Wedding Planning - Post #5 - Picking Colors

Planning so far hasn't been too difficult.  I picked out my dress pretty fast, I know how I want my hair, picking our venue was easy, photographer was a no brainer.  Picking out our wedding colors was super easy too.  It's so nice to plan a wedding, and life together, when you're doing it with someone with the same likes and dislikes and similar philosophy on life.

That's getting a little deep to talk about picking out our colors - but it was a no-brainer.  We both love blue and the ocean and the bright colors that are associated with the beach so we wanted to stick with that.

Here are some items in our two colors - a nice royal blue and a pretty teal.  Pretty easy decision.  Check that off our list!  I sent this picture to our friend who is designing our invitations and she'll use them in the invites as well.  I have my shoes already, too!  They don't match the colors above exactly but they are in the same family.  I don't want to be matchy-matchy with all the decor.  I'm keeping the shoes secret until the wedding day.

I've also started the process of finding our caterer.  Ugh.  What a long project this will be.  There are so many thing to consider and because the brewery isn't a typical event space there are added factors.  Tables - the brewery doesn't have tables so we have to rent them.  Do we rent them from a table rental company or do we rent them from our caterer?  The patio doesn't have seating at all, do we need a picnic bench out there or just a tall cocktail table like we'll have inside.  There are 30 barstools at the venue already, so we're okay on seating.  It's a cocktail event, if everyone is sitting we have a problem, mingle people!  Dance!  Hopefully in a future post, soon, I'll be able to say that we chose a caterer.

Wedding Planning - Post #4 - Honeymoon!

We did things a little backwards.  We picked our Honeymoon location before we have even decided on a caterer and we knew before we even booked SweetWater Brewery.  Really, isn't that the 2nd best thing about a wedding - 2nd only to starting the rest of your life married to your best friend?  The next 100 or so days is going to be somewhere along the range from semi-stressful to very stressful and a honeymoon with no stress is the light at the end of the tunnel.

Stephen and I had been checking the online deal sites for their trip deals.  He checked Groupon all the time and I was always checking Living Social.  There were some amazing deals out there - 7-day surf trips to Costa Rica to 5-day spa vacations to the US Virgin Islands.  The problem with most of them was how quickly we'd have to use the deal.  Most of them expired by the end of June or July.  We didn't want to rush to get married that quickly!

One day Stephen found an all-inclusive, 5-night trip to Jamaica at a great price, less than $1000.  (I'd rather not share the exact cost of our amazing deal.)  The deal has to be used by October.  We jumped on it.  So there you have it - our honeymoon is booked!

Photo from Coyaba Resort Jamaica website

We will be spending our Honeymoon in Montego Bay, Jamaica at the Coyaba Resort Jamaica.  The resort is a privately owned hotel with 50 rooms, all with an ocean view.  It has all of the benefits of an all-inclusive resort, without the large crowds that we expect will be in Jamaica in August.  The resort has three restaurants and bars, a pool and a stretch of private beach. They even have a really pretty dock with chairs all the way out to the gazebo.

We upgraded our room for $25 a night to the Ocean Junior Suite which will be a larger room and balcony with a sitting area.  We never upgrade our rooms, but we'll only go on one Honeymoon, we wanted the best.

All of our non-motorized water activities are included in our room rate and we can pay for everything else.  We can take day trips from the hotel to experience more of the island.  I can't wait!  Another bonus is that the resort is only 10 minutes from the airport so we aren't going to spend all of our first day traveling.

Photo from Coyaba Resort Jamaica website

We leave for our trip on the Sunday after our wedding and we'll be returning the following Friday.  That gives us the weekend to get back to normal, let Mabel know we didn't leave her forever, and enjoy being husband and wife in our own home.

Click here to see a photo gallery of the resort.

We booked the stay long before we booked our plane tickets.  We watched AirTran and Delta for about 2 weeks on Bing and Kayak.com before making our decision to buy.  Prices were steady for about 3 weeks on AirTran and Delta dropped to match so we jumped on the Delta tickets.  We'll get our Skymiles for the trip for the same price we would have paid on AirTran, without Skymiles.  I'm glad we waited to buy.  I'm so loyal to Delta.

If anyone has an excursion that we must do while in Jamaica, let us know in the comments.

Wedding Planning - Post #3 - Hotel block

If look at everything that needs to get done on my to do list I'll freak out, so I'm only looking at one thing at a time and hoping that it all works out in the end.  This week my focus is going to be a caterer or bakery who can do our dessert only reception.  I have a feeling that a bakery only will have a problem with the set up, take down and manning of the table during the event (if needed) so I might have to go with a caterer.  I'm not sure.  Because I know a caterer will have linens and serving dishes, plates, napkins, etc I'm contacting them first.  Wish me luck.

