wedding

Latest Obsessions 03.18

| The Bee Life

With March being my favorite month, my latest obsessions are full of more of my favorite things! Craving sunshine, sweet summer vacays while keeping busy in these cold months with scandalous TV shows and swooning over our beautiful wedding memories.
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Our Wedding Pictures. I received the edited photos pretty quick, but recently received all of the raw images, that was a field day going through ALL of those pictures. Most of them being full of bloopers and blinks, good for a chuckle, but there were a few gems in there that I just heart-eyed emojied over. I am planning to tease some more wedding pictures this year on the blog, so get ready!

Red Bathing Suits. I am ready for summer, and I am ready for some new suits! With my significant weight loss this past year – I am feeling great in my body and actually looking forward to bathing suit season! I am loving red/orangey suits, whether it’s this one-piece from Target, or this fun ruffle top with a mixed printed bottom from Old Navy. Athleta also has this strappy red one piece that I have my eyes on.

A Sunny Vacay. So being summer ready and bathing suit ready, I need someplace to soak up some rays! We were blessed last year to be able to go on four-great trips, three of which were full of sunshine, bathing suits and lazy days.  So we are looking forward to hitting the road and getting out of town to soak up some more sunshine in my red bathing suits!

Versace. Well, let me clarify, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story on FX.  We loved watching OJ vs. the People the first of the series, mainly because that happened when B and I were too young to remember! The acting in both of these series is beyond amazing, Darren Criss has transformed into the super creepy Andrew Cunanan and the rest of the cast is uncanny to their inspired real-life characters. Not to mention the music in the show is sooo on point!

What’ve you been obsessing over? What have you been binging to satisfy the cold months and what vacays or summer fun are you looking forward to?

 

 

Image Sources: Versace | Vacay | Timothy-Logan Photography

 

Valentine’s Day – 2018

| The Bee Life

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

The somewhat controversial, holiday that has been called many things – a Hallmark holiday, only for people who have a sig-o, a day to buy overpriced flowers,  yada yada.  But, I love, love!
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This year I decided to show a little extra love to B each and every day of February instead of just the holiday. It’s been fun planning out each day with a new surprise, I wanted to do it for 28-straight days because it’s far too easy for us all to just focus on spoiling our loved ones on this one, single, day — thinking we are in the clear until the next anniversary or holiday.   Some days have been more extravagant than others, and some are simply a text with a memory or a handwritten love note (my fave!)

So regardless of your feelings on the day, I want to send a little piece of my love and well wishes especially to those reading right now. And I hope that you can share a little bit of extra love today, whether it’s smiling at a stranger, buying someone’s coffee, taking out the trash for your boo, giving a compliment to a coworker or calling someone you haven’t seen in awhile.

Don’t forget to share love, today but most importantly… always.

Photography by: Timothy Logan Photography

Tips for Creating Your Wedding Registry

| The Bee Life

Since we are in the prime of engagement season, a lot of you newly engaged ladies and gents will be looking to start creating your wedding registries! This is a super intimidating process, regardless if you’re needing everything new or looking to upgrade existing pieces.  So here are some tips I recently learned creating my own registries, and some tricks I learned after, to help you create your dream registry!
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Tip #1: Take A Walk Either through your house/apartment and make a check-list for each area and start creating your wish list of things you want/need!  Since everything is digital now, I also recommend going to the store, especially if you can’t decide between two stores.  Seeing, touching and comparing products will help make a decision and then no surprises when you receive gifts.

Tip #2: Use Starter Guides/Check-Lists These are pre-populated lists made by your Registries and they’re life savors, more and more sites are creating these.  It wasn’t until I’d already created two of our registries that I found Zola and their check list.  It was a game changer! The checklist allowed me to think of things I needed, ideas for pieces to upgrade, and filter out things that weren’t that important for us!

Tip #3: Star Your Most Wanted Obviously everything is a most wanted item, but reality check, not everyone is going to buy off your registry, and if they do – make sure you get your priority items first! I regretted not doing this sooner, as I ended up returning items in place of ones we needed more.

