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the renegade bride

“the wild, wacky adventures of a bridal industry insider +newlywed + new homeowner and (in practice)renovation-maven. Whee!”

November 29, 2010 Engagement Pictures!

I posted these on my professional blog and forgot to hop over here to post them, so here we go.

Our amazing photographer is Sam Hassas Sam has such incredible energy, vision, and creativity, and we are sooo happy that he’s our photographer. We can’t wait to see all the fun that we come up with in Hawaii. Read his blog post on our session here and be sure to hit him up if you’re looking for a fabulous person to capture your day.

 

 

I was really anal about our pictures and had to make sure we represented our colors for our wedding and the overall style we were going for: classic, elegant, a little bit 1940s, a little bit whimsical, and fun. I think it came across in the pictures:

Check out the lovely:

 

 

 

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November 29, 2010 My little shopping problem

So, long story short: all my life I’ve never been a clothes shopper. I didn’t really care about shoes, or coats, or anything remotely clothes-centric. I wasn’t one of those girls that longed to go shopping with her friends. Banana Republic credit cards didn’t tempt me. If I went shopping with people I mostly tagged along. That all changed with being on What Not to Wear. Not only did  I learn how to appreciate clothes, I learned how to shop. Shopping, it turns out, is better than chocolate. Who knew? Not this girl.

Right after I got back from NYC with my new makeover, I took my fiance shopping for a little wardrobe update for him. This was super fun because I got to execute all my new shopping skills without spending money. It tided me over. Then I got really busy with work and a bajillion or so weddings, and at the same time lost almost 30 lbs. I am still losing, but 30 lbs less (making a total loss of 70 lbs over 2 years— awesomeness), I found myself at the crossroads where shopping was required: none of my clothes fit and I had no winter clothes left after Stacy and Clinton had thrown out all of my sweaters. Even if they were terribly ugly, I started to freeze whenever we went out anywhere.

So….it’s Black Friday. Fiance and I weren’t interested in looking for electronics, we needed clothes (he’s been on the weightloss bandwagon along with me, and has lost 20 lbs!)…and thus we went out into the world to procure some new duds. I was looking for Jeans and sweaters and a new coat. He was looking for jeans and shirts and maybe some sweaters. I ended up buying some sweaters and a pair of boots. I had so much fun shopping that I came home and kept shopping online, looking for the perfect coat. I saw, fell in love with, and then had dreams about this coat from French Connection: the Winter Sun Coat:

In my dream, when I got this coat I put it on and I became a Vampire. That’s weird, I know, but I guess I just feel that this coat is somehow transformative 🙂

I elected not to buy the coat, and am still looking for one, but in my searches I found lots and lots of things I’d like to buy. Like these jeans from 7 for all Mankind:

And those shoes the model has on with those jeans is not so bad….

I don’t really know how most of you lived your entire life having this feeling about shopping. It’s oddly wonderful and distracting at the same time.

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November 16, 2010 And the Winner is…

HAWAII!!

It’s officially official: we are getting married on June 10 in Hawaii! How awesome is that? I’ll go ahead and answer that one for you, it’s awesome. Only sacrifices include cutting our guest list from 200 to 20, the save the dates I made but never made (now, new save the dates are needed–woohoo!) the custom stamps I got but don’t need now (anyone else getting married on June 11 2011 with a yellow and gray motif?– hit me up!)

The benefits are numerous: less stress. Beautiful location. Small, intimate wedding. Beautiful location…wait, I said that, right? I feel like now I can finally start blogging in earnest our Hawaii wedding plans, so let the games begin!

Thank you to all of you that offered support both on and offline–it means more than you know. I don’t want to downplay at all that this was an impossibly hard decision for us both, and it took a lot of soul searching and introspection to come up with this course of action that was best for us– but that was the key: we had to do what was best for us, and that meant having the wedding that would make us the most happy. I’ve always dreamed of getting married on the beach, and I had thought that I’d have to let that dream die until my sweet fiance saw this place and said, “hey, I think we should get married in Hawaii…” and my…OUR…dreams are now coming true!

Check out this amazingly beautiful spot:

Yeah…total love. And, I am so going to have letterpress invitations now. Come on, who wouldn’t!

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September 24, 2010 On Eloping

Hello, world, it’s me again. I’d fallen off the earth. Figuratively speaking, of course– I was here, but I was feeling overwhelmed. Not to get on the soapbox or anything (but, oh, how I love me some soapboxing), my last post talked about running away and having a sweet wedding on a cliff in Hawaii.

I didn’t get many public comments on that post, but I did get many emails about it. My friends & strangers & cool people from all around the world told me what they thought about my dilemma and ultimately, I kept hearing the same thing: “It’s your wedding, it’s your day, do what you want.”

