Jamie's Bridal Shower

A few weeks ago I flew east for my friend Jamie's bridal shower. It was a lot of fun, as showers go (you know, all that playing hostess for for women you don't know from Adam... or Eve), and it was great to see my friends again for a couple days. There were tons of awesome little details:


It was a travel-themed shower, so the bride's sister/MOH Emily had guests submit a photo and description of their favorite trip with a loved one. I sent a picture from our Alaska trip back in June. Emily and I had grand ideas of doing a digital scrapbook that we printed out, but in the end, time constraints won out and she inserted everything into a photo album.


Emily also got lots of flowers from Sam's Club and made vase arrangements for all the tables. We played a game that sent us "around the world" (we even had passports to write our answers in) to identify various international things, including identifying the phrase "I love you" in various languages (shown on that poster board -- I only knew the Chinese and Italian). Each vase also had a flag in it from a different country, which we had to identify. The wedding colors are black and white, hence the black-and-white polka dot ribbon.


All the presents were displayed in open suitcases. This also made it very convenient to pack all the presents up at the end!


A family friend made this bride cake. The "skirt" is the cake, and the bodice is decorated with icing. When we got back to Jamie's house and ate it, we discovered that the doll was just a head and torso with a long stem in the bottom instead of legs -- maybe it's meant for this kind of thing? The cake stand was decorated with extra flowers from Sam's Club.



The around-the-world food included various international cheeses and appetizers (sushi, potstickers, appetizer meatballs, falafel, stuffed grape leaves) and the flags for the passport game were stuck in the various foods as well.


These ice bowls were absolutely amazing. The bowls for the shrimp and cocktail sauce were actually made of ice, with the lemon slices frozen within them. They were very well-received, and it was eventually revealed that the instructions came from -- who else? -- Martha Stewart. To keep it from melting all over the place, the ice bowls were on top of the polka dot fabric that was on top of a shammy that was on top of a cookie sheet.


Here's Jamie holding one of the gifts from me and our other friend Paula -- a towel cake! It's two full sets of towels, rolled to form a three-layered cake, and decorated with ribbon I had at home and post-Christmas clearance decorations. I have to say, it was a pretty big hit.


This picture's pretty crappy, but I wanted to show off the other part of the gift from Paula and me (it was lingerie), with the pretty black-and-white damask-like print wrapping paper (they were actually chandeliers printed on the paper, not a true damask print). Do I know how to coordinate or what?


While Jamie was opening her presents, my job was to make the bow bouquet.

Pretty good, huh? I even made it one-sided, in a cascade shape, with a ribbon-wrapped handle. Too bad I'm the master of a non-money-making skill.


A shot with the towel cake and bow bouquet. You can see the doll cake in the background, too. The shower was held in the clubhouse of a local housing community. Jamie's mom knew someone who lived there, so we were able to have the shower there. It was really nice -- like the living room, dining room, and caterer's kitchen of a very large, fancy house.



Group shot -- from left to right, Jamie's friend from med school, Devon; me; Jamie; and our other bff Paula. We played that game where everyone got a clothespin when we walked in and were told we couldn't say the word "wedding." Later on, it was expanded to include the word "Jamie" as well. If someone caught you saying those words, she got to take your clothespin, and the person with the most clothespins at the end won a prize. We also played bridal shower bingo, which was fun. It was a game-intensive shower, for sure.

After the shower was over, we acted like the pathetic, then-26-year-old med student/interns we are and did absolutely nothing on a Saturday night. Well, we ended up playing Cranium, which is always a good time. All in all, in was a lot of fun, and we have the bachelorette party coming up in Pittsburgh at the end of March. Jamie's wedding is April 12 -- I probably need to get my bridesmaid dress altered because the next six weeks are going to fly by!

"she wiped away tears as she told how he laughed so hard he couldn't speak"

But did she wipe away tears of sadness or laughter? I can't tell.

