Sunday, May 3, 2009

Best Rainy Weekend Ever

I can easily say that this weekend was one of my favorite of 2009.  I got to spend a lot of time with Joe, sleep in, do wedding stuff, eat great food and hang out with one of my besties.  It was awesome.  :)

Kate and I went downtown Frederick and enjoyed the great weather, tons of live music in the streets, dinner in a dive bar, and lots of cute shops.  Our best find of the night- a couture wedding dress maker from NYC who also has a little shop here in Frederick!  Kate and I loooooved her and every single dress she had in there- they are beautifully made, everything is hand-stitched and one of a kind, finished in 2-4 weeks (that is INSANE) and, the very best part- she is AFFORDABLE!!!  

Then we came home and starting going through wedding magazines and we ended up just making fun of 99.9% of everything in all four magazines.  The wedding industry is warped and insane, people.  Our favorite thing to make fun of are those HIDEOUS pointy-but-round-or-square white shoes.  OMG.  Barf.  Oh, and how the models stand in those stupid poofy dresses.  :)

Today it rained and rained and rained.  We were all feeling lazy and tired from the weather, but we headed out to brunch at Firestone for brunch- YUM!  So tasty.  Then we were on a mission to begin our first wedding project...

Kate and I are going to be our own florists.  The average bride in DC spends between $2,500 and $3,000 on FLOWERS.  Uhmmmm, no thanks.  I am pretty sure Kate and I will be spending about $250 on our flowers, including the containers.  

Since we both want the same type of centerpieces, and our weddings are a month apart, we decided to split the cost of the antique jars we wanted to get.  So today we hit up all the antique stores in town and bought every cute antique jar that was under $4- that was our limit.  I thought it would take a couple months of scanning the antique stores in town (we have 20+) but we got all 46 vases today!  Final cost was $127- that's $63.50 a person for all the jars for our centerpieces... which calculates to approx. $1.40 a jar!  They are beautiful.  Some of them we need to clean up, and that will be our next project!  Hooray for fun, eco-friendly, inexpensive and totally awesome centerpieces!

We'll both be buying some flowers wholesale from local vendors and hopefully using some wildflowers, too.  I found a guy in Frederick who would let me pick his wildflowers if I made a donation to his non-profit that promotes earth-friendly products- heck yeah!  Now that's being thrifty! :)

So anyway, a short story made entirely too long- we had a blast today searching through all these stores and finding great jars as vases under $4.  Joe got into it too, even if he doesn't want to admit it  :)  He was such a big help today- love that guy!  :)

Kate- we did good today!  xoxo!

Here are some photos!!!


Check out this antique store!  Joe bought a beautiful chest to hold blankets here

loved these Turkish locks... Kate was figuring out how she could use them

loved these mini terra cotta pots in the holders... 
thinking of how I could use these for the wedding...

colorful pails that could totally show up on June 19th of next year! :)

Lilly on the chest we bought :)

She's so cute!  And I love the detail of the chest.

Some of the jars we bought... had to try 'em out! :)

Loove these jars that are just a little bit blue

You can't really see the very pretty jar, but I like this photo :)

Oh Hai!  Lilly modeling with our awesome finds :)

All 46 jars/vases!

soooooo pretty!


1 comment:

Karyn McK. said...

Placecard Favors. You could use the terracota pots for placecard favors. If you are assigning seating, you could plant something fabulous in each pot such at basil or cilantro. Then, in each pot, make a little placecard... something on a popsicle stick would work! The guests could take them home. Functional, cute, themed, and green!