Under the Harvest Moon: Something Involving an Aisle

So, we were running 30 minutes late (sorry guests), but the time had finally arrived.  All the guests were seated, our guitarist was playing and it was time for the processional.

Grandma Moonbeam started it off with an escort from my cousin.

Up next were Daddy Moonbeam's parents.

Followed by Mr. Moonbeam's Granny, escorted by BIL Moonbeam.

And Mr. Moonbeam's Nana and Papaw.

Then Mr. Moonbeam's parents made their way.

Next, Momma Moonbeam made her way down, escorted by Brother MB.

London 'maid and Groomsman Greg started off the bridal party. 

 Followed by Seattle 'maid and her entourage, Groomsmen John and DW.

 Brother Moonbeam made another appearance, this time escorting Cuz 'maid.

 Our traveling troupe of adorableness came next.  (I never posted about it, but they're carrying wire and wicker baskets with sheer, iridescent ribbon knotted to the top wire)

 Then, Sista Moonbeam headed down the aisle.

Now, it was time for Daddy Moonbeam and I to head down, one last picture outside.

Picture taken by Aunt Annie.

 And, we're off.

 Still going, but Mr. Moonbeam's in my sights now.

 The hand off.

Just a couple of steps to get to the altar (please no tripping).

And, we've arrived.  Up next the ceremony.

All photos taken by John and Whitney Canales and edited by me unless otherwise noted.

Miss Anything?

Getting Ready

The Last Night

Rehearsal Dinner

Some last minute projects

Sorry for the delay

Under the Harvest Moon: Getting Ready

I woke up way too early the morning of our wedding day.  No one was up and since our reception venue was steps away from the cottage I was staying in with my bridesmaid's I headed over to see it again.  Linda and her helpers had put most of the flowers in the venue refrigerator, so I checked out the centerpieces.  The tables and linens were being put up, but what I was most excited about was the fact that it was glorious and sunny.  It was a welcome change from the buckets of rain from the night before.

So, my ladies and I headed out to a huge breakfast at a local diner, everything really is bigger in Texas.  Then we went back to the cottage, checked out what was going on at the venue and did a little setting up.  Lots of family members were there lending helping hands, thanks again everyone.  Then Seattle 'maid tore me away from setting up and forced me to go and shower and start getting ready.  I showered, submitted some job applications (I was still unemployed at the time) and started to feel bridal.

I had great friends and family around

I had Cuz 'maid do my makeup, she may be younger, but she is far superior than me in her knowledge of makeup, hair and other things that some ladies know about.  She's a whiz at all the girly stuff and helped all the bridesmaids and myself out.  Thanks Megan!

I consulted with some friends before the wedding and came up with this makeup cocktail.

Smashbox Photo Finish Primer (light)

Dior Airflash Spray Foundation (color 300)

Bare Minerals Bronzer

Maybelline Superstay Gloss (color 105)

Maybelline the Colossal Volum' Express Mascara

Whatever eyeshadow my cousin had on hand and that was it. I had my first facial a few days before the wedding, so my skin was feelin' good and in keeping with my standard style the makeup was pretty simple and clean.

For hair, I might have put some texture putty in my hair or not, don't remember.  But, to get the birdcage veil in there I took the advice of my old neighbor (a makeup artist and hair stylist).

Tease a tuft of hair for the veil comb to go into, spray it with hairspray and tease again, spray one more time and stick the veil comb in.  Then lay the veil where you want it, and hairspray it into shape.  It came out once when someone got a piece of it in the middle of a hug, but I stuck it back in and it stayed in place all  night.

After the prettification, we headed over to the church.

When we got there the rectory was buzzing.  Corsages and bouts were being handed out.  Flower girls were dressed (in Momma Moonbeam couture) and ready to go.

My cousin helped me behead some roses, so that those sweet little ladies could have some petals to throw around.

Grandma Moonbeam did a final pressing of my dress.

Photo by Aunt Annie

And my ladies were on hand to help me get into it!

