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| These are the styles the girls picked out. They will all be in champagne (the black dress was already sold out online in champagne). |
The Dresses by Sumnermichelle8 featuring j crew dresses
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
The Dresses
The Dresses by Sumnermichelle8 featuring j crew dresses
Chicago-Bound
Hello my lovely readers (Wallace, Mom, & Nana)! A lot of wedding progress has been made in the past few weeks that I am very excited to share. Most significantly - all the bridesmaids dresses have been ordered! A couple weekends ago I went to Chicago with Liz, Lauren, Lindsey, Jen and Alli (Caitlin and Ashley are not local and therefore weren't able to come) to try on the dresses and see the different styles.
We made an appointment at J.Crew on Michigan Ave. for 2:00 in the afternoon and left early in the morning so we could go out to lunch and shop for shoes beforehand. For lunch we stopped at a cute little deli right off Michigan Ave. called The Goddess and Grocer. They had the best sandwiches and the most tasty-looking desserts. I wish they had one of these in Milwaukee! Afterwards we ventured around the corner to Bloomingdale's to take a gander at their shoe department.
I had only looked at wedding shoes one other time and had a vague idea in my head of what I wanted. We were in Bloomingdale's for a mere five minutes when Liz spotted the most perfectly pink shoe I could have imagined. It was girly, a little vintage-looking, and had a very high heel. Plus, it was made by one of my favorite designers, Badgley Mischka (they are Style 17 in the 2011 Footwear if you are interested). I was sold. I purchased them there and then and had them shipped to Milwaukee. They are sitting safely in their box for now, but it is going to be very hard to not wear these pretties out this summer.
Once the shoes were bought we walked around for a bit to kill some time before the appointment. Around 2:00 we went to J.Crew where they brought us back into the bridal dressing rooms. Our consultant brought out the dresses for the girls to try on. I chose champagne for the color but each of the girls could choose their own style. Between the seven of them they ended up choosing five different styles, and I love them all (pictures to come in the next post)! I can't wait to see them all together.
After the dress fittings we stopped at a little cupcake shop for a sweet end to the day and then headed back home! I could not have asked for a more fun day with some of my favorite girls, they are the best!
We made an appointment at J.Crew on Michigan Ave. for 2:00 in the afternoon and left early in the morning so we could go out to lunch and shop for shoes beforehand. For lunch we stopped at a cute little deli right off Michigan Ave. called The Goddess and Grocer. They had the best sandwiches and the most tasty-looking desserts. I wish they had one of these in Milwaukee! Afterwards we ventured around the corner to Bloomingdale's to take a gander at their shoe department.
I had only looked at wedding shoes one other time and had a vague idea in my head of what I wanted. We were in Bloomingdale's for a mere five minutes when Liz spotted the most perfectly pink shoe I could have imagined. It was girly, a little vintage-looking, and had a very high heel. Plus, it was made by one of my favorite designers, Badgley Mischka (they are Style 17 in the 2011 Footwear if you are interested). I was sold. I purchased them there and then and had them shipped to Milwaukee. They are sitting safely in their box for now, but it is going to be very hard to not wear these pretties out this summer.
Once the shoes were bought we walked around for a bit to kill some time before the appointment. Around 2:00 we went to J.Crew where they brought us back into the bridal dressing rooms. Our consultant brought out the dresses for the girls to try on. I chose champagne for the color but each of the girls could choose their own style. Between the seven of them they ended up choosing five different styles, and I love them all (pictures to come in the next post)! I can't wait to see them all together.
After the dress fittings we stopped at a little cupcake shop for a sweet end to the day and then headed back home! I could not have asked for a more fun day with some of my favorite girls, they are the best!
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Finding the Perfect Venue
The first thing on our planning list was to locate a venue. Wallace and I wanted something unique and fun with a lot of character that could be a beautiful backdrop to our wedding all on its own. I knew I didn't want our wedding to be in a traditional hotel ballroom or convention center; that just wouldn't have fit our style or the feel we were going for. We started a list of must-haves for our potential wedding site:
1. Fit up to 250 guests
2. Double as our ceremony and reception site
3. Allow vendors of our choice
4. Located in downtown Milwaukee close to the lake, the third ward, and downtown hotels/bars
5. Available in September/early October
I was happily surprised to find that Milwaukee had quite a few unique wedding venues to choose from. We were very lucky in that Paul's sister Heidi had had her wedding in Milwaukee the year before and had created a spreadsheet including the information for every possible venue there was (she was much more organized than I!). Heidi was nice enough to send me the spreadsheet and Wallace and I got to work figuring out which ones would work for us, which turned out to be a pretty challenging task. Many of the venues we liked either could not accommodate the amount of guests we had or were already booked. I felt discouraged and disappointed every time we visited a venue that I had high hopes for, only to find that they were booked solid until November.