While that seems like a daunting task for this week, I was able to secure our hotel for out of town guests.  Things I can do at my desk during a lunch hour are my favorite part of wedding planning.  I wanted to find a hotel close to the brewery but also close to other things to do for everyone while they are in town.  The reception is only three hours long and I hope family and friends stick around longer than that.

After some research I found the Artmore Hotel in Midtown.  It's located on West Peachtree close to all of the bars, restaurants and museums in that area.  It's also across the street from a MARTA station which will be perfect for the out of town guests who will be flying in.  They won't need a taxi or a rental car to get to the hotel.  Bonus!  That area is so walkable, too.  It's really one of the best parts of town.  Piedmont Park is only a few blocks away as well.  For the reception night, it's only a three mile taxi ride away.

Photo from Artmore Hotel Reservation website

Rooms are really reasonable, especially in the heart of Midtown, and they will include a breakfast for the guests.  I've heard the rooms are giant, too, from a friend who had her guests stay there for her wedding.  I love their patio, it looks great.   It's a trendy hotel, not your typical Hampton Inn or something similar, which is perfect for us.

Rockstar Shopping Party at fab'rik

I'm sure you've seen those fishbowls at checkout counters of fast food chains or clothing stores for you to drop your business card for a chance to win something.  I see them all the time.  I never drop my card because I never feel there is a chance for me to win something.  I'm not sure what made me drop my card one day when I was shopping at fab'rik for a friend's birthday gift, but I did.  About two weeks later I got an email from the shop letting me know that I had won a Rockstar Shopping Party at the Atlantic Station location.

The party meant I got to invite 10-20 of my friends to come to the store, after hours, for a private shopping party.  Everything in the store was 20% off, even sale items.  They even had refreshments for us.  I should have taken pictures.

Last night was my party and it was one of the best shopping experiences of my life.  Everyone one there was a great friend.  We all dropped our purses on the chairs in the store and went to town.  It took us about 30 minutes before we got into the fitting rooms, we made sure to look at all the options.  Having the entire store a group of girls who know each other was so much fun.

Once we got into the dressing rooms it was organized chaos.  We each had so many different dresses and shirts to try some of us couldn't even fit it all in one dressing room!  It got to a point where everything we tried on we came out of our fitting rooms and showed the collective group.

Some dresses fit like a glove, some fit me horrible.  All of us have pretty different body shapes and sizes so it was also fun to see how one dress or shirt that looked horrible on me looked on someone else.

We all left the store happy.  I ended up with a maxi dress, of course, two tank tops and a long sleeve sheer top.

While shopping and spending time with some of your best friends is always fun, the staff at the store made the experience amazing as well.  There were 4 girls in the store to help us and they waited on us hand and foot.  Our drink glasses were always full, they had fitting rooms for us immediately and didn't make us carry arms full of clothes around the store and they helped us in the dressing room too.  They took our "no's" out and brought new sizes, helped with new suggestions and had fun with us.

It was such a great night, I hope someone else I know wins one day!

*fab'rik did not pay me or give me any sort of compensation for this review.  All opinions are my own based on my shopping experience in the store.

Wedding Planning - Post #2 - Reception Venue

The part of weddings that most people remember the most, not the bride and groom, but the guests, is probably the reception and the venue.  Was the party a good one?  Did they have good alcohol?  Were there enough bathrooms?  Did we have fun dancing?  Positive answers to all of those questions is important to us in addition to making the reception reflective of our personalities and us as a couple.

When trying to figure out where to host our reception we tossed around a bunch of ideas.  Some were too expensive and others just didn't have the right fit.  The one that was just right (I feel like I'm writing a children's story) was SweetWater Brewery.  We love their beer.  If you haven't tried one, run out to your local pub or shopping location of choice and pick up a 6 pack.  Our favorites are the 420, the IPA, Blue and Sweet Georgia Brown.  Also, if you're paying attention, we ran in the SweetWater 420 5k over the weekend.

Check out the new wall mural on the addition to the brewery!!  That is a balcony on the right of the mural  - the place is huge!

SweetWater is a local, Atlanta brewery that has been a big part of my time here in Atlanta and Stephen's as well.  The beer can be found all over Atlanta, sometimes even in my office's keg, and only in 6 other states.  Even with the expansion they aren't planning to expand distribution yet.

With the new addition came a few neat spaces.

This is the entry lobby if you were to go into the new building.  Look how small Stephen looks!

