This Texas Wedding: Flowers and Rings

I have a few pretty pictures of my flowers and our rings I thought I'd share.

My bouquet on the cake table, loved it so so much. I remember reading one blog somewhere where the husband got his wife an duplicate of her wedding bouquet every year for their anniversary. Super sweet! (*hint, hint* Robert, if you ever even look at this anymore.)

Love the colors.

Man, love my smokin' hot nails. I loved that red color, it was just an OPI color from the nail salon. I wish I had read what it was so I could get my own bottle of it.

One thing that did disappoint me about my photographer was that they did not take lots of detail shots. For example, I would of loved pictures of my dress hanging outside in our trees, or mine and Robert's boots propped up together somewhere, and detail shots of our rings in cute settings. If you have read any wedding blogs you know the pictures I am talking about. Again, I got what I paid for and I paid for 4 hours of photography. I am sure if I had paid for someone to be there all day I would have had more of those shots. Also, I emailed the main owner of the photography company that I used and asked if I could send over inspiration photos of some things I would like to try and capture. Well he got suuuper offended, at least I took it that way, and pretty much told me it was rude to send another photographers work to your photographer because if you wanted that look you should of hired that photographer. So, I never emailed anything over. It was not the LOOK I was going for but the IDEA. The idea of my dress hanging up somewhere outside, the idea of a picture of my boots, the idea of a picture with me in the foreground and Robert in the background looking at me. See what I mean? I guess by that point I was just tired of it all and gave up.

I did suggest this one, and my photographer looked at me kind of like I was crazy. It was the end of the evening and that look was that look that told me I had not hired what I wanted. As I have said before I am very happy with the photos I have, I am just very sad for the photos I do not have. I think if we had done this photo earlier in the evening, before the candles burned out, it would of looked a lot better .

Whew, can you believe I am almost done with the wedding posts! I think I only have 3 or 4 left!

This Texas Wedding: Cake Time!

Nice finger swipe there!

Man oh man, I love cake. The wedding cake was one of the very first things I was excited about when I started wedding planning. But holy cow y'all, wedding cakes are expensive! Robert and I went to one bridal show, it was madness, but we would look at some of the cakes and oooh and ahhh over them and then pick out a price list and then pick our jaws up off the ground. And lets be honest, sure the cake looks great, but how does it taste? That is all I care about, and some of the samples we had were not that great.

Pretty soon after we decided to have the wedding ourselves in our backyard I started thinking of logistics. Who was I going to get to cut the cake for everyone? Sure I could of asked one of my aunts or my bm's and they would of been more than happy to, but I did not want any of my guests to have to work during my wedding. After I asked Darcy for her help, I know I could asked her, but something else was still holding me back. If we did cake, that meant I had to get a whole nother set of plates and silverware, that meant that much more trash. And that was not making me happy. So I decided on cupcakes! I love cupcakes, so I was not to disappointed to give up a whole cake. Robert did insist that we have a small cake for us to cut for tradition.

So I started looking around for a local bakery we could either pick the cupcakes up from or have delivered. The first place I tried was Nagelin's Bakery, the oldest bakery in Texas. They had AMAZING red velvet cake and since I already knew I wanted at least red velvet I called them. Well turns out at the time they only did vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. So next I thought of using just a grocery store, but there was just something a little off putting about that to us. So I started looking around at the smaller towns around us.

Robert and I made those cake stands!

Jackpot! I found Sugar Shack Bakery in Wimberley, about the same distance from us as downtown New Braunfels. I called them and set up a time for Robert and I to go and do a tasting. Sugar Shack is run out of home by a grandmother/grandfather/granddaughter team. It was a little strange driving up to a house for a cake tasting, but they have a pretty industrial kitchen set up on the side of their house with it's own entrance. Sugar Shack got its start when the granddaughter was raising money to go on a mission trip and she and her grandmother made cakes for her to sell at a local coffee shop. She raised the money in record time! After she got back from her mission trip people kept asking for cakes and offering to pay for them, they decided to start up a business. Lemme tell you, they have something good going! If I remember correctly, the grandfathers mother was the cook at the Texas Governors mansion for years and passed on her recipes to her daughter in law.

