Wedding Gift Registries

Over the last few days my fi (short for fiance :)) and I started our wedding gift registries. We registered at Bed Bath and Beyond, Pottery Barn and Macy's. This seems like a good mix.

Bed Bath and Beyond is for every little thing you need at a good price and an advantage is that they are located pretty much everywhere. Jon is from Michigan (and most of his family lives over there) so we have to keep in mind that we need to register at places that they have too. Macy's is good for this as well. I do not think they have Pottery Barn so that will be for just people in Cali. I love that store (I actually worked there about 3 years ago as a seasonal employee). They have very nice furniture, decor, and dinnerware, etc.

And then last night I went to Anthropologie.com and created a wish list. Sadly they do not have wedding gift registries. :( But they do have a wish list and it looks just like a registry because anyone can look up your wish list to see what it is you want. The list tells you how many of each item they want and how many have been bought for them already. Sounds like a gift registry to me! I got the idea from my friend Erika who is also getting married and she created a wish list at Anthro. I took a look at her wish list last night and got super excited, maybe a little too excited, because I ended up staying up until almost 2 in the morning adding items to my own wish list. I just love how everything there is so unique. The pieces that we get from there will add lots of personality and style to our house.

I admit that being registered at 4 places sounds a little bit excessive and almost greedy. I am considering listing that we are registered at Anthropologie for just my friend showers and not for the wedding. I don't know yet, we will see. I figure my friends and some of my mom's friends would enjoy shopping at Anthropologie more than the other stores. All I know is that I got excited when I found out I could buy Erika something from Anthropologie instead of the usual places.

Registering for wedding gifts is so much fun! It's like Christmas except your wish list includes anything and everything you will ever think you need. I think Jon enjoyed using the scanning gun the best. I think his favorite thing to do is to point the gun at me. He tells me he just wants to make sure I'm on the list. :)

One more thing... in your opinion.... should we register for china or not register for china? Jon and I are leaning more towards not registering for it because we don't know when we will ever use it. We will probably just register for nicer everyday settings that can be dressed up or down depending on the occasion. There are some really pretty designs out there for China, but I gravitate towards the more unique and I know that it will probably go out of style within a few years and then we will never use it again. So what's the point? We would rather have people spend more on other items that we will use more rather than on expensive China we may only use once every few years. In all honesty, what is your opinion?

Antiquing Adventures

This weekend we went antique shopping again! This time we went on a mission to find antique bottles to use as centerpieces and for the ceremony aisle way. My mom, sister and I went looking for blue mason jars specifically and then any other types of small antique bottles that weren't too pricey. We went to antique stores in Clovis and found some great bottles! My plan is to have half the tables with groupings of 3 or so bottles in varying heights and sizes as the centerpieces. Depending on the size of the bottles there will be different amounts of flowers in them. Some of the really little bottles will have one big flower in them.

Here is a photo of all the pieces we collected!

The plan for the other half of the tables is to have much taller centerpieces to balance out the overall look. These will be floral centerpieces as well but they will be in white iron pieces my mom found at Home Goods. They are perfect! We met with two of the florists last week and are pretty sure we know which florist to go with. She just got my vision exactly. She got super excited when we showed her the white iron pieces my mom bought.

We went on another antiquing adventure today at the antique stores in Cayucos. We came here for a few days to stay at our beach house and figured we might as well go shopping here too! This time my fiance came too along with my sister and mom. :) He was a good sport although he was working half the time from his phone, he still joined in on the search. I always knew Cayucos had several great antique stores, but I hadn't really been inside them. A couple of them were 3 stories tall, who would have known? We found some great treasures there as well.

Personal Wedding Websites

This week I created our personal wedding website!

Before I created our wedding website, I did some research on the different ones out there. At first I went straight to theknot.com because they are a phenomenal website for all kinds of great wedding tips and ideas. I browsed through their wedding website templates and although they had several cute ones that you can make in a variety of colors, I just didn't feel like any of them represented the look of our wedding. Then I looked up weddingjojo.com because I had remembered reading about it on other bridal blogs. Unlike theknot.com which has everything you can think of as far as weddings go, weddingjojo is just for creating your own personal wedding websites. I browsed through their templates and I found one in particular that I really liked, but realized that you had to pay 14.99 a month for it. Only one of their templates is free! No thank you! If I can find other websites that don't charge, that is what I am going to do, I don't want to have to pay for something like that. I then google searched wedding websites and looked at ewedding.com and some others I can't think of right now and none of them really had that great of templates or you had to pay for them.

Then I came across weddingwire.com and browsed through their templates. They have 100's of templates all for FREE, I couldn't believe they were free because they had soooo many cute ones I had a hard time choosing which one to use for our site. I got so excited!! They have ones from Vera Wang, Martha Stewart, and all sorts of other designers. I think they have a lot of wedding invitation companies' templates so that if you wanted to, you could have your website match your invitations. What a great marketing idea!