They are right. We’ve talked to several of our friends to broach the subject of our destination wedding and most have been supportive. Others have been really…well, interesting. We live and breathe weddings. We have weddings pretty much every weekend. We love to share in our bride’s celebrations as wedding professionals. But I’ll be honest– I’ve allowed that to put a lot of pressure on me when it comes to planning our wedding. I started to become consumed with being sure that everything was unique, everything was perfect to the very last detail, and that started to overtake my logic and reasoning powers. I started to become so fixated on planning the wedding that I was neglecting to be planning for the marriage– it’s a trap I always try to advise people NOT to do, and there I was, doing it.

So, voila: destination elopement started to look like a wonderful alternative. It brings our wedding back to being about us, about our relationship, and about a spiritual renewal and commitment.  Am I still obsessed with details? Yes. Am I still wanting to make sure everything is perfect? Yes. But I feel like the destination wedding scales it down (a lot) and makes it feel more managable. It makes it feel like I don’t need to carve out 5 hours a day of my life to plan for a big wedding. And to be perfectly honest–we had never wanted a big wedding. It just kept growing and growing and growing into this THING that became no longer managable.

In my job, I see brides freaking out all the time about guest lists and budgets and details. I see them struggle with how to make things work, how to deal when the budget is capped out and they don’t have enough chairs for guests, or they somehow got too little cake or too much alcohol (as if there’s such a thing!). I feel I’m pretty good in those situations in my job– I’ve been a part of over 100 weddings at this stage in my career from all sorts of angles, and that’s not counting all the weddings I have attended as a guest. I love every moment, but right now I’m so not relishing all the stress that goes into being a bride.

Even a month later, we have still not made our final decision about what we are doing. We’re still in the weighing the options part of the journey, trying to decide what is right for us, and how our decision will affect all the parties involved. That’s the part that sucks– in all honesty, as much as we want to pretend that it’s all about us, we also have friends and family that will be hurt if we run off to Hawaii and they don’t get to come. So we’re working through that. I hope we’ll have a decision in the next week, if anything so we can just move forward and get things on track…and believe me, I’ll keep you posted.

However, I have made a little progress: I found a totally different dress at a trunk show that I absolultely fell in love with. It’s unique, beautiful, and very me. I bought it. No sneak peeks, though! You’ll just have to wait and see. And we went out of town to a workshop & had our engagement pictures done– the session was incredible, and I can’t wait to share the pics. I know for sure our best decision thus far on our wedding is our wedding photographer— it was so much fun to work with him on our e-pics. Can’t wait to share.

In the meantime, if you have thoughts/stories/comments– please share them. Tell me what you think about couples that elope, what you are going through, what you went through, what your feelings are– I think this is a subject that many brides go through, and I don’t know a single bride that doesn’t consider eloping at one point or another, so please– feel free to share your thoughts. Get personal, it’s cool. We’re all friends here!

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August 25, 2010 True Story: Wouldn’t it be Lovely?

So, this past weekend, my so sweet fiance was helping me with a really lovely wedding reception setup. It was a beautiful thing, with lots of confectiony-flowers and oodles of details, and I was in a floral design paradise. That’s not really the point of this post– but I felt I’d do it some injustice by not mentioning how pretty it was, because it was super gorgeous. Anyway, gorgeous reception aside, we were in the midst of setting up, and the two recently married peeps had a bunch of canvases floating around from their engagement session and from their destination wedding.  On top of that, they were looping a sweet little video that was taken when they were married in Hawaii. My future hubs comes over to me and says “The place these people got married is freaking amazing,” and I was like, yeah, yeah, sure whatever, I’m sure it was beautiful. He then shows me the canvas. And while this is not the same cliff and tree (this, friends, comes from a Google Search of “Cliff with tree in Hawaii”) it kinda captures the same feeling:

Thanks to the Photographer– Jennifer Bowen— for the image.

When I saw the cliff and the couple getting married there, I was totally envious. Looking at my sweet husband to be, I saw that he had the same kind of look on his face. I’m not going to lie, wedding planning is getting us down. The stupid budget and the details and the guest list are giving us reason to awake in the night in a panic. Suddenly, a cliff and an ocean and just the two of us seemed to be the perfect solution to all of our problems.

I’ve got a confession– I’ve always secretly wanted to get married in Vegas, and many times in the course of our planning I’ve said that I’d be perfectly happy to run off, elope, end up in some silly chapel in Vegas and just have fun with the whole thing. While my future hubs has been a little less than…enthusiastic…about that plan, the trip to the tree place seemed like it resonated.

