

Ultimate Luxury, you guys.  Ultimate.  It just doesn’t get any better than this.

This registry experience was a complete turn around from the one at Kohls.  Some of it was just good luck, but it made me think about what makes a registry experience go smoothly.  So, to help anyone out there who still has to face the scanner, here’s my thoughts on how to make it less painful:

• Give yourself plenty of time to register before your shower or wedding.
• When you pick a store (or two, or three) watch their inventory for a few months to make sure they have consistency.  If they’re always discontinuing items or constantly changing out their products or brands, you may want to look elsewhere.
• Keep a list close to kitchen/bedroom/living room, so that when you say “Do we have a roaster?” or “We really need some new sheets,” you can jot it down right then.  Otherwise, you may forget when you get into the store.
• Be a united team – decide in advance what colors and styles you like.  There is nothing worse that having an argument in the middle of the store because you like shabby chic and he likes modern.
• Be prepared to compromise.  He can have the magnetic spice rack you don’t understand, if you can register for the cupcake carrier he thinks is useless.

Any other tips for registering?

I just realized that even though M and I set up our wedding registry almost 9 months ago, I still haven’t written about it.  Probably because it was a terrible, terrible experience and I wanted to forget about it completely.  But after some time, retail therapy, and a decision for the better, I’m finally ready to spill.

When it came to registering, we just wanted a good deal.  Someplace that offered registry completion incentives, a wide range of products, and online shopping for people who don’t want to go to a store.  We didn’t want to pick anywhere too expensive, because we’re just not high-end kind of people and we didn’t want to make our guests pay for a $100 salt shaker when a $89 one would do just fine (kidding).  We decided on Kohls because they have a good variety, and we figured we could use extra gift cards/returns money on important stuff – like clothes for me! 

With that in mind, we ended up at Kohl’s on a Saturday with no real preparation other than some people had started asking us about engagement gifts and we thought we’d better pick something out.  We marched confidently to the service counter and prepared to set up our registry – only to be shunted to a kiosk in the corner.  M started entering in our wedding information while I browsed the frames nearby.  Then with our registry set up, we went back to the service counter to get the best part – the scanner gun.

Picture from danandnicolesbigday, Majesty added by me.

Except that when the associate tried to key in our registry information, it didn’t work.  She then spent ten minutes on hold with Kohl’s IT support until finally M convinced her to let him take a look.  It turned out that the last registry hadn’t been cleared out, and with a few keystrokes M had cleared it and entered in our information.  We left the woman with IT support and started off.

The first few items were easy – Kitchenaid Mixer, Dyson vacuum, some sheets and towels.  But once we got past that, we weren’t sure what to do next.  We currently live in a rental house, and our furniture and accessories are pretty mismatched.  And not in a chic way.  We hadn’t talked about what colors to buy or what we would need for our next house.  Coupled with the scanner delay and a poorly timed excursion (right before lunch), we both started to get tense and snappy.  He couldn’t understand why I wanted to register for curtains; I didn’t want to commit to a bathroom set… the whole experience went downhill.  After scanning a measly 15 items we got the hell out and told ourselves we’d figure the rest out online.

What was your first registering experience like?  Did it go smoothly, or did you have some unexpected complications?

Previously, on Love & Lace…

M, ring in hand, decided to propose right before we left to visit my Gran.  But poor timing killed his proposal before we left and we spent the weekend in Oklahoma without the excitement of a new engagement.  The weekend went well, and my gran loved meeting M.  We flew back on a Monday night red eye, and collapsed into bed.  Knowing I had to get up and go to work the next day was less than exciting.

Unbeknownst to be, M decided that Tuesday would be an even better day to propose, since I’d be at work and he’d have all day to set up his proposal.  So the next morning he announced he was taking the day off.  I thought about my schedule for a few minutes and figured I could take an extra vacation day too, since we rarely played hookey and hung out.  Either I missed the look of disappointment on his face or he covered it well.

Around lunchtime we went out for sushi and he started getting really nervous.  How was he supposed to propose with me hanging around all the time?  (Boy logic.)  He frantically suggested that maybe I wanted to work a half day (Nope!) or maybe go shopping (No thanks!) or that I should go to the gym (Really??).  Then he confessed – “I have a surprise for you, but I need you out of the house for a while.  Go. To. The. Gym. Please?”