Tip #4: Take Your Time Since this can be a bit overwhelming, don’t feel like you need to do this all in one day or one weekend, start early, browse, shop, and add as you go and think of things.  You really just want everything final about a month before your first major wedding event (people are last minute shoppers!)

Tip #5: Put a Cap on It After you have your list created you’ll quickly find out what your priority items are, so limit the number of registries you create! This will be a life savor for you and your guests.

Tip #6: Use Zola The part I love most about Zola is the behind the scenes interface for brides/grooms, not only do they have a wide variety of products and brands, on top of money funds that you can create, they also make returns, shipping, exchanging, SUPER EASY AND you can be really secretive about it so you don’t hurt anyones feelings! Their app is easy to use and their customer service is great!

Tip #7: Link to Wedding Website Be sure to link your registries with your wedding website! This will be helpful especially if you plan on using your wedding website URL on all the various invites and serves as one central place for your guests.

Tip #8: Download the App! A lot of the apps for registries make it easy to shop, check-in and have built-in scanners for shopping in stores.  It can also allow you to check-in on pieces that might become out of stock or discontinued (because that happens more than you’d think!)

We had three registries; Target was a no brainer for me just based on shear convenience for myself and guests, Pottery Barn was mainly used for new dishes and few other fun pieces, and Zola was the catch-all but mainly all my dreamy Kate Spade pieces and other fun and functional pieces.  This is one of the fun parts about getting married, so don’t stress, add as you think of things, and get ready for a lot of awesome new stuff!

Happy Shopping!

Local Love – Chronicle Brewing Co.

| The Bee Life

Sharing some local love to a dear friend and one of the finishing touches for our wedding.  Our wedding favors were custom-home brewed beers that were completely created unique to us and our favorite beer tastes! This was especially cool because we got to walk through the whole process from start to finish with Chronicle Brewing Co.  Chronicle Brewing Co. is a home brewing company that has grown from a passion and creates custom brews for birthdays, weddings and other special holidays!
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To kickoff our beer process; we first had a tasting with beers that we like or were in a similar category.  For B, we went with an IPA since that is his go-to, the goal was to create an IPA that wasn’t to hoppy, and finding that happy medium to appease our guests as well as B! For me, I was in between a porter or a stout, something light but still flavorful with hints of chocolate.  With the tasting, Mike the founder of Chronicle Brewing Co. was able to better pinpoint and start creating the recipes for our beers based off of what B and I liked!

For the IPA’s we were able to buy hops from my hometown and Mike used those through the brewing process – which we were also a part of, again being a part of this the entire way! It was also awesome having a hand in determining the ingredients and using parts that were unique to us.  After a few weeks; we were ready to go over and help with the bottling process: sterilizing the beer bottles, applying the labels, and then the actual bottling and sealing with our awesome custom bottle caps.

From there they just needed to sit a little longer, we picked them up just before our wedding, and finally got to taste our beers that were being worked on for months! Guests were greeted by a beer at their table setting ready for them to take home, we loved that we were able to create not only special labels and caps for our beers but having two completely custom beers made to represent B and I’s favorite beer flavors, not to mention they were so delicious!

 

Local Love: Wedding Edition

| The Bee Life

I wanted to share some local love with the amazing team that helped me pull together my dream wedding! And I can’t stop gushing over how perfect everything was, it was so beautiful, I seriously look at pictures and can’t believe that was OUR wedding!
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Bouquet Studio. What sold me on our florist, Amy was her knowledge and love for what she does. We first talked in early 2017 for over an hour; talking through our initial vision before having a lot of details finalized – her suggestions of different greens and florals to use within each of the pieces were spot on.  Not to mention she helped envision a grand space with different centerpieces; allowing me to have some of my dreams fulfilled from a floral perspective, including peonies!

Kelsey Elizabeth Cakes. Quickly becoming a household name in the suburbs of CLE, I’d swooned over KEC cakes and sweets on instagram for over a year plus.  Our compromise was to have a special cake made just for B and I and then give our guests other sweet treats – but we picked the Hand Painted Florals Cake from KEC’s Buttercream Collection; we were able to select colors, the flavors this helped us make a statement especially after topping it with our custom cake topper.