So at the tasting we tasted all their cake flavors and frosting flavors we decided on the following:

• Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting - duh
• White Almond Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream Frosting - Chocolate Buttercream? AMAZING, I actually think I might of likes these more than my favored red velvet.
• Italian Cream Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting for our cutting cake
• Triple Chocolate - Sour Cream Espresso Chocolate Cake with Dark Chocolate Cream Cheese in center and Fudge Icing on outside for our 1st anniversary cake

We decided to get a separate anniversary cake because, one, we could not narrow it down, and two, we wanted something extra special on our anniversary! I am glad we decided on this because the Italian Cream cake we cut was gone in 2.5 seconds. I did not expect anyone to eat off of it, I assumed people would know that was what we were saving for our anniversary and just eat the cupcakes, well lemme tell you, I assumed wrong. People loved that freaking 5" round Italian Cream cake we had.

So we've talked about flavors, lets talk about decorating them. We did not want anything fancy, rustic and homemade looking the better. I did know that I wanted a little topper on the cupcakes. So, I sent the ladies at Sugar Shack our wedding swirl logo and asked if they would be able to recreate that in chocolate to put on top of the cupcakes. I think they turned out pretty good! And added that nice little bit of punch we needed.

Here is another picture of the cake table. I had mason jars with tags on them with my maids names for them to put their bouquets in and a vase for mine. I did not want them to just sit on tables rotting all night!

Now on to the cake cutting!

Robert and I never really discussed what our cake cutting etiquette would be, but I am pretty sure I threatened him if he smashed cake in my face.

 But at the same time I think I knew it was coming. Robert would never waste a chance to smash food all over me!

Even though he got the better of me, I got him pretty good too. I kept trying to step back to avoid him but kept stepping on my dress! I don't see how I did not rip it.

I think some of our guests, especially  the ladies, were a bit shocked. One ran up and gave me a napkin almost immediately. I think if I had spent a lot of money getting my makeup done I would of banned cake smashing, but I really did not mind, I was laughing pretty hard.

I obviously needed help cleaning it all off of me. Later in the evening I was talking to some one and looked down my dress and realized I had a chunk of cake sitting between my boobs!

This Texas Wedding: Reception

We did not have your traditional wedding reception, there was no first dance, no bouquet toss, no garter toss, no send off, none of that. We did have cake cutting, that the next post! Even though we did not have those traditional things, I loved our reception.

Neither Robert nor I like being the center of attention, and most of those traditional things involve the couple to be on display. Our reception was more of a big party, still too much socializing and being the center of attention for me, but, common, some of that is to be expected with a wedding! I would of been happy sitting at a table with Robert all night, but we both knew we needed to move around and thank all of our guests for coming.

One rule we did make for the reception was to stick with each other as much as possible, I think this was a great rule, other wise I know he would of been hanging out with his side of the family and friends the whole night and I would of been with mine. But this way he got to meet some of my family and friends he had never meet and I got to meet some of his. This is not to say he sometimes got away from me, because he did! But for the most part I could reach out and touch him all night, and that is always good.

Now! On to the pictures!

Thanking all of our guests for coming and telling them to eat! (See, green beans missing?)

Different views of the back yard with the tables and our beautiful lights and poms I made!

The food line.

Robert holding Susannah, love this picture sooo so much.

Robert and I dancing with his niece and nephew, I guess my niece and nephew now too!

No wedding is complete without popping the top off some champagne!

One last view of the yard at night.

This Texas Wedding: Decor!

This is probably going to be my most favorite post out of all of my posts, let's talk about the decorations! I am going to let the pictures do most of the talking, but I will add in descriptions.

All over the property we had painted wood signs, obvs these two directed guests to the ceremony and reception areas. We also had little arrows directing guests around big rocks, to the restrooms etc. Sadly, what I do not have any pictures of are the signs we put out on our street to lead guests to our house! They were super cute! Matron of Honor Melanie painted them all.