Nevertheless:

Blow-Up Doll Stands in for Groom

White House Wedding

Well, not really. Jenna Bush is not getting married at the White House, as it turns out, but that isn't stopping her from getting a classy-ass dress. As numerous other bloggers have blogged, Style Scoop has published a composite of all the wedding dress designs Laura Bush commissioned. Take a look.

1. Vera Wang
2. J. Mendel
3. Arnold Scaasi
4. Carlos Miele
5. Amsale
6. Carmen Marc Valvo
7. Angel Sanchez
8. Badgley Mischka
9. Nicole Miller
10. Lela Rose
11. Marc Bouwer
12. Oscar de la Renta

Personally, I LOVE #5. Funny how that works, since it is very reminiscent of my own dress. Nicole Miller's is nice as well, and the skirt is very similar to my own as well. Plus, I love the flowers in that model's hair. Oscar's dress looks divine as well. Dress #3 is very boring and plain.

For Jenna, I'd choose #4 or 10; they're very current and would be flattering on her.

But who cares about Jenna! It's much more fun to lust after them for myself!

Wedding cake follies

We haven't run into this yet, but that's probably only because we haven't started looking at cakes yet...

The only difference is, I'm going to be just as much of a prick as the guy in the skit.

The Venue! Part 5

As I mentioned before, once we had crossed off Mellwood, we were really excited, because it meant we had chosen our venue! That's because we had visited Glassworks already, on the same day that we visited the Science Center, but I saved the site visit recap for this post.

So, without further ado, here is our venue:

Louisville Glassworks! The building, the Snead Manufacturing Building, hosts a bunch of glassworking and glassblowing studios, as well as some office space and loft apartments. Here's a rundown of what it offers for us:

-The Rooftop, on the eighth floor, where we'll have our ceremony. I am VERY excited about this part!


We'll set up the chairs the same way that is shown in these pictures, looking east into the heart of downtown. The view to the north shows the river just a block away, and the top of the bat of the Louisville Slugger Museum (picture taken by me):


I really like the look of that wooden arch in the second rooftop picture -- it helps to draw attention to the bride and groom a little more than those flower arrangements on pedestals. I also love the look of the roof at dusk, but I'm not sure if we'll be able to take advantage of that, since our ceremony will start in the late afternoon, and it will be May, so the sun won't set until very late. Plus, Louisville is on the very western edge of the eastern time zone, so it seems as though it stays light out almost a whole hour later than it does on the east coast proper. Maybe we'll go back up to the roof later on, though -- it's definitely an option.

-The reception site, on the second floor
Those columns are encrusted with glass at the top, and there is lots of glass artwork on all the walls. Those windows in the back left look down onto the glassblowing facility downstairs. To the right of those glass tiles is a flameworking studio. We can have a glassblowing or flameworking demonstration for our guests!


This is the view as you step off the elevator, onto a beautiful glass floor. The seating area is to the right, and there are glass pieces along the hallway. To the left is another, smaller, room that allows you to look into another glassworking facility, and has more displays of glass pieces. It's a good place to stage a buffet, but a little small for holding our ceremony (which is OK, since we have that gorgeous roof!).

We have a great rain contingency plan: In the best-case scenario, they'll move us to the first floor, which is another large event space like the one on the second floor, and we'll have our ceremony there, with a backdrop of the gift shop (not as ghetto as it sounds; it is FILLED with tons of gorgeous glass pieces and is lit beautifully). If that space is rented out, we'll have the ceremony on the second floor, with us on the dance floor and all the guests seated at their dinner tables. Since this is a little less than ideal, we would then get refunded half of the rooftop fee. Either way, it eases my mind tremendously about the possibility of bad weather.

The building also owns one of the afore-mentioned loft apartments, and rents it out hotel-style. They suggest using it as a getting-ready suite or as a honeymoon suite. We want to stay at the same hotel as all our guests, so we won't be using it as a honeymoon suite. As of right now, we probably won't use it as a getting-ready suite either, but it would be a great place to use if you wanted to.

