Show Us Your Life: Wedding Party, Flowers and Ceremony

Happy Friday!!! You know what that means! It's Show Us Your Life again over at Kelly's Korner. Everyone is sharing more about their wedding today, specifically their bridal party, flowers and ceremony. Sweet! (Hope you don't mind the overload of wedding posts recently...click here to read about my dress and here for our 4 year anniversary.)

P and I struggled at first with where we should get married. Since I'm from Pa, venues around my home town and the church where I grew up (and attended private elementary school) were obviously in the running. But we currently live in Ma (where all P's family, our current friends, and my Mom's side of the relatives are) so this would make planning easier and we'd have less guests that would need to travel from out-of-town. What tipped the scales for us was that Cape Cod is like a second home to me since I spent the summers there from high school on and am now down there every weekend at my parent's beach house. Since we wanted a summer wedding anyways, we thought this would be a perfect compromise - a great beach-vibe local, close to everyone up here and still personal for me! Yay!

For some reason I always wanted my bridesmaids to wear silver. This might not seem like a summer color, but by combining it with lots of white, sage green and soft blue, we had a light and fresh palette that reminds me a of the water, the sky and the gray wood shingles covering every Cape Cod home. I had 6 bridesmaids (including my sister, the MOH), P had 6 groomsmen (including his best man) and we had one adorable 2 1/2 year old flowergirl (P's niece). I wanted the girls to each wear a dress that they felt comforable in, so I told them to pick any dress in platinum satin from either Alfred Angelo or Impressions Bridal. So glad we did this, they each looked gorgeous! Check out these hotties:

{Linde - my best family friend, Neeve - Paul's sister, Ava - our niece, my sister Laura, me, Jen - my best friend growing up, Kia - my best junior and high school friend, Suzanne - the day I met her at my first job out of college I knew we would be friends for life. Thank you, girls, for being such great friends!}

I know nothing about flowers, so I just talked with my florist about what colors I wanted and she chose the actual blooms we would use based on the season, etc. I wanted the girls' flowers to be a mix of white, pale blue and soft green, so I know they included hydrangeas (these definitely shout Cape Cod), white roses and then some other stuff.



My bouquet was all white with some of those really cute pale green seed pod thingiemabobs. Tied around my flowers was my "something old", a pendant necklace my grandfather had given to my grandmother a very long time ago (they were married for 60 years). It reads (in french) "I love you more than yesterday, not as much as tomorrow."



P wore a white tie and vest with his tux, the groomsmen wore platinum ties and vests, and both our dads wore black. The tuxedos P picked out had a subtle pinstripe running through them, he has good taste:)

{DJ - 1 of P's 3 best friends, our Best Man Kevin - 2 of P's 3 best friends, Paul, Brian - P's brother-in-law, my brother Tom, Brett - 3 of P's 3 best friends, Glen - P's golf buddy. Thanks, guys, for always being there for us!}

And we can't leave out this sweet face! I love this girl to death!! She's now 6 years old, about to enter kindergarten, and has a younger sister and new baby brother. She wore the cutest little white dress with a silver sash to match me:)




We had a full Catholic mass for our ceremony at the most quaint little white church. Two huge white urns with loads of white roses and baby's breath flanked the entrance.



And now, a 4 photo play-by-play of our ceremony!



Thanks for letting me ramble on about our wedding. It was the best day of my life, I could talk about it for hours:) My guess is that next Friday is going to be all about the reception, so stay tuned! Hope everyone has a great weekend.

PS. I was at Michaels last night picking up some paper supplies and they already had Halloween stuff out!!! Please, just let me enjoy my summer, people! It finally got into the 80s here this week, do not take it from me prematurely.

Real Rooms: Casual Elegance

Hey there! Thanks for all your anniversary well wishes yesterday, you guys are the best:)

Let's take another look at a Real Room, shall we? I'm bending the rules slightly for this one since it has a professional designer's touch, but I'm in charge here so I can do whatever I want! Hee, hee...plus, who really cares as long as we can look at some pretty pictures, right?!

This is my Mom and Dad's Living/Family room at home in Pennsylvania. It is the main hang out area (besides the kitchen of course), so its comfy and casual but since they are empty-nesters, it can at the same time be a bit more formal and elegant. Mom had help from local interior designer and friend Tom Gass of Gass Design.

I love the result. There's such a great combination of color, styles and materials in this space. I mean, its got a green accent wall and red leather wing back chairs! And check out that chandelier (lighting is so important)!! There's black and brown, metal and wood, gold and silver, Americana and Asian (a beautiful black sideboard hand-painted with gold pastoral scenes holds the TV and its components)...all flowing seamlessly together to create a really dramatic, yet completely approachable, real room.




So, maybe soon I can start featuring some rooms of people who aren't related to me!? Anyone interested?

4 Years Ago Today...

...on the happiest day of my life, I married my best friend. Isn't he cute?




I can't believe how fast the years have gone by. I guess time flies when you're having fun!




Paul, thanks for being the best husband ever! Thanks for making me dinner practically every night, thanks for putting gas in my car and getting it's oil changed, thanks for letting me leave my paper projects all over the kitchen table. You always make me laugh with your funny voices, singing impersonations, and weird toes. The amount of useless trivia, movie lines and golf hole-by-hole replays you have in your head always amazes me. You are one of the most generous people I know. You are extremely loyal. You are the flat line to my roller-coaster. Even though I hate food shopping with a passion, when you're with me, its fun. Someday (hopefully soon) you will make an amazing father. You have made me the luckiest girl in the world.



PS. Sorry for the influx of wedding-related stuff lately. If you're into it, stay tuned on Friday for more on our bridal party and flowers (thanks to Kelly's Korner Show Us Your Life). Happy Hump Day!