There was only one thing that could me in my over-excited brain.  This was it.  As requested, I went to the gym for an afternoon yoga class, but I couldn’t really calm down.  I knew that when I got home, he was going to propose.  I tried to tell myself that his surprise could be anything, but I couldn’t shake off the certainty that he was going to propose.  I showered and changed into a nice dress after yoga, then called my sister on my way home.  After two hours of thinking about nothing but my impending engagement I had to tell someone!  Since he hadn’t mentioned it to her, she couldn’t do anything but wish me luck and tell me to call her either way.  Nervous about what I’d come home to, I walked inside…

….to find M, in a t-shirt, emptying the dishwasher.  Not exactly what I was expecting.  When he realized I was home and already dressed, he went into full on panic mode (turns out he’d been expecting me to come home and shower).  He asked me if I wanted to start dinner, while he changed, so I grumpily took over unloading the dishwasher.  After a few minutes, I turned around to find him calling my name and sprinking rose petals down the stairs.  I walked up to the guest room to find soft music playing, candles flickering, and a dozen purple and yellow-gold roses.

M got down on one knee, opened up a box with a gorgeous pearl ring, and said some really sweet words that honestly I barely even listened to.  Instead I was just just taking in the fact that this was really happening.  I started crying and (I hope) choked out a “Yes!” before kissing him a lot and letting him put the ring on.

So our road to engagement didn’t go as smoothly as he probably hoped, but it was a beautiful proposal in the end.

Did you fiance surprise you with his proposal or were you wise to his scheming?  Were there any bumps along the way?

One year ago today, M got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.  It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by since that perfect but surreal moment.  And since it’s our engageversary, I figured this was the perfect time to share our proposal story.

The Setup

I was 100% sure I wanted to marry M from about… oh, three weeks in.  But it wasn’t until after we hit our one year anniversary that the bridal pangs began to rear their head.  We’d attended three weddings that summer and it got the wheels turning about what our wedding would be like (since I was 100% certain that we would be getting married).   Despite the fact that we’d only been together a year, I started turning our conversations toward marriage – and more specifically, when he was going to propose.  It’s not a time in our relationship that I’m particularly proud of.  But like many a “waiting” woman, I began to nag a little and try to get information about when it would be.  Finally, M told me to just back off a little because he still needed some time to think about it.  I was hurt, but it was exactly the slap to reality I needed.  I told myself that we still had our whole lives in front of us and that a few more months of waiting wasn’t going to kill me.  And it kind of worked.

In November 2010, he began dropping big hints – like tweeting, “Shopping for a surprise for Y!”  We had just booked a post-Thanksgiving vacation to the Dominican Republic, and I was certain he was going to propose on that trip.

At the top of Pico Isabel de Torres – a perfect proposal spot, if I do say so.

But M had other ideas.  The trip was fantastic, but it did not come with bling.

Since my proposal-eagerness had caused tension in the past, I tried not to show how disappointed I was.  There was still Christmas, New Years Eve’s, Valentine’s Day, and my birthday coming up and he was still strongly hinting that he had been ring shopping.  I put it out of my mind the best I could, and in January I had something else to take my mind off it:  the unfortunate loss of my grandfather.  My gran decided not to hold a funeral, so my family – spread out across the US – made plans to visit in staggered waves so that she would have people around her for the next few months.  M and I arranged our schedules to visit in early February.  Since some time had passed, my gran was in higher spirits and looking forward to meeting M for the first time.

I fretted a little about whether she would be okay with us sleeping in the same room (even though we lived together) and M took that as a call to action to make our relationship more legit.  He had gotten the ring a couple of weeks back from the jeweler and decided to propose right before we left for Oklahoma.

But this just wasn’t in the cards.  The Friday before we left, we both ended up working past 9pm and his idea for a surprise at-home proposal fizzled.  We hopped on a plane early the next morning and I had no idea what I’d just missed out on.

Up next… (spoiler alert) he proposes.

Did anyone else get on their fiance’s nerves by bringing up marriage too much?  I know it’s not just me – go ahead and spill in the comments!

