Friday, June 26, 2009

bridal sample sales

go only because i can't...

Pronovias Sample Sale - Saturday, June 27th
14 East 52nd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenue.
by appointment only (212-897-6393).

Also,

Walked by Veka on Mott yesterday, they are having a sample sale, prices from $1000 - $2500 on european designers like Suzanne Ermann. Go Go Go. I totally went in to see some of those fancy numbers...you should too.

Veka
262 Mott St., nr. Prince St.
New York, NY 10012
212-925-9044

Thursday, June 25, 2009

have you seen this?

The nytimes article With this Burger I Thee Wed? I object to a few things in this article, including this:

Still, the final tab is often head-slappingly high: The cost of a wedding planned this summer by Ms. Weiss or Jo Gartin, two of Los Angeles’s most sought-after wedding specialists, is as high or higher than last year, or about $150,000 to $200,000, according to the two planners.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ridiculous.

But the slideshow of readers' food picks is total wedding porn.


mmm, cheesy burgers...

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

la la la, less than 4 months...

I'm thinking I need to unsubscribe from smitten kitchen and Joy the Baker from now until October. Cuz all I want to do is go home and make these.


I've been MIA lately...had friends visit over the weekend from that place the FH is from and they were SO FUN to have over. That said, when asked what wedding stuff I had to show her, yeah, I had nothing. Like nothing. We have nothing in our apt that has to do with our wedding. Do I need to have stuff? Is there something I'm missing?

And our wedding binder, if you could call it that, is like a monster with paper as teeth, totally overwhelming the one inch spine I thought I would need for this thing called a wedding.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

rehearsal dinner schmimmer

FH got taken to the cleaners by a restaurant in Little Italy in the Bronx and put a deposit down.

Came home freaked out. Talked it over. Since the dinner menu was going to be fancier than our actual wedding and there was a hazy area re: tipping, we canceled the reservation and stopped payment on the check. We decided to go to more affordable and less nice place. You know, the place with all the politician pics on the walls as you walk in, the pizza place in the front and the mirrored room in the back. alls kinds of classy.

As I've said before, I'd prefer to skip the whole thing, take a tylenol pm and got to sleep on the twin bed from my childhood, but if dinner is to be had, even the bare essentials will do for me. It's the parents who "care". Bring on the mirrored room and the cheap chianti.

Friday, June 12, 2009

Dispatches from Pre-Cana; Part I

Pre-Cana is mandatory Catholic marriage counseling all couples must go through to be married in the Catholic Church. Not going to lie, I viewed this as a big fat pain in my.....neck. Didn't help that FH resented having to go. Now, I love therapy and my therapist, but marriage counseling led by a people who are going to try to tell me that rhythm method is really the only acceptable birth control and who actively advocate against gay marriage and pro-choice political candidates? meh.

I am Roman Catholic, survived 16 years of Catholic education, struggled with the faith and the church and the church's stances on a variety of issues (don't even get me started on women priests and the 2nd class status of nuns) and still struggle with it. However, my uncles, who will be celebrating the mass as they are both priests, are awesome and have made Catholicism a large part of our family. Mass is celebrated at reunions, we used to sing Christmas Carols as a family in front of St. Pat's. It is an amazing unifying force for my sometimes contentious family.

Back to Pre-Cana. We went to our first of 3 sessions. It was...not painful...dare I say...semi-delightful?!?!

You could tell from the 30+ couples in the room that no one wanted to be there. It felt like a weird school assembly where we were going to find out we had to do extra sessions because we are all NY sinners. You know, how you used to feel in grade school.

There was one speaker, a reporter whose name I forget, who talked about his marriage, his experience and advice on communication in marriage. He went over the Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament, the gravity of the vocation that is marriage and what we as people entering marriage should be mindful of not only as we enter marriage but as we face challenges together as a married couple, as one. A team, if you will.

He covered how love will change and it isn't romantic love that keeps things going but a deeper more intimate love that strengthens the marriage, helping through bad times. How men and women communicate differently and how plans to make your partner change after you're married won't work. How you have to give fully of yourself to the other person. It was a good pep talk on marriage.

He had some mandatory propaganda along the lines of, "it has been shown that couples who live together before marriage have higher rates of divorce." Which, I'm sorry, when your rent is a mortgage payment in someone else's life and you are paying for a wedding, you are living together and I don't think your risk of divorce is any better or worse than the next person.

But I appreciate the attempt at a guilt trip. There's something comforting in that. And yes, I find guilt comforting sometimes, a direct result of 16 yrs of Catholic education and just one reason I enjoy therapy.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Crazy Calligraphy

Yep, I went to Pearl Paint and bought a calligraphy set. What? You think I'm crazy? Well, I think it's crazy to pay someone to write addresses on envelopes. Who's crazy now, Rachel?

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

tasting

I find myself looking at pictures of our tasting, specifically this peanut butter fudge pie. mmmm.



And the decimated apple pie. Is it weird to have two pies as dessert? figure the lighter apple for traditionalists and the peanut butter fudge pie for FH, cuz he will go around to every table and eat theirs...

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

sneak peek

hello lace, beading and buttons...

Monday, June 1, 2009

It Fits

EDITED

Tried the dress on yesterday. It fits and I still like it. It's way more romantic than I ever thought I would go for. Having just gone to Kleinfeld's for a friend's dress fitting, I have the name and number of a seamstress.

Kleinfeld's cost for alterations is $575 for alterations, $295 for dry cleaning, holy crap. But they give out their seamstress's contact info if you want to do it that way. I just don't know if she will press it and clean it for me as well. It was a sample, it needs a lil sprucing. And she's out in brooklyn. Kleinfeld's is centrally located...

Now I can get around to buying those shoes that are super comfy. Found them at my glass slipper. The strangest shoe store in NYC.

It's on the sixth floor of an office building, only a few blocks from Kleinfeld's, down a labyrinth of hallways. Picture a windowless room full of white and ivory wedding shoes.