Green Gables

One last post about PEI and then this blog will return to its regularly scheduled programming (and I will finally succumb to the fact that my vacation is over and that I am stuck in the real world until further notice).

Who else has read and/or seen "Anne of Green Gables"? Those who have will undoubtedly share the same love for this red-haired, imaginative, clever, slightly rebellious, nature-loving orphan (and her friends Diana Barry, Gilbert Blythe and Marilla and Matthew) that I do. Those who haven't, I would recommend reading the series (even though they are lately considered "children's books") about Anne, an 11 year old girl orphan. Anne gets sent accidentally to a farm (Green Gables) on Prince Edward Island when brother and sister proprietors, Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, try to adopt a boy to help out around the place. But they decide to keep her (yay!), and she worms her way into their hearts as well as the surrounding neighbors/townsfolk of Avonlea. The books follow Anne's adventures on the island, in school, on the farm and are a great look into life on PEI in the early 1900s.

Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables in 1908. I read all the books when I was probably in junior high or something. And ever since then I felt some sort of special connection with PEI and the beautiful landscape that Anne lived in. I knew I someday wanted to go there. Apparently, loads of other people do too, since Anne fans and sites are one of the island's main sources of tourism. While we were there 2 weeks ago (check out pics of our trip here), we visited Green Gables in Cavendish, the setting for the popular Anne novels.

Green Gables is a circa 19-the century farm owned by Lucy Maud Montgomery's cousins, the Macneill family. Montgomery visited her family here on the farm as a child, and this is where she got all her inspiration for the books. It has been named a National Historic Site and is part of the Prince Edward Island National Park. You can take a guided or self-guided tour through the house and surrounding area (including the mile long trail "The Haunted Woods" and "Lovers Lane" - favorite stomping ground spots that Anne herself named in the books). Some of the farmland around the house has also been converted into a golf course (when tourism ranked higher on the priority list than conservation).

We took the self-guided tour. We had 2 boys (ages 9 and 14) with us - looking back, they might have enjoyed visiting Avonlea, the village of Anne of Green Gables more. It's a storybook town set up like things would have been back in the early 1900s, where characters from the book walk around and you can participate in activities like square dancing, horse and cart racing, oyster shucking, watch pig races, or dress up in period costume for a photo shoot. (This tourist attraction is in Cavendish too, just the down the street from Green Gables.) But I thoroughly enjoyed strolling along the same wooded trails that Anne did (ok, I know its all made up, but you know what I mean!) and seeing the farmhouse as it would have been a hundred years ago.

Here's some pics from the day...I really loved seeing the interior of the farmhouse. Amazingly, the inside rooms offered a lot of inspiration for current home decor...guess some things never go out of style!

{love this muted green painted trim and door}

{i wouldn't mind a hutch like this in my dining room}

{i was really drawn to this wallpaper pattern and color, and you can never have too many lovely white ceramics}

{aren't those wooden hat-box things cool?}

{according to Wikipedia this was Anne's room - it was so crowded in there I must have missed the sign that said this, otherwise I would have taken my own photo!}

{sorry its so small, but a panoramic view of Green Gables from Wikipedia}

Show Us Your Life: My Wedding Dress

Remember Show Us Where you Live Fridays over at Kelly's Korner? Well, we've run out of rooms to look at, but Kelly still wanted to get everybody together on Fridays for some eye-candy and ideas. So today's event is to Show Us Your Life: Your Wedding Dress:) Yay, how fun! Next week's event will be about your flowers and bridal party. PS. next week is also our 4th anniversary!! This time 4 years ago I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off!

I had scheduled one day for dress shopping while I was home at my parent's house in PA over Christmas vacation. Unfortunately, my mom came down with something really serious and wasn't able to go that day...I was bummed, but I did have my sister (the MOH) who has always been there for me and isn't afraid to share her opinions. I also didn't go into dress shopping with any preconceived notions of what I wanted....I just knew I didn't want anything too froofy! I ended up getting the 2nd dress I tried on. Everything after that just couldn't compare.

To tell you the truth, I don't even know the dress' style number or name (how terrible a bride am I?). I do know it was from Forever Bridal and that I loved it:) Simple and elegant, not over the top, comfortable for the hot summer weather, easy to dance in, strapless, with a long horizontal pleated sash (is there a technical term for this?). Here's a pic I found on Google. You could choose from a million colors for the sash, I went with a very light silver. I didn't want a lot of contrast between the band and the white dress, and I had always pictured my girls wearing platinum dresses.



And here's some shots from our wedding day that tell the story of my dress. All the below images were taken by our amazing photographer, Erik Mysliwy of Perfect Wedding Photo.

{I love this triptych of images of my sister Laura carrying my dress from the room where we stayed the night before to the room where I would be getting dressed. Such a cool moment caught on film.}

{waiting to be worn}

{the girls helping me get into the thing}


{my sister-in-law Neeve tying my sash}


{messing around feeling pretty before we head to the church}


{Neeve doing up my bustle before we go into the reception}

{from the back so you can see what the bustle looked like. I spent A LOT of time on the dance floor!}

{spinning around on the golf course...just so you could see the color and how subtle the band is}

Thanks for continuing to host us, Kelly! I've met so many great bloggers through your Friday events.

Speaking of weddings, P and I are headed to upstate New York tonight (we're really into road trips lately) to attend the wedding of these guys tomorrow:

{This is Jason, one of my best friends from college, and his fiance Kim. You can just call him Monkey, I do!}

Can't wait to see these guys and celebrate their big day with them! They are a wonderful couple and we're so happy they found each other. Monkey and Kim asked me to design and make their invites as well, so I'm really grateful to have been a special part of this. (Thanks, guys...see you tomorrow!) And I'll talk to the rest of you next week, have a great weekend!!