BRIDESMAIDS!!

Hey girls!! In less than 2 months I'll get to see you and I'm so excited! The wedding is really coming together. There will be some last minute things to take care of, but they're little things.

I hired a makeup artist to do our makeup, and my dad is flying in our fabulous family friend Cade and his partner to do our hair! They were stylists of mine and Faith's when we lived in Kansas and they became friends of ours. Apparently Cade and Dave now do "Event Hair" and they were so excited about the wedding, so my dad offered to fly them out if they'd do our hair. Now we'll all have pro makeup and hair! Awesome!

I sent a text out a little while ago suggesting that alterations to the dress didn't just have to be for size fixes. Fitzlippo turned hers into a SUPER SWEET-fantastically theme friendly version and I wanted to share. All of you can do this, or do something similar. She's got her shoes on too and she added the baller Fedora. If you all want to do a Fedora, they're $10 from walmart if you don't already have one (or know where to get one). I really like the look and if you all want to wear them, we'll have you wear them during the ceremony too. If not, we'll keep all head gear (ie hats) off til after the ceremony.

BACHELORETTE PARTY

Hey girls! Ok so the post-bachelorette bachelorette party (henceforth known as PBBP) can't be in Vegas. I'm not going to finish primary in time to fit it between primary and advanced. Therefore, I have to be in my 350 mile radius and the next best city in that range is NOLA. I love New Orleans! It's a great city; there's so much to do. Nightlife is awesome but there's plenty to do during the day too.

You'll get more details later, but think Memorial Day (only 3 day weekend I'll get between now and July 4th). I hope you can all make it! We can meet in P-Cola (airport is Pensacola Regional "PNS" is the designator for flight searaches) and the drive is only a couple hours.

More to follow!

Some of Emily's Bridals

Some of Emily's Bridals: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

Bridal pictures! My hair will be way more punk but I had it actually done for boudoirs (kind of messy, for that shoot) but we did this for my photographer's/makeup artists portfolios and some adds they're doing. It was fun! Jolly good.

Summary of Definites

1. BRIDESMAID DRESS is found here:

http://www.lightinthebox.com/Sheath--Column-Sweetheart-Knee--Length-Capped-Satin-Mother-of-the-Bride-Dress--FSH0140-_p51974.html

2.Buy your dresses as soon as you can, I don't know how long they keep their patterns. Color: Grape. Size can be standard (small, med, ect.) or for $20 you can have it custom fit to your measurements.

3. You will be wearing black converse. They can be high or low top, I don't care what style of converse. I think they might even have converse heels, but make sure they're standard color (black canvas, white rubber.)

4. Jewelry, hairstyle, makeup choices are all yours.

5. REVIEW GUEST SITE:

http://www.mywedding.com/elmorejohnson/

6. ALL DETAILS ABOUT TIMES, EVENTS, HOTEL, ETC ARE FOUND ON THE GUEST SITE ABOVE

Hair

It'll be dark brown and the hair clip will be my sweet peacock feather and silver/pearl brooch fascinator with a birdcage veil (gonna be baller!) but this is basically the hair style!

Rock n Roll Bride · Punk Rock (n Roll) Bride

Rock n Roll Bride · Punk Rock (n Roll) Bride: "- Sent using Google Toolbar"

US$ 89.99 | Sheath/ Column Sweetheart Knee -Length Capped Satin Mother of the Bride Dress (FSH0140)

US$ 89.99 | Sheath/ Column Sweetheart Knee -Length Capped Satin Mother of the Bride Dress (FSH0140)

I LIKE THIS ONE for you guys! In the color "grape" (check out the color/size guide) If you're dimensions don't fit into those you can choose "custom fit" and for less than the price of getting it tailored you can have them custom fit it to your dimensions. (I did that for wedding dress #1 from this site...it's great quality and it fit like a glove!)

Shoes

What do you want to do about shoes with the bridesmaid dresses? They're kind of short, but if you all want heels that's just fine. We could try to find some vintage-style Mary Jane heels or something cool. There's also options such as: combat-ish boots (definitely complete the west coast punk look then!) or maybe converse? We could go with a color that matches and either leave it or as- is or get some markers and you guys can design them however you want, either on the purple canvas or a different color. Ok so some examples (and not these colors except maybe the converse, I just chose the first thing that fit the style.)

There are a lot of awesome shoes here too:
http://www.tukshoes.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&manufacturers_id=15

Check it out!

And the winner is...

The winner is dress #2, the black/pink Betsey Johnson with the spaghetti straps. A close second was dress #1, the Sue Wong. Haha fundamentally different dresses so I hope you're happy with the Betsey Johnson. The dress below is the color combo, this color blue with this color purple. Thoughts?

I am the smartest girl alive! Ok, maybe just the best tutorial follower...ha!

I'm experiencing a moment of deep self-satisfaction and I have to share with someone. I only got K and Sara's message machine so I'll just share my awesome experience with everyone!

