Category — wedding

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So the time and place of my wedding was set only a few weeks into the engagement and I was itching to get started planning my dream wedding already.  I wanted to start by finding a color scheme and maybe a theme first so I started hitting up the wedding blogs daily for inspiration.

I knew I wanted our wedding to be representative of Mr. Juicefairy and myself as a couple.  We are pretty reserved, so I knew I wanted the event to be formal, classy and elegant, but not too stuffy.  We have more of a contemporary taste in style so the decor and paper goods had to reflect that.  Nothing too frou frou or pink would make Mr. Juicefairy very comfortable and it was important that he felt just as comfortable as the bride since it was his day too.

Mr. Juicefairy can be a little particular when it comes to his tastes and we have a running joke amongst friends on how he is obsessed with the color blue.  Ninety percent of his closet is blue, the other ten percent is gray and black.  I didn’t see how we couldn’t make one of the wedding colors blue (happens to be one of my favorite colors anyhow) but it needed a compliment color.

Image from my wedding by Jessica Leigh Bozard

From looking at color boards on wedding blogs I realized I absolutely love green flowers.  Like green spider mums, button mums, orchids and hydrangea.  They all kind of fall into the apple green color.  Paired with blue it can be really pretty so I stated thinking a periwinkle blue and apple green could be a nice color scheme … inspired by the color of hydrangeas which I really like.

But once I finally picked out my dress that had to change. I picked out a dress that is ivory… not antique white… ivory.  If you put up a periwinkle blue to an ivory dress it looks like puke.  It actually makes the dress look more yellow.  It was totally not going to work.

Photo: JMFlora found via The Bride’s Cafe

Ok.  I was slightly color obsessed at this point stressing over what I would choose.  I started thinking raspberry and apple green were good choices.  I mean they are beautiful together and raspberry would be very flattering on the bridesmaids.  But it didn’t feel right.  It didn’t feel like a representation of us as a couple.  As a designer you get a feel for colors and vibes colors give off to a viewer and raspberry was not what I wanted … wrong vibe.

Then I came across this wedding.  Navy blue and apple green!  That was it.  Navy is a deep color like black so it could be elegant and refined … like the blue blazers of a prep school.  And the apple green was the cheerful, slightly offbeat color that would keep it from being too stuffy.  I had my color scheme!  Now we were ready to roll!

Photo by Ellie Grover found via Elizabeth Anne Designs

I ended up deciding to incorporate a little bit of a theme into the decor as well, other than the color.  Mr. Juicefairy and I both really really enjoy movies.  We watch a lot of them.  Our first date we discussed movies for about an hour, our second date we went to a movie, our first kiss we were watching a movie, and we now get four (yes, four!) movies at a time from netflix.  So why not a movie theme?  Not cheesy silver stars and red carpets but maybe just some subtle themed items.  I will share more on that later.

So now that was decided I started work on my invitations.

The first three questions that need to be answered when you get engaged are, 1. When?, 2. Where? and 3. And how many people?

Mr. Juicefairy and I liked October for a few reasons.  October usually has very nice weather in Florida.  It is more mild, not sweltering hot, and usually doesn’t rain every day which is nice.  It also happens to be a slower month at my job so I knew I wouldn’t need to rely on anyone to cover for me then.  This was a big deciding factor. We knew that it would make it a longer engagement if we chose October, but that just meant we would have a long time to plan and  might keep the stress manageable. Having a longer engagement also helped us add to our savings so that we could have the wedding of our dreams (OK.  My dreams.)

Now you can’t decide where until you know how many people that you want to invite because you have to pick a venue that can accommodate your party size.  I had always envisioned having a big wedding.  I wanted all of my family and friends there.  Mr. Juicefairy wasn’t even sure he even wanted to get married for a long time, let alone have a big wedding.  A small ceremony at a courthouse would have suited him fine.  But he knew how much I wanted a big wedding and conceded.  This is something that he regretted doing in the latter months of the engagement when I was asking him to help cut paper and crying over the color of jelly beans.  But Mr. Juicefairy loves me and it makes him happy to make me happy so he went with it.  I know … I am pretty lucky.

So we started compiling the list of guests.  After adding and adding and adding and adding we ended up with 170 guests if everyone brought a date and everyone rsvp’d.  So we decided about 150 was a safe bet to plan around.  Yes, this was going to be a big happy wedding!

A photo from the engagement shoot we shot at the Lake Mary Event Center.

Right before the engagement Mr. Juicefairy and I had shot engagements pictures in Lake Mary at the Lake Mary Event Center, where they were to be married.  It was previously an old community center that the city had knocked down and renovated for parties and meetings.  The place was breathtaking.  It sat on a private lake with a pretty green lawn.  The country-estate-looking building also had a rounded room with windows all the way around it, the perfect place for a ceremony.  I remember saying how much I liked it.

After the engagement the event center was one of the first places I thought of, but we started to look into some other venues.  I complied all the information from each place into a spreadsheet so I could compare pros, cons, and most importantly price.  It was shocking how expensive things were right out of the gate.

