Wedding Recap {Part II} (2024)

Ready for Part II? I’ve been looking forwardto blog thisall week, but it’s always a challenge for me to actually sit down and take time to write. For my last post, I kind of went in order of how everything came together before the wedding… so here’s Task #5.

5. The Bridesmaids Dresses

This is one of my 8 beautiful bridesmaids. Eight…? Eight!? What was I thinking. I had 3 sisters in my party and chose 5 friends who had been there through every stage of my life. One who has been my dear friend since kindergarten, two whom I met when I first moved to the U.S. and were present for the early beginnings of my relationship with my husband, and two others whom I had met in college and knew me, were there for me when my husband and I went through our four year long distance relationship. I love them all and they are all so special to me, but choosing a dress for 8 different heights, sizes, tastes and budgets was the most difficult task of the entire wedding preparation. I hear the word ‘bridesmaids dress’ and I still cringe. It took months – literally months – before we had found a dress for them. It was my #1 cause of stress. If you would take a look at my Pinterest, you would immediately see that purple was never a color pallet I was interested in. We had searched online, looked in stores, … My poor sister-in-law tried on at least 9 different dresses at a department store and all of them varied around $150. (The ones I REALLY liked were $200+.) And again, I just couldn’t make my lovely friends pay this money (6 out of the 8 of them had to come from either out of state or overseas). For a while we even thought about MAKING our own dresses but trying to find enough fabric that we really liked and that they had in Europe and the U.S. was just a nightmare! My poor friends and family in Europe even went to a special ‘Fabrics Conference’ to find the color I had in mind.

Then one of my husband’s aunts suggested to look at a retail website. She owns a boutique and has access to some nice online stores in California. We looked at the website she gave us and totally loved the design of this dress. The color I originally wanted was not an option so we defaulted to the dark purple because of our ‘winter’ wedding. It worked out amazingly. In order to use the website, you had to order for at least $200. The 8 dresses together came out at just a little over $200. What a blessing! With shipping and the help of my aunt, the girls ended up having to pay $50 for them.

6. Food

We wanted two things for our wedding: 1. For all our friends and family to be there. 2. For all of them to feel very special and thank them for their support over the years. We originally thought about just having dessert but just couldn’t let that happen in order for #2 to be accomplished. So we went all out! We were extremely blessed that our parents decided to pay for all the food. We did all of the catering ourselves. My husband’s family personally owns a 3 Margaritas in town. The food was delicious! So so good.

For appetizers we combined both of our cultures.
We had ceviche and my dad made tomato soup (for 250 people!) the night before.

For dinner we had steak chicano, pollo con crema, veggies, potato salad, a green salad and some dinner rolls.Ahh, so good! We had food for days afterwards.

But dessert was my FAVORITE (and I barely had time to eat from it)! I had my heart set on a chocolate fountain and was so happy that my mom brought not only milk but also white chocolate from Belgium! For the chocolate we used marshmallows and bananas. My sister-in-law is going to culinary school and made cake pops with her friends (lemon and red velvet). Chocolate chip cookies are my husband’s favorite so we had to have some of those. And then a dear friend of the family made us a cake! She even put the purple lilies on it that I originally wanted in my bouquet!

7. Flowers

We had a local friend do our flower arrangements. Brenda works with you until you have exactly what you want. She took us to the Wholesale Florist at least 3 times so we got exactly what we wanted. I really wanted daisies for my girls and wanted my bouquet to be simple, yet elegant. I loved it! We decided on cream roses and lilies. I originally wanted purple lilies but they would come out super dark – almost black (see the picture of the cake). So, we decided to go with Picasso Lilies. I love that name. 🙂 She also made corsages for the family members from the leftover lilies and roses. We bought roses and hydrangea’s in bulk at Sam’s Club and used them all throughout the reception and ceremony.

8. Favors

We decided to go with s’mores. Chocolate, a cookie and a marshmallow… who doesn’t love that? My mom brought “Mignonettes” from Belgium and we bought the marshmallows and graham crackers at WalMart. What an ordeal to order little bags and wrappers to put these favors in. Again, so many choices! We ordered the favor bags and ties from PaperMartand ordered small golf pencils (on which we wrote our names and the date of the wedding) from Golfpencils.com (their website seems to be down at the moment).

(This is the only picture I have of the favors… Thank you, Liz!)

Alright, so there’s Part II.
I will save my favorites for last and will tell you next time about our theme decorations and what we did for our guestbook.

Thanks for reading…