This awesome experience DID NOT start awesome. I've been designing the invitations and I've become a little obsessed. I plopped onto the compute this morning to get crackin' and what do I find? A monitor with a blinking blue light. Nothing starts it. I restart, take plugs out and put them in, no dice. So I take to the laptop and look up my monitor. Seems this little gem (exact model and same year) has an issue with going to shit after a couple years and the "error" code is the flashing blue light. What's wrong with it? Techies disagree but there were 2 options: burned out LCD backlight or blown capacitors. Both would cost between $100-$300 to fix and a new monitor is $150 on the cheap end. It's past warranty and already broken so what the hell, I determined I'd fix it myself.

If it was an LCD issue I'd have to order so I looked up a tutorial first on how to replace capacitors. What a pain! You have to take the monitor apart, open up the guts and be sure not to get zapped by other capacitors in the process. (We're talkin around 1000 volts here, would've been a bad day.) So long as I didn't go poking metal into things that looked like batteries I figured I'd be ok; off I went!

This model really sucks for taking apart. The screws are nearly impossible to get to and the circuit board is not in an ergonomic position. But I finally got it out and what do you know? Blown capacitors. Brown juice all over. The capacitors shit themselves. At this point I realized I'd need a soldering iron, solder, 3 new capacitors and a tutorial on how to solder circuit boards. $20 and a 10 minute tutorial later I set to work.

I really didn't know if this was going to work! But I got the faulty pieces out, the new ones in, tediously put this thing back together and headed to the computer room. Plugs went into the monitor, I held my breath in anticipation and...NOTHING! Haha I went through all that and forgot to check if I plugged it back into the surge protector. Ok so I plugged that in and...SUCCESS!!! I fixed the monitor! I braved the perils of the circuit board and walked away victorious! Plus I saved a couple hundred bucks, which is GREAT because I've got this wedding thing going on.  WOOHOO!

Time to Vote!

Okay bridesmaids, I need to know what kind of style you all prefer please vote on the following. I'm going to write a description of the dress next to the number since blogger doesn't like to line up text with photos but remember color(s) will be different:

Dress 1:Sue Wong style flapper

Dress 2: Betsey Johnson pink/black

 Dress 3: Betsey Johnson pink/black with bow

Dress 4: Modcloth black with lace


Dress 5: Blue with lace

Added Pictures

I forgot how to add pictures in the "Pics" tab but I just figured it out again so check out the new ones :)

These can be found at: http://www.unique-vintage.com/wong-silk-ivory-layered-flapper-cocktail-dress-p-3987.html

They go marvelously with Gatsby and have a shape that flatters any figure. Probably going to order them in a color that matches this shoe (I love this shoe) :  

WOW look at this one!

This is a TOTALLY different look but definitely puts the punk in big band punk theme. Kathleen (Drew's aunt) found this and it's awesome! The picture was next to a mannequin in a blue kilt... it's calling to me guys. Completely different from Gatsby so it's hard to decide which I like better but this is pretty cool.

Alas

So I think I scared the girls at 1koo with my dress. I got an email saying they can't make it... but it was in really broken English so I think they're plenty capable they just need something more concrete with minimal add-on instructions. Like Gatsby. Hopefully they can make it or I'm going to enter a pit of despair for a solid hour :)

I think I'm onto something!

I was talking to Fitzlippo and thought I'd take a nap but after our conversation I was jazzed up for the wedding so took to the drawing board. I'm very pleased with this. Oh yes. Might be the winner. Imagine it in fabric, dashed lines are beading, the cap sleeves would actually be transparent material with beading on it, similar to the top part of the Sue Wong bridesmaid dress. Tell me your thoughts!

Or...

I drew this too, I was thinking about trying to incorporate it with the invites somehow. This is obviously of the era too, but I don't know how I feel about sheath dresses exploding into ruffles and feathers at the bottom, it's a little much I think. Could have short hair with it though which would be stellar. Then again, Drew really wants the long hair so alas, looks like we'll need to go with the stuff below:

Crappy Sketch, Look at the Pics Below for Elements

And here's 1koo_3. I really like this shape and the girl is a little bit shorter than previous models. Plus this is a Chinese company so if I'm unsure of how it might look on a small person like me I only need to find the dress on one of their Chinese models. But anyway, here's satin going into net. I like this a lot, but I really don't like the flower trail thingy above the fabric "bunch". It's a looser bunch so that flower thing probably helps to keep the fabric tighter but if they wrap it tighter I won't need that. My bunch would be higher too so it can immediately go to the lace layer before going back into satin and then net or skip the 2d satin layer and go net. I'll sketch my idea and post it. I'm thinking the beading on the bodice should be similar to the style beading on the bridesmaid's flapper dresses.

We'll call this 1koo_2. This is such a neat dress but it isn't the era we're going for and the shape is too bell. Again though, love the wrap and it's put together better. Also great use of layering here, I like the way satin leads to lace, but I think having a third layer (net) would be best for the bottom. It'd add even more dimension (they did it with ruffles during the 20s but I really dislike ruffles) so I can do it with layers. It'd be a lot different than other wedding dress styles too and with bright heels and big punk hair, can't go wrong!