check!

Another thing done! I went to my hair trial today and I loved it. And after showing you those two pictures this morning, I searched around online and ended up showing her two totally different images. Of course. So inspiration was a combination of low bun in the back and poof in the front:

source

I have a TON of hair. Even with massive thinning the first thing any hair stylist tells me is that I've got thick hair. They say it in a semi-horrified voice. So she started by trying to replicate style #1 above. It ended up something like this:


poof! So much poof. And hair. I've got a lot of hair people.

Neither of us liked it, and the weight of it was weird felt like it was going to pull it out, so she took it all down and we moved on. What she came up with was this:



I loved it. Everyone in the salon loved it (there were about five other women checking it out). It's comfortable and feels securely stuck to my head. Also I look like I have about half as much hair as in the previous style. Some pictures my sister took just now (a few hours later).



I'll be wearing it with the veil for the ceremony and pictures before, and then taking the veil off and just wearing the fascinator for the reception.

Also, I need to work on actually smiling in pictures and taking front facing pictures for the wedding!

And on a non-wedding related note, here is my sister and my puppy for added cuteness.

hair trial

We're back up at my parent's house this weekend, in part to help work on the yard, but also because I have my long awaited hair trial today.

I've been kind of dreading the hair trial. I don't totally know what I want done with my hair. And I have a lot of it. It's thick and wavy and extra-prone to tangles. My normal hair stylist jokes that I could have dreads in days (and it's true). Also I sort of forgot to ever schedule an appointment with my regular hair stylist to get my bangs trimmed so they are currently longer than I'd like.

I'd like them to be sort of like this picture of the lovely miss zooey.
But possible slightly more refined in the back (just so it sticks).
Wish me luck!

the crazy inside my head

My big-decision, decision making process goes something like this. Have large, stressful decision to make. Do a ton of internet research and decide on what you want and what is possible. Fixate on the thing that is within reach to avoid feelings of sadness about the thing that is wanted but not possible (due to budget, proximity, etc). Commit to item within reach. Fixate on what was actually wanted and second guess decision to settle.

So you can imagine that my wedding planning process has been a lot of fun for my psyche. The perfect example of this is my wedding dress. It was the first dress I tried on, and I bought it because it came in petite, it was enough like the dress I really wanted that I liked it, and it was really cheap. Practical, yes, in theory. So now I've spent months second guessing, buying other random cheap dresses for the reception to make myself feel better about my original purchase, and secretly lusting over the dress I really want in an ideal world.

I had a dream about the ideal dress last night. Which makes me want to barf a little bit. My dress is perfectly fine. And ideal dress, even used, is several GRAND more. In fact, ideal dress used would cost about a 1/3 of our wedding budget. So there you go.

Our wedding is not about a dress. I love the person I'm marrying, and he will love me back even if I think the dress I'm wearing has flaws. And yet something has been set up where I honestly feel like I will regret not having ideal dress on my wedding day.

I could blab on about my irrationality for days, so instead I'm asking you to tell me that you've also felt something totally irrational in this process.

(image from brides)

diy flowers trial

Another project this weekend was for my sister to learn how to make bouquets, since she is going to be doing that the day before the wedding. This actually led to another discovery. Right down the street from my parents is a farm that carries zinnias in a variety of colors. We went there to pick up some flowers for my sister to practice with, but FH decided that he was going to give them a call and see if they had enough flowers that they could be a potential supplier for the wedding. And the woman was thrilled to work with us! She's selling us bouquets of 15 stems for $5. That is literally less than half of what our other supplier is charging. So huge score.

My sister used the domino french spiral youtube video to get the basic idea. She ended up with this lovely bouquet. not the colors or flowers we are going to use for my bouquet, but she said it really helped her to see what she is going to need to do for the real ones.

A few things she noticed...zinnias are really small. We are going to use dahlias as the base for the real thing because this bouquet, which is tiny, took around 30 stems. She also realized that with zinnias at least, it was necessary to wire every, single stem. No question. They were flopping all over the place otherwise.

Overall we were both really happy with the result, and she is glad I talked her into doing this trial before the wedding.

dish washing, part deux

We spent the weekend up at my parents house working on the wedding, and I've got to tell you...having the majority of the wedding stuff out of our house, up there, makes it seem soooo soon!

We took all the dishes we've collected out of their boxes and gave them a proper washing in the dishwasher (as opposed to the lawn washing they previously received). The picture on the left is some, but not all, of the boxes we piled up in their kitchen. In the living room we stuck 13 boxes for our 13 tables (ooo...scary...13 tables...think my marriage is doomed?). In each box went the correct number of plates, napkins, water glasses, three random vases, and a mason jar filled with silverware.

I have no idea how I missed taking a picture of that assembly line, but after everything went into the "shed" which is really my parents old garden shed that my dad, sister,and I converted into my sister and my bedroom in high school. It's now in the process of becoming my dad's office, but in the meantime is the wedding storage room.
My dad covered it all with a painting tarp so it wouldn't get dusty.

As much as my inner control freak feels a little weird about my stuff not being here, it's nice to let go of this project and call it done. There is no reason why I'd need to recount the forks before the wedding. No reason at all.