Another issue I had thought about was the necessity for a day-of coordinator. I've acted in a similar role for other people's weddings, and I know it's a person who can be a really lifesaver. Glassworks requires all wedding couples to hire their own day-of coordinator, who will be there for the rehearsal, ceremony, and first part of the reception. We will have trusted friends and guests available to help with things outside those times, but it worked out well to have to hire the Glassworks coordinator to get us all down the aisle in time.

Here are some more photos of the facility (photos from Flickr):
The glassblowing studio.

Glass pieces extruding from the outside of the building.

The flameworking studio.

They let you blow your own glass ornaments. It looks fun!

I am so excited to have booked our wedding at Glassworks! Now I have a million ideas for decorating the rooftop (I LOVE that wooden arch; where to get one myself?) and the reception space (should we use tons of glass to mimic the feel of the space or go somewhere unexpected, like lots of flowers and greenery?). The next official parts of planning are interviewing the caterers (there are 15 approved caterers) and finding a photographer. We've also gone ahead and made a block of rooms for out of town guests (which is practically all of them).

YAAAY!

The Venue! Part 4

Next up was the Mellwood Arts and Entertainment Center, a building located just outside of downtown that is a former meat packing company-turned-artist space. The complex is huge, and it has tons of artists' studios and shops, including a rather large art supply store, and a restaurant just opened there as well. We had actually been to a craft fair there a couple years ago, so I was sort of familiar with the building, but it turns out that there is much more to the complex than I originally thought.


A view of the outside of the building. It doesn't look like much from the outside, but it's awesome inside. The larger event room is above the parking garages on the bottom floor, and those white balcony doors open up from the event space onto that gorgeous lawn outside. The second room is behind the first one (to the left side of the picture), and also opens onto the lawn.

Mellwood has two rooms, both with a very exposed-pipes, loft-style feel (a recurring theme for us, no?). The larger room seats way over 200 people, and costs twice our maximum budget, so it was out. The smaller room was good for our number of guests and fit a little better into our budget, but it was just a reception space. To use the lawn for the ceremony would have been more money, and that would have put us slightly over budget, although I would have been OK with that if we had totally loved the place.

A picture of the larger room set up for a dinner. The smaller room looks pretty much the same.

Reasons we decided against Mellwood included:
-Too expensive, which was OK but not ideal
-A little outside of downtown Louisville, which was OK but not ideal; I really wanted to our guests to get a feel for the city, and not come to a brand new city just to go to "some building" that could be situated anywhere.
-We would have to have the wedding in the smaller room, and it's very likely the larger room would also get rented, and we didn't like the idea of a bigger (although not necessarily better) party going on across the hall (also a reason we weren't big fans of a hotel wedding).

Nevertheless, although we decided not to use Mellwood, we were very happy when we left our site visit, because it meant we had chosen our venue!

The Venue! Part 3

On the same day, we saw both the Louisville Science Center and Glassworks. I was late getting to the Science Center, so Eric was left holding his own with the sales woman. Despite some instruction on my part as to what questions to ask, I don't think either of them was very comfortable until I got there.

The science center is located in Louisville's downtown West Main District, which is notable for having largest collection of cast iron facades in the country outside of New York's SoHo.

The science center's Riverview Room is on the other side of the building from the entrance (shown above). It looks onto the river, with roughly this view, but from higher up:


The view above is looking straight to the north and a little to the west. Unfortunately, to the east, there's a view of the construction site of the just-started Museum Plaza, and while the sales person said they don't think our view is actually going to be obstructed, I wasn't too optimistic. The room was actually two rooms -- a very large space with exposed pipes that would be the main area for dinner and dancing, and a smaller, rectangular space to the side that is often used for cocktail hour, staging a buffet, or, in our case, for the ceremony itself. If we started the wedding before the science center exhibits closed, our guests would receive free entry and could come early to look around, which I thought was very cool. Unfortunately, the ceilings in this otherwise-gorgeous urban, loft-type space weren't very tall, and it gave the whole room a much smaller feel. Plus, they wanted a little more money than I thought was worth it.

Of the four finalists, we easily crossed this one off of our list.