One of the biggest things that helped us pick our venue, other than how many people it could accommodate or how pretty it was, was whether we could hire our own caterer for the food.  What is a wedding if not just a big dinner, right?  And one thing Mr. Juicefairy enjoys is a nice big dinner!  I wanted to make sure he got better than just hotel food.  The menu items at most places were pretty standard … an overcooked piece of chicken in a chafing dish with a side of watered down pasta.  Not my idea of gourmet and with so many “foodies” in our families we knew that food was where we wanted to spend the majority of our budget.

One day only a mere three weeks into the engagement I called Lake Mary Event Center to ask some questions.  The girl asked what our wedding date was because they usually book 18 months in advance and wanted to make sure they were even available!  18 months!  She checked availability and saw that the September, October and most of November was booked with the exception of October 31st — Halloween. “We’ll take it!”

I have no qualms with getting married on Halloween.  It is just another day, specifically another Saturday.  Mr. Juicefairy and I were confident that we liked the venue and we really weren’t concerned with the oddity of getting married on Halloween.

Well the date did end up being a slightly annoying topic.  I really got tired of people asking “Oh, is it a themed wedding?” “Should we wear costumes?” “Are the colors orange and black?”  It was actually really annoying.  I also forgot about the couples that had kids and wanted to take them trick or treating. They seemed shocked that I didn’t think about that when picking an evening ceremony.

In the end it wasn’t that big of a deal though and I was glad that we picked our venue and our date. We liked that the venue was in the area where Mr. Juicefairy grew up and on the same private lake he lived off of in college.   It really ended up beautiful like I had pictured it and the weather was perfect!

It is nice to be finally married to Mr. Juicefairy.  All of the anticipation, anxiety and excitement came to a climax and the details that had been so delicately planned were put into motion.  Everything came together to create the most perfect day!

Because some of my readers were attending my wedding I was careful not to give away much on juicefairy.com.  But now that it is over I can to share my memories of the planning process, how the whole event came together and of course my budget.  I just hope this is something you enjoy reading.  As the pictures come back from the photographer I will slowly be posting them.

I should probably start with the proposal.  I posted when I got engaged but not the details of what happened.  It isn’t necessarily the most romantic story you will ever hear but it certainly was fitting for the two of us.

At a certain point in our relationship we had decided we were in it for the long haul.  We were living together and our careers had been developing nicely and we knew it was a matter of time before we made the next inevitable step … when Mr. Juicefairy was ready.  As usual I was ready before him.

Jokingly, I had cut a picture out of a magazine of a ring I liked and put it on his pillow.  When he saw it his reaction was, “You like this?  Isn’t it a bit gaudy?”  Surprised, I asked what he thought I would like and he said, “A nice solitaire.”  That is nice but not exactly my taste.  He was going to need some help.

We ended up randomly going to a jeweler one weekend so I could show him what I liked.  I picked three that I liked a lot but one was my favorite.  I tried to disguise my favoritism of one so that he could make the choice in the end but I don’t think I did a very good job hiding it.

The ring I really wanted and got!

I had a feeling a proposal was coming but had no clue when.  One day he called me at my job and asked if I wanted to go to the library with him to renew the his card after work.  He said we could take a nice walk downtown and do that while we were walking.  I was tired that day and really didn’t feel like he needed my help with that so I told him to go ahead without me.  A few hours later he called and said that a couple had called and wanted to reschedule their engagement shoot to that night at Lake Eola.  I had been having a long day at work and knew I might be home a bit later than usual so I encouraged him to reschedule for a better time.  I was tired and just wanted to cuddle on the couch with the remote. When I got home he urged me to come with him to take a walk around the lake at Baldwin Park.  He said he needed to get a work-out in.  Not knowing what he was trying to set up, I whined that I just wanted to relax and to go ahead on his own, but then I felt a little guilty for saying no.  So I grudgingly put my sweats on and went with him.

As we were walking I specifically remember talking about a friend that recently had gotten married.  I was a little envious because I wanted to get married.  In retrospect, if I had known what was going to happen next I would have kept my mouth shut.  Because then Mr. Juicefairy stopped to tie his shoe and when he got up he hugged me and asked if I loved him.  I hugged him back and said yes, thinking he was about to give me bad news or something.  As I was hugging him I said “Are you ok?  You sound weird?”  He then backed up and stuck the box with the ring out in front of me and asked me to marry him.  I was ecstatic.  He had not only proposed but had gotten me the ring that I had really wanted.

He also had surprised me by telling me that my mom knew and that we could go over to her house so I could share the news with my mom and sisters and show them my ring.  That meant a lot because he knew how much that would mean to me.  He was willing to let them celebrate with us right away, just to make me happy.

From here started the engagement which lasted a year and a half.  Planning that wedding was probably the most fun I have had in my life (marrying the person I loved was nice too ;).  I got to be creative and crafty and finally got do something all Mr. Juicefairy and me.