When M and I first became friends, I spent a lot of weekends at his four-man bachelor pad – watching movies, eating dinner, playing games.  As you can expect from a bunch of 20-somethings, most of these games involved drinking.  The most popular game, though, was something called “Drinking Jenga”, which seemed to evolve out of the Jenga Truth or Dare game.  In a nutshell, M and his friends wrote rules on each Jenga piece, and when you drew a rule you had to follow it.  Some of them involved drinking (hence the name) but most of them were just silly, like: “Speak in an accent for the rest of the game” or “Sit in your neighbor’s lap for one round.”  When the bachelor pad dispersed and M and I moved in together, we somehow inherited the game and from then on it got pulled out whenever we had a few people over and a late night planned:

Breaking out the Jenga at the end of our Engagement Party

Shortly after we became engaged, I spotted this picture and suddenly I just knew…

Photo by Tom Weller; via MomentJunkie

…we had to have Jenga at our wedding.

You can buy giant Jenga sets for around $200, but since I had a groom just itching to do a non-girly wedding craft, we decided to just make it ourselves.  Thankfully, Groomsman M had a lot of tools and graciously volunteered to help M with the project.

The first step, though, was coming up with a list of rules.  Most of our guests are over 21, but we do have a few kids so we wanted the game to be less, well, drunk.  Instead, we personalized our rules so that most of them had to do with us and the stuff we like.  We’re at 55+ rules so far, but we still need another 20 or so.  Want to see some of what we’ve come up with so far?

• Kiss The Bride/Groom: You must give the bride/groom a big ol’ kiss
• So Say We All!: Every time someone drinks, shout “SO SAY WE ALL” for one round
• Meet the Parents: Introduce yourself to the Bride or Groom’s parents
• Purple & Gold: Sing the JMU or Knox Fight Song. If you don’t know either, find someone who does.
• Klepto: Steal a prop from the Photobooth and wear it for the rest of the round (then give it back!)
• Swarley: Give a new name to another player; that player will be referred by that name for the rest of the game
• Doctor Who?: SPEAK LIKE A SUPREME DALEK FOR ONE ROUND, YOU INFERIOR HUMAN
• Fred & George: Get your belly rubbed by everyone currently playing and purrrrrr

We plan to put our giant Jenga game out during the cocktail hour and hope that it’ll be a good icebreaker and keep everyone entertained.

How do you feel about games at weddings?  Did you provide any entertainment during your wedding?

And if you really want to help us out, suggest a rule in the comments!

Another  unexpected surprise that came out of finding my wedding dress was finding my bridesmaids dresses as well!  When I last wrote about what my ‘maids would be wearing, I was still trying to find something that came in a lot of different styles, wasn’t satin, and fit everyone’s budget.  My sister was pressuring me to pick the convertible dress so that people wouldn’t have to get alterations, or a one-style-fits-all dress from a department store because it would be cheaper.  It was November, 6 months til the wedding, and I was starting to get nervous I wouldn’t find anything.

Then, while trying to decide whether to buy my wedding dress or not, my cousin and I started browsing the salon’s bridesmaids selection.  We ran across the Mori Lee Affairs line, which I hadn’t considered before.  I figured they would be much too expensive, but to my surprise, they rang in between $130 – $150.

My cousin was a good sport and tried a few on:

There were some weird faces and dramatic poses, cause that’s how we roll.

So far, so good, but I couldn’t make any decisions until my sister had tried them on.  So when I went up to New York for Christmas, we went back to RK Bridal to try on the Mori Lee line.  The bridesmaid experience was a lot better than the wedding dress experience, mostly because we knew what we wanted and the salespeople left us alone.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures, but we took some ninja photos in the dressing room anyway:

Ninja photos < Any other photos

Good Price?  Check!  Lots of Styles?  Check Check!   I spoke with a few of my other bridesmaids, and they all agreed they liked the look.  My sister was the only one still waffling about the convertible dress, but in the end she agreed that if I liked Mori Lee dresses better then that’s what we should pick.  Yay for bridal power!  With all our ducks in a row, I gave my bridesmaid some guidance about where to buy and which styles to try on and set them loose.  By the end of January, they had all ordered their dresses and we were on track!

So, do you want to see the final lineup?

My Photoshop skillz know no bounds.

Did your bridesmaid dress shopping take longer than you expected?  Which dresses did you decide on in the end?

Now that I had the all-important dress it was time to get down to business about serious things.  Like veils.  And shoes.  (Okay, I was looking at these long before I picked a dress.)

When I first got engaged Iknew I wanted a bird cage veil.  Traditional veils just didn’t do it for me.  I had no dreams of my dad lifting my veil over my face or having a blusher stuck to my lip gloss.  Instead I coveted birdcages like these:

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Fabric flowers!  Hand cut lace!  Tiny rhinestones that look like water droplets!

I was smitten.  Continue reading →