Borrow Rentals. This was definitely one of our splurges, but it was SO worth it.  We really wanted to make a statement with our sweetheart table, which included needing a grand chair – once we toured the Borrow Rentals showroom, we fell for the double wide Settee.  We also ended up renting a few 60″ mirror table toppers to make a statement and play into the space of our venue with the amazing ceilings.  Finally we picked out the Gigi chairs for lounge seating with a cute side table, they were the perfect touches and just enough. Furniture rental for weddings is pure genius.

Campbells Sweets Factory.  We used another local sweet spot to help us fill our hotel Welcome bags with delicious popcorn and also a sampling of cake pops for guests at the reception. The flavors we got; Buckeye, Chocolate Cheesecake and Wedding Cake were eaten right up, they were so delicious!

Little Mondays. Although this isn’t local to CLE – I worked with an artist out of NYC who is a friend of a friends; she helped us create a few custom pieces for our wedding day.  These were also splurges, but for me it’s all in the details. We had a series of our favorite F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes, hand drawn for added accents around our venue. She also created a wedding map for us to include in hotel Welcome bags for guests, sharing the days events and also pieces of our love story!
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We also had cookies that were made and brought from my hometown by a family friend who is very talented at making pretty AND delicious cookies.  She made 100 cookies for us that included our hashtag, wedding date, a W-initial and just a pattern – these were the finishing touches to our sweets and coffee table!

It was all the details that made this special for us, and all the details that came together and blew me away. Not only did these lovely teams help bring our vision to life, the customer service and passion was in line with how we felt for our wedding day! We are so thankful and lucky to have found amazing vendors for our special day.

#EmnBWed – Sneak Peak

| The Bee Life

Happy Belated Thanksgiving! I hope you all had a blessed and loving day with family, friends, loved ones and furry pals.  Our Thanksgiving this year was one for the books and a bit out of the ordinary since we were on our honeymoon! But more to come on that… so since we finally tied the knot, I wanted to give my readers a little sneak peak of our wedding since we are anxiously awaiting the final photos from our photographers – although they have teased us with a few.
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In a nutshell, the day was absolutely perfect.  Everything seemed so surreal, I couldn’t believe it was actually our wedding day – I felt like we were playing dress-up the whole day. But it was so beautiful, everything worked out as planned and our guests seemed to enjoy themselves! The day didn’t seem to go too fast, but there were moments throughout the night where I almost pinched myself and a few times when I just sat down and soaked it all in.
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No one can prepare you for what you feel on your wedding day, the mix of emotions, the wave of people, love and support, the overwhelming feelings and the moments of perfection. I imagined how I would feel, what the day would bring, things I wanted to try and do, but you can’t do anything but live in that moment at that very time, and oh what a crazy beautiful moment it all was.

Cheers!

Photography Credit: Timothy Logan Photography

#EmnBWed – The Final Update

| The Bee Life

In case I have any avid bee readers out there – yes, I’m still getting married, and no, we haven’t gotten married yet! But it’s happening, and it’s happening very soon! I figured I would fill you all in with the latest and greatest, but keeping in bee fashion and not spilling too many deets of the big day.IMG_4765So about a month ago, we hit a few hiccups – and I’m only sharing in case any other brides are reading and have experienced the same thing; and I’m sure many have experienced much worse.  All of the following hit at once; B started a new job, B lost his voice and was diagnosed with a paralyzed vocal cord (still happening, 5-weeks strong), the electric in our garage magically stopped working ($$$), my debit account got hacked and drained my savings account – thank you overdraft, oh and our DJ mentioned he was declaring bankruptcy.   We rallied through most of these and as mentioned, B is still working through the whole paralyzed vocal cord diagnosis, which is pretty crazy, since one day within a few hours he just couldn’t talk. Our awesome and super handy neighbor was able to help us through the garage electrical drama and saved us the money and headaches we would’ve had to manage had we gone the contractor route. And we’re learning to have a little faith with our DJ. But woah, was it a lot, all at once.