Guests were then greeted with table for gifts, our guest book and our programs/fans. Our guest book was full of envelopes for guests to write us a little note and then seal the envelope with a heart sticker. Our programs were double sided, one side had the wedding party and the ceremony order on it, the other side had the lyrics to our unity candle song and the reading that my Aunt Anita did.

We had another table set up for the cake/cupcakes to go on later but before the ceremony it held these jars filled with snacks. We have pretzels, custom color M&Ms, goldfish and candy corn.

Somewhere along the line I decided I really wanted to do assigned tables. I think that was mostly because I had an awesome idea for table names, famous Texas dancehalls and music venues! Robert and I love Texas County Music and the live music scene, we don't go to near as many concerts as we did when we first started dating, but we still love it. So each table was assigned as a different hall/venue.

Guests would go up to a "ticket booth" and find their name on a ticket that said "Meredith Morton please join the party at Gruene Hall" on the back there was info for uploading pictures to our flickr, which like no one did! I am planning a whole paper products post that will show these in more detail.

We did not have any decorations for the ceremony area, just a table with our unity candle, that we made, on it.

 Different views of our tables. Our table decorations included burlap table runner, burlap wrapped mason jars with flowers, glitter pumpkins and wood log candles, everything I wanted from this post!

Our favors, bottle of homemade vanilla and silverware packets I made.

The set up under the patio, our koozies (also a favor), infusion jars with sweet tea, un-sweet tea, lemonade and sangria wine. Finally our handmade menu board. Matron of Honor Melanie wrote out the spread listing. Funny story, we didn't actually have green beans on the menu! I told her we did for some reason, so she had to run out there and rub it off before everything got started! I felt so bad, everything fit so perfect. We have this hanging up in our dinning room now. I think the next time Melanie comes over I will get her to re-write green beans on there!

And that's it! Let me know if you have any questions about how we did anything, pretty much everything you see was handmade by Robert and I!

PS. Sorry this was a lot wordier than I said it would be!

This Texas Wedding: Picture Time III

As soon as the ceremony was over we did our couple pictures, below are the good ones.

In front of our fence with the moss letters and poms I made.

Post processed by me, love the vintage feel.

Walking down the street in front of our place.
(This one was Robert's idea! Looks beautiful, right?)

Road in front of our place, you can see the white fence on the left.

I would love the last one about a million times more if it had been about 2 seconds later and we were actually kissing, not just about to. Also, if that dang telephone pole had been photoshopped out. I actually probably could edit it out, I did it on another pose in this same position.

Mmmh, love those 70's colors.

What I do love is that in all of these pictures there were cars. Cars behind the white fence in the first ones, cars on the street of these last ones and our photographer edited them out! I am planning a whole post on post-processing, done by my photographer and done by me that I will probably publish at the end of my recaps.

All in all I am VERY HAPPY with our photos. However, I think looking at so many wedding blogs before the wedding and seeing all the amazing wedding photography out there gave me really high expectations. I wanted like a whole magazine of photos of Robert and I! But, what I have to remind myself is that those people paid for that amazing photography, like my whole wedding budget was their photography budget. I truly do think that with wedding photography you pay for what you get. And while we got some good pictures that I will love for the rest of my life I do not think we got amazing photos. Actually, I take that back. I think we got amazing photos for what we paid for them, and that I am happy with. I plan on Robert and I being together for a long time to come (next 50+ years, please?), which means lots more photos of us, so our life and relationship do not need to be defined by these photos.

Anyways, sorry to get into all of that, but I really wanted to put that out there for any brides that might be reading this. Don't let all those wedding blogs, with their amazing wedding pictures become your standard, keep your eyes open and expectations realistic. It will hurt a lot less in the end.

Ok, I will end on something positive now! What I absolutely love most about all of these pictures, shoot our whole freaking wedding, is that they were taken 20 steps from our front door! That means every day when I step outside, drive through our gate or down our street I am reminded of this amazingly happy day. I would not trade that for anything.