Photo by Aunt Annie

The guys didn't get together to get dressed, but they were all at the church on time (unlike me) and ready to go.

A quick shot of Brother and Sister Moonbeam.  Brother Moonbeam even shaved without me asking him to!

Photo by Aunt Annie

And back to me... and my dress.  In all it's French-seamed-by-Momma-Moonbeam loveliness.

The requisite army of people to put the thing on without messing up hair and makeup.

Attaching the family heirloom lace train, it's removable so other ladies in my family can use it.  But I get to keep it, sorry first daughter's right.

Aunt Eileen putting on the heirloom necklace that I borrowed from Daddy Moonbeam's side of the family.

Then London 'maid helped me with my garter.

It started out innocently enough... and then giggles, lots of them.

A few pictures of me and my ladies.

Check out the flowers!  So bright and happy.

Taking a second with Momma Moonbeam.

Then it was a short walk to the church doors, where my littlest cousin met up with me.

And here is a gratuitous shot of my train and full skirt.

We had a few minutes outside as everyone started making their way inside, and pretty soon it was all gonna go down.

But since I had a few minutes to kill.

Aunt Annie took a couple of shots of my flowers, complete with embroidered handkerchief from Mr. Moonbeam's family.

And me.

All photos taken by John and Whitney Canales and edited by me unless otherwise noted.

Miss Anything?

The Last Night

Rehearsal Dinner

Some last minute projects

Sorry for the delay

Under the Harvest Moon: The Night Before

After the rehearsal dinner, we stopped off at the girl's cottage so that my bridesmaid's and I could choose which flowers we wanted in our bouquets.  Momma Moonbeam and I bought about $250 worth of flowers from HEB on Thursday afternoon and we just kept the flowers in buckets of water and left them on the front porch in the evening (it was cool out at night in November).

 We laid out garbage bags and just started out trimming all the extra foliage off.  There were sunflowers and lots of mums. 

There were more mums in tons of colors.

We also used a lot of filler, dried (and dyed) eucalyptus, million star, I think the green berries are called hypericum and I don't know what the yellow is called, but I really liked it.  

Then we left Momma Moonbeam, her best friend and my Aunt to bouquet making duties.

Thanks so much to Linda for heading up the flowers, she had a lot of helpers as well, but she's DIY-ed wedding flowers before and knew how to get them done.

Most of the bridal party (those of age anyway) headed out for a fun evening.  It was great to meet up with family and old friends from San Antonio, college and Seattle.  We started out chatting and catching up at a dive bar.  Then we headed out to a more lively bar for some dancing (I even got Mr. Moonbeam to dance with me for about 5 whole minutes).

Having a good time with my gals from Seattle.

And to round out the night, we hit up a taco truck before heading home for a few hours of beauty sleep.

Miss Anything?

Rehearsal Dinner

Some last minute projects

Sorry for the delay

Under the Harvest Moon: Rehearsal Dinner

So, it all happened on a crazy, stormy night in Texas, which left me slightly worried about our outdoor dance floor the next night.  But, the only real effect was that I switched my shoes for the night from heels to flats because of the mud (though, let's be honest, I totally would've wussed out on the heels anyway).

I don't seem to have any pictures of the actual rehearsal, but London 'maid did steal my camera for a sec to get these shots.

London 'maid (fresh from her long journey) and I

Mr. Moonbeam, seems like he was in a good mood

After we rehearsed we headed over to the party, graciously hosted by Mr. Moonbeam's parents at the Alsatian in the Hotel Alsace.  This was the hotel that many of our out-of-town guests stayed at, and where Mr. Moonbeam and I spent a couple of days after the wedding.  It was already booked (and admittedly a bit out of our price range) for the date of the wedding, but I would recommend this place for anybody hosting events in Castroville.  We chatted with the owner (very nice and professional), had many meals there (very good) and it's a great looking place (I'd call it contemporary Hill Country).

source

There were a few entrée options in the buffet, plenty of iced tea, and a beach themed cake and 'sandy' cupcakes for dessert (a nod to our beach wedding).