We’re up in the air on how to proceed. We’ve not yet sent out the save the dates (and they are almost done) because the guilt of having a big wedding and spending what could be a down payment on a house has started to really set in. Not to mention the day-to-day anxiety of figuring out how best to proceed with an out of control guest list and a million and seven projects to complete before the big day. I’m thinking we’re at that crossroads– the one where we are seriously considering tossing aside our deposits and eloping. And I find that oddly comforting…like it might just be our best decision, the decision with the least amount of stress, least amount of debt, least amount of up-at-night-pacing-the-floors-in-apprehension.

So, we have a decision to make and I have no idea where it’s going to go. Readers…share your insights. Talk us down from the cliff, or tell us to go for it! I mean come on, that cliff is freaking MAGNIFICENT, right?

August 9, 2010 One Month In: Progress Feels Delicious! AND Planning Updates!

I went for my four-week checkup at the doctor, and I was very pleased with the result of my first month of lifestyle-change diet & exercise. It’s been grueling at times, but for the most part has really gotten easier. I feel so much better, so much more healthy, and so much more ALIVE than I did a month ago.

In 4 weeks, I’ve lost 11.5 lbs, 5 inches from my waist, and 1 inch from my hips.

This, to me, is a major accomplishment. I’ve been eating healthy, working out, thinking about everything (yes, EVERYTHING) I put in my mouth. Each calorie counts, and I’m a bit of an obsessive-compulsive counter of them. The dutifulness is paying off, though.

In the wedding, however, I’m painfully behind schedule. Today, we go for our tasting (and that’s going to break the caloric bank, but oh well…) so that feels like a bit of progress. Otherwise, I’m woefully behind. I have still not gotten out the Save-the-Dates. The wedding website is 90% done, I just need to get a move on with the content. That part is the hard part. I would like to pretend that I have big plans to get things done this week, but the next four weeks are so wedding intense (other people’s weddings, not mine) that I feel I am not going to be accomplishing all that much. Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

Oh well. We can’t win them all, right?!

July 23, 2010 Make your Own Shoes!

I know the post title seems vaguely misleading– I’m not suggesting you become a shoe cobbler or anything 🙂 Whilst longingly longing for some C.Louboutains (not gonna happen) I stumbled upon this cool website where you can design your own shoes! You can make them as fancy as you want, with options like suede & bows & ripples & color-coordinated heels. Woo…

May I introduce you to Shoes of Prey I wasted invested a lot of time in designing some weddin’ shoes. These are yellow snakeskin with a cool bow and a 2.5 inch heel.:

Here’s a few some other enterprising ladies made that I found quite lovely:
Patent-leather pink & tan:

And these sexy beauties– black soft leather with red accents. Yummy!

Or maybe something pink…

Or some yellow snakeskin:

As you can tell, I had a lot of fun. I love that they offer so many options and that they can work with weird sizing issues (like the fact that I have boat feet, I’m 5’10 and don’t need eighty seven inches of heels) and that they offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. Fun! Go on, indulge yourself…design a little.

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July 20, 2010 7 days: 6 lbs!

I can’t believe it– but in a week I lost nearly 6 lbs. 5.8 to be exact– and I feel so excited I could sing. I won’t, but…

It’s such an amazing thing to stand on the scale and feel proud at your accomplishment. I was beyond thrilled to see that I lost that much in one week. It’s great to get through the first chapter and feel successful. I’m still teetering on crazy hunger some days that makes me want to eat anything in sight (including, one day, thinking about the road and how it might taste) but I’m getting better at managing calories and expectations. Rome wasn’t built in a day, after all.

In so many ways, it’s the most exciting journey. This is the most concerted effort I’ve ever made at losing weight. Other times, I followed the program, yadda yadda, but I’d not really felt this level of enthusiasm and commitment. It’s the best feeling in the world to know that you are  full of conviction about the possibilities ahead of you.

The most transformative thing thus far is the change in the way that I look at food. It’s more about energy to fuel the engine that is my body instead of a delicious past-time. Second to that is that it takes so much work and devotion to be healthy. It’s about making sound choices. It’s funny to me that I’ve heard people say the same things over and over about being healthy, about making sound, good choices, about diet and exercise being a lifestyle choice. It’s sad that up until now, it went in and out the other ear. I made excuses for all the reasons I couldn’t, instead of saying “Well, maybe I’ll really try this. Maybe I’ll really change my life.”

It’s amazing– the prospects and possibilities ahead.

I promise that next post will be totally all about the wedding. In particular, my first completed DIY: the Save-the-Dates!!

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July 14, 2010 Rewarding Good Behavior

So, yesterday I officially embarked on the doctor’s diet plan. I did a lot of soul searching, the should I, should I, should I….then marched right over to the office first thing and signed up. I had a battery of tests, after which I was given the medical green light and got sobering news: 900 calories a day was my starting calorie limitation, 100 carbs. Arg. 100 carbs? I think the coffees I was having every day had more than that.