This is the new brewery side.  You used to be able to walk through this area when it was only the space to the right (with the brown floor) but now that it's so big and the equipment is so expensive and fast, the tour doesn't walk through there anymore.  Instead you get to view the area from the new event space through a window.  Pretty impressive expansion.  I couldn't get it all in one shot.  

Here is the new event space - can you believe it?!  You can't tell in this picture, but the space goes to the left quite a bit and then back past the bar too.  Hundreds of people can fit in this room - no problems.  The windows in the right of the picture are the windows to the brewery where I took the picture above.  

I'd like to say that we rented this brand new space for our reception, but we did not.  Our guest list, even at the most we would ever invite wouldn't fill this room.  If you scroll back up to the picture of Stephen in the lobby, out the window you can see another part of the building with window walls and an outdoor patio.  THAT is where we'll have our reception.  We will have a big space inside and a pretty large patio all to ourselves that evening.  I don't have any pictures of that space which is surprising because I've been there countless times for the brewery tours.  But I guess that will make it more special for the post after the wedding.  

There you have it.  We're celebrating our union in a brewery.  Sounds about right.  Pretty perfect if you ask me.  

Wedding Planning - Post #1 - Hair Piece & Photographer

Well, here it goes - wedding planning.  My lunch hours are now going to be spent doing wedding related stuff - I'm calling them Wedding Hours.  For the next 4 months I'm going to be 100% focused on our wedding.  Can I do it all in 4 months?  I'm going to have to!  Luckily I have some amazing friends with some equally amazing talents who I can lean on.

Before we were even engaged we knew who was going to photograph our wedding - Jenn Hopkins Photography.  We met in college and she is one of those people who make your life better.  I've been lucky to stay friends with her so many years after college and I've watched her business take off.  She was the photographer for my step sister's wedding last May, my dad's wedding last New Year's Eve and she shot our family photography session before each of those events on top of countless other events for mutual friends.  She is our family photographer.  Stephen and I knew we couldn't have a wedding without Jenn.  She was as important as every member of our family.

If you haven't been to her website or blog, please check them out.  She's based in Jacksonville, but she can travel - and she's 100% worth it.

One of the next steps, many next steps, is to decide where I'm going to get my hair and makeup done for the wedding day.  There are a million place to choose, but with only 4 months until the wedding, I have to work fast.  I am in the process of scheduling a trail session with a hair stylist and makeup artist at Mariemarie Salon.  They are located between the house and Decatur where we'll be getting married so it will be perfect.  I'll update later after my trail runs!

If you see me in my daily life I rarely wear my hair up.  I want our wedding day to be special and I want to have my hair done up in an updo.  Along with that, I want a flower hairpiece.  My friend found an awesome shop on Etsy and I just purchased the most gorgeous hairpiece, ever.

The shop is Cultivar and can be found here.  The listing for my hairpiece is no longer on the page, so I pasted the picture for all to see.  I'm in love.  It's about 3" wide if that gives you a better idea for how big it will be on my head.  Soon I'll post some ideas for my wedding hair.  

SweetWater 420 5k and Festival

Another 5k under my belt.  My goal is to keep improving on my time with each race, and I'm doing that, but to be honest, not as much as I wanted or thought I would.

Stephen and I ran the SweetWater 420 5k on Candler Park Saturday morning with about 2500 of our closest friends.  I heard that the course was hilly and boy, that was an understatement.  There were some pretty serious hills at about the half mile mark, the 2 mile mark and just before the finish.  It was a gorgeous route that we took, the houses are pretty and the park is really nice, but I hated the finish.

Most races you can see the finish coming and you know to give your last big push.  With this race the last quarter of a mile or so is up a hill and then you round a corner to the finish.  Unless you're tracking your distance on your own GPS, there was no way to know that you were approaching the finish line.  It only gave you about 30 yards to push hard.  If I had known I was so close to the finish I definitely would have run harder.  I was saving some energy for that last push, but didn't know when I needed to start.  More signs or staff along the way cheering us on would have helped.

I finished with an official time of 35:49.  That put me in 147th place for my age group and 1422nd overall.  If you don't want to do the math, I ran an 11:33 mile.  That's better than before, but I know I can do better.

The full list of results can be found here.

The best part of the race was that with registration came your wristband for the SweetWater 420 Fest that started after the race and a free beer with the race t-shirt.  Stephen and I headed home after the race to shower and change then we went back to the park to enjoy the festival for a few hours.

It was a perfect weather weekend.  Sunday we hit up the Dogwood Festival in Piedmont Park where we had VIP tickets for the Taste of Dogwood with free food and drinks.

Not a bad weekend.  On to the wedding planning!