It was sweet to think back on how excited I was before the ceremony.

We felt giddy as we thought about the silly moments after the ceremony.

And we got excited about the years to come.

Thank you to all our friends and family for your sweet little notes, texts, calls, and gifts. We’ve loved celebrating with you even when you’re far away!

Engagement rings can look however you want them to. Usually in the United States, an engagement ring is a diamond ring, but many couples opt for different stones or no stone at all.

Traditionally, a wedding ring is a solid band, but many women choose to pick out diamond bands.

(All images via Tiffany & Co)

So, that’s a quick breakdown for any of you who’ve been curious! I hope it helps.

You can find the instructions here. If I were planning a party that needed save the dates, I would definitely consider this idea! So adorable.

Immediately, after ordering the dress I was impressed by a couple of small things: 1.) The store offers free return shipping and 2.) tax is already figured into their prices. I paid an additional $10 for shipping and that was all.

Today, when the box arrived at our house I ripped it open and found this beautiful grey cloth packaging.

The dress is made out of beautiful material that feels soft and silky against my hands. (Plus, it has pockets which I imagine will be a great advantage on my friend’s big day.)

The dress was still a bit wrinkled when I was taking these. I’m not 100% sold on it, but so far I think it is a great option. It’s very classically beautiful–perfect for a church wedding. And not that this is a deciding factor or anything, but look at how adorable the tag is.

What do you think? Is it a great choice for a bridesmaid’s dress or should I keep looking?

I realize that I wrote a lot about our wedding right after it happened and then I stopped. I’ll say it was wedding overload. Peter and I just wanted to get through a few weeks without hearing the word wedding. It never happened. I have a theory that once weddings are on your brain, you develop a strange ability to pick up the word when you otherwise would’ve tuned it out. Ex., I’m writing this at a coffee shop and a country song just came on over the speakers. I picked out the phrase “wedding dress” and couldn’t make out a single other word. Has this happened to any of you? I just heard a guy across the room say something about picking up a tuxedo. It’s a sickness, really.

Anyway, what actually happen is that we distanced ourselves a bit from the wedding industry and then our friends Caroline and Nick got engaged. This exciting news breathed a new life into the topics of weddings for me and I’m finally ready to slowly start going through the details of our day. Now, wasn’t that an unnecessarily long way of saying that I’m going to tell you about wedding details? Yes, yes it was.

Our caterer insisted that we print menus and put them on our tables. It became quite clear that her ideal client would’ve adorned each place setting with hand calligraphied, letterpress menus. It was quite annoying. In looking for a way to keep our tablescape relatively simple and inexpensive, we decided to print our menus on empty wine bottles. Peter and I like wine quite a bit (it’s usually the only alcohol I ever drink), so it felt like the wine bottle menus served to make our wedding that much more personal. Plus, the green wine bottles were really pretty in the sunlight.

Once we managed to find an appropriate sized label, the project was easy. We bought the 4.25 x 5.5 inch white labels from Onlinelabels.com . We bought huge labels because we were serving a lot of food!! We ended up with a family style meal where everyone got a little bit of everything. Guests ate salad, several sides, bread, and three entrees. In hindsight it was a lot more food than we ever needed!

I really loved these. If you look closely, you can even see that we credited Caroline for making our wedding cake. We still have several sheets of these labels left, so maybe it’s something that Peter and I will do again for a larger dinner party or Thanksgiving. Have you seen any fun menu ideas? I’d love to see them for future dinner party brainstorming!

Oh, and now that I’ve warned you about wedding posts, expect to see them more frequently. I promise that I won’t write about them too often.

Photo credit Mary Sledd.