Feeling like we would never find what we were looking for, I began thinking about the possibility of having a tented reception. The more I thought about it, the more appealing it was. It would essentially be a blank canvas in which we could design the space from the floor up, making it exactly what we wanted. We could pick the perfect location and wouldn't have to worry about it already being booked. I excitedly got to work researching tented weddings, only to find that for us, there would be more cons that pros. As appealing as it was to be able to design our space from the ground up, the costs associated with this were huge. We would have had to bring in everything from a dance floor, to tables and tableware, to a caterer's kitchen. I never would have thought that having a tented wedding would be more expensive than having a non-tented one, but as it turned out they generally are! So we turned our efforts back to finding a pre-existing venue.
A few of my favorites that we went to visit were The Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, Cuvee, Lake Park Bistro, Discovery World, and the Iron Horse Hotel. Unfortunately, all of these were either booked for September and October or they were too small for the amount of people we were expecting. I was getting more discouraged by the minute, and thought that we might not be able to have a fall wedding after all. Then one day Lynda suggested we look at the Villa Filomena, a historic mansion located downtown. It had been on Heidi's list, but we hadn't gone to look at it because there were no pictures online and we thought it would be too small (the ballroom only fit 200 for a sit down dinner). We decided to go take a look anyway, and I am so happy we did! The moment Wallace and I walked in we knew we had found our wedding site. It turned out that another 50 people could fit in the parlor, making it the perfect size. It was also the most "us" out of any of the venues we had seen, and we knew we could see ourselves getting married there. The outdoor terrace provided the perfect backdrop for our ceremony, while the ballroom and parlor were beautiful, homey, and full of character. We booked the only day that was still available, making our wedding date September 16th. We could not have been more excited!
1. Fit up to 250 guests
2. Double as our ceremony and reception site
3. Allow vendors of our choice
4. Located in downtown Milwaukee close to the lake, the third ward, and downtown hotels/bars
5. Available in September/early October
I was happily surprised to find that Milwaukee had quite a few unique wedding venues to choose from. We were very lucky in that Paul's sister Heidi had had her wedding in Milwaukee the year before and had created a spreadsheet including the information for every possible venue there was (she was much more organized than I!). Heidi was nice enough to send me the spreadsheet and Wallace and I got to work figuring out which ones would work for us, which turned out to be a pretty challenging task. Many of the venues we liked either could not accommodate the amount of guests we had or were already booked. I felt discouraged and disappointed every time we visited a venue that I had high hopes for, only to find that they were booked solid until November.
Feeling like we would never find what we were looking for, I began thinking about the possibility of having a tented reception. The more I thought about it, the more appealing it was. It would essentially be a blank canvas in which we could design the space from the floor up, making it exactly what we wanted. We could pick the perfect location and wouldn't have to worry about it already being booked. I excitedly got to work researching tented weddings, only to find that for us, there would be more cons that pros. As appealing as it was to be able to design our space from the ground up, the costs associated with this were huge. We would have had to bring in everything from a dance floor, to tables and tableware, to a caterer's kitchen. I never would have thought that having a tented wedding would be more expensive than having a non-tented one, but as it turned out they generally are! So we turned our efforts back to finding a pre-existing venue.
A few of my favorites that we went to visit were The Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, Cuvee, Lake Park Bistro, Discovery World, and the Iron Horse Hotel. Unfortunately, all of these were either booked for September and October or they were too small for the amount of people we were expecting. I was getting more discouraged by the minute, and thought that we might not be able to have a fall wedding after all. Then one day Lynda suggested we look at the Villa Filomena, a historic mansion located downtown. It had been on Heidi's list, but we hadn't gone to look at it because there were no pictures online and we thought it would be too small (the ballroom only fit 200 for a sit down dinner). We decided to go take a look anyway, and I am so happy we did! The moment Wallace and I walked in we knew we had found our wedding site. It turned out that another 50 people could fit in the parlor, making it the perfect size. It was also the most "us" out of any of the venues we had seen, and we knew we could see ourselves getting married there. The outdoor terrace provided the perfect backdrop for our ceremony, while the ballroom and parlor were beautiful, homey, and full of character. We booked the only day that was still available, making our wedding date September 16th. We could not have been more excited!
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| Here we are a few weeks later in front of the Villa. |
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