I found my newest ally in this journey– The Calorie King Seriously the best website ( I also invested in the book so I can carry it around with me) and I’m waiting patiently for the android app so I can have the King in my purse digitally.  Everything you ever wanted to know (calorie wise) can be found on this site. It’s just insightful to know some of the things I once ate were like, a million billion calories.

No matter what though, 900 calories is intense. It’s very, very, very little calories. It’s hard. Yesterday, Future Hubbs and I went to the grocery store and lamented over the high cost of healthy eating (seriously– apples, wtf!? Like one is $1.89!!) and read every label of every little thing we invested in. He’s riding the healthy train along with me (but not 900 calories). We walked for an hour in the afternoon to earn back some calories for the day– previously, I’d exercised to look good, not to be able to eat 1 extra ounce of Tilapia. Which I had always hated until I ate it last night, and after a day of starvation boot camp, it tasted like the sweet ambrosia of the water.

As I type this (eating my midmorning snack of 39 golfish = 100 calories) I recall back to yesterdays initiation into the land of the will-be-healthy-and-relatively-thin, and how my nutritionist advised that I come up with a great reward. My first week goal is to shed 4.5 pounds, and if I reach the goal she said I ought to do something nice for myself that isn’t food related. I think I’m going to do a manicure. I used to bite my nails obsessively until April 30 (the day I got engaged) and I quit biting altogether. My nails are the longest they have ever been, and I think they deserve a little pampering. Besides, if I can’t buy a milkshake, or Starbucks, or, well…anything with calories for that matter, I think a manicure is a good thing.

Let me know if my diet journey is annoying. I’ll post about something else, I promise 😀

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July 13, 2010 The Great Awakening

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a “heavyset” person.  The only time in my life that I was below average weight was the day I was born– one month premature– and I still came out packing regular baby heft. Anyway. Over the past 18 months, I slowly but surely lost 40 lbs. That was a lot– and made me feel pretty awesome about myself– but then slowly but surely– it started to creep back on. A pound here, a pound there. I had planned to lose weight pre-wedding, as most brides do, and I thought this was the perfect time to take and turn my life, my eating habits, and my weight– around for good.

A week ago,  I started Weight Watchers. I was feeling pretty positive about it until weigh-in rolled around and I’d lost zero pounds. I was pretty bummed– and discouraged. I happened to have a doctors appointment yesterday morning, so I went in with a bit of a heavy heart. When I walked into the exam room, the doctor quickly followed and took my blood pressure–which was awesome– but then she looked into my eyes and said with all seriousness, “We need to talk about your weight.”

Fact of the matter is that yo yo-ing around on the scale isn’t healthy. Nor is gaining 15 pounds in 2 months for no reason you can define, or pinpoint, or really understand. I am 31: carrying around a little extra here and there is going to impact my long term health, and listening to her strike the fear of God in me (diabetes, worsening arthritis, difficulties conceiving when that time comes, heart disease, etc etc) I found myself nodding and wanting to take notes.

My doctor gave me a lot of suggestions and offered help in her office– weekly meetings, consults with a nutritionist– doctor approve and supported weight loss– and I left with a lot to ponder. On my way back to the house, I started a kind of inner retrospective of all that I’d already gone through in life over my weight: from feeling fat at 10 to being called it in school, the bullies on the playground that make it a point to make you feel crappy and different if you are. I remember high school, and how after a few days of fasting in July I’d made a concerted effort to shave some 50 lbs off my body, ending up at a svelt 135, a weight accomplished by eating less than 1000 calories a day and less than 20 grams of fat. I remember the day that diet ended– over a piece of extra crispy fried chicken– and how that defeat had started another rollercoaster ride: up, up, up to 200+, down, down, down to 175 at the lowest.

I’m happy in my own skin. This isn’t about feeling fat, or unattractive. I feel beautiful. But I don’t feel healthy– and I have too much to live for to not be at my healthiest, to not have a body that supports a healthy heart, strong body, and a great constitution. I don’t want to have to worry about diabetes, about heart disease, about becoming obese. I realize that as our bodies age, it becomes easier to gain and harder to lose– and I feel like I’ve been afforded the opportunity to change things around.

Like so much of my life this year, I’ve been given unexpected opportunities that have completely transformed my life. Sometimes, it only takes a second of insight to alter the way you look at something completely. I’m excited about changing my health– for losing weight not because I want to be “thin” but because I want to be healthy. I am ready to stop the yo-yo rollercoaster ride of starve, starve, starve then eat, eat, eat, (and then eat some more).

It’s a scary journey, but it’s time.

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