So now that hopefully the worse is behind us… here are all the things I’m most excited for, and I think B would probably agree about most after our recent chats.

  • Seeing the reception venue all set-up and all the tables put together – it has all been a vision in my head for well over a year… and I can’t wait to see it all put together.
  • Walking down the aisle to B and seeing him all done up in his suit!
  • My Father/Daughter dance – it’s going to be a tear jerker but that’s all I’m saying.
  • Dancing the night away with B, our family and friends.
  • Eating MY wedding cake and drinking champagne!
  • Finally being B’s wife!

The details have come together quite nicely, there are still a few things to do on the list but nothing crazy it’ll only be a matter of time before I’m straight butterflies, complete ADD, and ready to walk down that aisle to my husband!

Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to share all the details and a behind the scenes look on the blog later this month!

Until then! XO!

Photo Credit: Timothy Logan Photography

Latest Obsessions 10.17

| The Bee Life

So many things lately you guys, and so much fun, but so, so random.
Latest Obsessions 10.17 - thee bee life
Etsy. We have been shopping for wedding gifts for our bridal party, parents and a few other special people participating in our wedding and Etsy has pretty much been our one stop shop.  The ability to customize special pieces for our loved ones, order hand made jewelry and custom prints has me completely obsessed! I can’t share too much, because a few of those recipients may be reading!

Vintage Santa’s. Yup, I know I’m early guys… but I’m so excited for Christmas! And I think vintage Santa’s might be a thing at the #wagarwoolfchristmas this year. This wreath has my name written all over it not to mention this print (from Etsy) has already been ordered.  I wasn’t sad at all when I saw all the decor out in the stores, I will be decorating as soon as Thanksgiving is over.

Summer Clothes… for our honeymoon! Since we’re going someplace warm, I’ve been shopping for a few fun and flirty bathing suits on top of some fun summer clothes! Especially taking advantage of some of the clearance items. Starting to get obsessed with our upcoming trip.

Our Wedding.  Yup! Still obsessed. As the final details are coming into place, the seating chart is nearly set and guest list is final, simply cannot wait with all the warm and fuzzys inside. Final dress fitting is this weekend and then it’ll just be the final countdown! I can’t imagine what our wedding day is going to be like, but I know it’s going to be pretty wonderful and perfect and I can’t wait to marry B.

Photo Sources: Top Left | Top Right | Bottom Left | Bottom Right

Weekend Recap – #EatDrinkAndBeMramor

| The Bee Life

Woahhh! Hello October and hello to a much delayed weekend recap of our friends L&C’s wedding! Since this was the last wedding before THEE wedding, it was all surreal but so much fun. It was especially fun planning our wedding alongside of L&C, relating with the latest dilemma’s, vendor drama and sharing pictures of our dresses and grand plans.  And it was awesome seeing it all come together for the actual day!
Weekend Recap - EatDrinkAndBeMramor
Since L works in the wedding industry, we knew she’d be pulling out all the stops on their big day – this was evident on the ceremony space with their gorgeous pergola framing the alter area, draped perfectly with dried hydrangeas and surrounded by lanterns.  Cocktail hour followed the tear-jerking ceremony as we got to mingle with friends and snack on yummy treats.  The grand reveal into the reception room was stunning.  Mini-tree’s were the centerpieces with hanging tea-lights and the kings table for the wedding party was jaw dropping and the focal point of the room.

From there the evening got started with dinner, toasts and first dances.  The dance floor quickly filled up as we boogied the night away with the crew between stops for drinks or a stop at the photo booth.  We definitely had a lot of laughs on and off the dance floor with everyone!  The wedding favors for the night were home brewed beers made and customized special for the bride and groom by Chronicle Brewing Co. they were packaged in custom carriers for easy take home! (We’re using them for our wedding too!)

It’s crazy to think that our wedding is next! But we’re so excited especially after all the fun we had at these four-weddings we’ve attended this year.  This 2017 wedding season is definitely going to be one to remember!

Cheers to the new Mr. & Mrs. M!