It was all very yummy.

I don't seem to have close-ups of the dessert, but they're in the back there next to our signature photo-mat.

Then it was time for Mr. Moonbeam to give a toast.  I think he really enjoyed clanging a knife on the glass.  I honestly don't remember much of what was said, but I'm sure it involved thanking our parents and families for being awesome.  

It also involved a shout out to his Mother.  Our rehearsal dinner fell on her birthday, and I think she was very touched that we took a moment to acknowledge it.

Then, it was time to hand out gifts to bridesmaids, groomsmen, flower girls, our ring bearer, readers, ushers and of course, our parents.

Our ring bearer looks excited.

Momma Moonbeam with her gift (the parents got picture books of our beach wedding)

And then MIL Moonbeam brought out the best surprise.  She printed out copies of Mr. Moonbeam's original email to his parents about the girl he met on his study abroad program in Italy.  He told them I was a tall, dark-haired girl that looked like Logan Tom (she had shorter hair back then and had recently been all over the Olympics).  It was just a few lines, but I don't think I had ever read it before.

It was the sweetest detail, and it got a few laughs.

Miss anything?

Some last minute projects

Sorry for the delay

Under the Harvest Moon: Some Last Minute Projects

I went to Texas a little over a week before the wedding to take care of last minute things, visit with family and give my Mom a chance to work on the dress while seeing it on me.

One of those projects was our favors.  I had a grand scheme of having recipes for all the homemade desserts we'd be serving, but that ended up excluding too many of Mr. Moonbeam's family recipes.  His family had to travel in, which made it harder to bring a dessert, and a lot of his (and my) family favorites were savory dishes.  So, we ended up with general family recipe favors and a lot of homemade desserts.  They weren't totally coordinated, but there was some crossover.

Like other bees before me (apple cider, cowboy boot), I got my hands on some muslin bags and stamped them with our custom stamp.  Make sure to use fabric ink for the stamping (I believe it's the kind that says 'permanent dye').

I gathered most of the recipes by email, but with some of the older folks it was just easier to get it on paper or over the phone.  The method of selection for inclusion in the favors was devised to be as fair as possible.  If you actually responded to my email and sent any recipe(s) one of your recipes got in the favor bag.  Then I did a little personal hunting/asking to make sure I had equal numbers of recipes from each side of the family.

Unfortunately I couldn't work on these in LA as planned, because my laptop died about a month before the wedding.  Luckily Momma MB was buying us new laptops for Christmas and when I arrived in San Antonio there was a new laptop waiting for me to load it with Adobe programs that I missed desperately.  Then it was a mad dash of laying out recipes, finding a printer that worked (there were 2 at my Mom's house that refused to work properly, so I had my sister bring over her new one), cutting out the cards (super easy since I took them to a copy shop) and stuffing them into the bags I stamped in LA.

I laid them out, 4 to a page, and printed the covers on cream cardstock.  Then I printed the recipes on white cardstock.  The main reason for doing this was the varied amounts of leftover cardstock I had on hand, but it ended up defining the cover, since the weight of the paper was the same.

Outsource the cutting, it's cheap and saves your sanity.

I had 160-ish people at my wedding, and I gave up after making 80 favors.  I put a little sign in front of them that asked guests to take 1 per household, but I heard that some cousins lost their favors when they left their table to go outside for a bit.  Seattle 'maid told me later that she had enlisted a friend to stash her favor in her purse so that no stealing would occur.  I suppose I should have made more, but at least I didn't end up with a lot of leftovers.

One of my all time favorite family recipes, and of course I forgot to have my Grandma make some for the wedding, but I'll share it with y'all instead.  (Oh, and if you put marshmallows on the hot cake and then pour on the hot icing, when you spread it around they sort of melt and mix in and make some amazing gooey heaven in your mouth.)

Under the Harvest Moon: Sorry for the Delay

Hello there hive!  I'm finally going to start my recaps.  For those of you who don't remember me, I married Mr. Moonbeam (for the second time) in November of 2009 in our large, Texas, family-oriented ceremony.  We were married (the first time) in July of 2009 in a small civil ceremony in Malibu (for oh-so-romantic health insurance reasons).  Both were great days for the two of us, but the stresses of our big ceremony have definitely contributed to my recap hiatus.

Confession: I really dislike my pro pics from our November ceremony.  I will be forever grateful to our shutterbug relatives (Aunt Annie and Uncle Chris) who took some of my favorite pictures from our big day.

Full Disclosure: I found our photographers off of Craigslist, we paid about $600 for their services.  I wasn't expecting blow-me-away amazingness, but I was expecting competence.  (I found our beach wedding photographer on Craigslist as well and she was awesome).  Our contract guarantees something like 30 images an hour, but what I would really like are 30 images from our hour long ceremony that are properly colored/exposed without a line through the center of every image.  We hired our photographers, a young husband and wife team that is new to the biz, because we liked the images we saw, they seemed nice and we thought it'd be great to have two shooters.  What we ended up with was a photographer and a babysitter.  They brought their infant to the wedding.  I didn't know this until said infant made an appearance at our reception.  Ask anyone, I love children, but if they had hired a babysitter, I would have had two people shooting my ceremony and maybe one of those people would have been able to take clear pictures.  I know they have two cameras, because he mentioned the gear used at our wedding on his facebook page.  And since there was a red line through every image of our ceremony, I wonder if something might be wrong with that camera, and maybe the other camera would have been just fine.  I really hated coming to this realization about our photographers upon receipt of our disc of images because I quite liked them in person at the wedding, but in truth, I don't think they're ready to be charging for photography services.

Taken by John and Whitney Canales Photography

It's not a crazy zoom in trick y'all, I promise.  This was the first thing I saw in every ceremony picture.

Yes, it was late in the afternoon, strong directional sunlight, but Mr. Moonbeam's Uncle Chris snapped this from his seat, so I would expect a professional photographer to be able to shoot competently in the same conditions.

Taken by Uncle Chris.  I didn't do any editing, It's just a clear shot.

After some back and forth with the photographers, I convinced them to send me everything in an unedited format, because they could tell the color was off and just sent me a bunch of black and whites.  And though I like some of the editing that I've been able to do to the originals,  the colors are still off and they're still odd.  And truthfully, seeing their unedited images upset me a bit more, because it became so obvious that they're playing around with and learning how to use their settings.  They have not mastered them, by any means and auto settings would have been more competent in most cases.

A picture from Aunt Annie (thanks again) using the auto settings on my entry level DSLR.  (On a side note, isn't the church gorgeous?!)

Since our wedding some great things have happened, and I can partially blame the lack of writing on that.  I got a job (being unemployed certainly gave me more time to write, craft and bake a lot of bread, but it was definitely leaving a void).  We've had six different visits from out-of-towners this summer, and some even stayed with us.  We've moved to a new apartment.  And I've been out of the country for almost a month this year (2 of those weeks were our honeymoon, recently recapped).   But in truth, I haven't been writing because I haven't felt like sharing.  It's been almost a year since the big wedding and I haven't even sent out pictures to most of my family or made a wedding album, because it's not fun to show off pictures you're not in love (or even like) with.

So, to any of you budget brides out there, I wish you the best of luck in finding an affordable photographer (like I did for 1 wedding), but I also urge you to spend as much as you can on your photos.  Also, it's important to know your area.  I think I got a great deal on a Craigslist photographer in Los Angeles, because there is an over-saturation of talented, creative types out here.  In San Antonio, not everyone on Craigslist is 'straight outta art school awesomeness', not saying you can't get burned in a big city, but I think the odds are different.  I know it's an overheard phrase in all of this business, but they really are the only thing you take with you from that day, and if you're a part of Weddingbee, you've probably seen a lot of beautiful things that you will constantly compare your big day to, and having images you love will make your memories that much better.

Rant Complete: next up a couple of last minute projects.