So I seem to spend more time lately swooning over pictures of butterfly wedding supplies online than I do actually buying them and doing crafts for my own wedding. But with 2010 almost here, I’m trying to get myself back in gear and start doing and not just dreaming.

BUT, before that happens, I found a TON of really great butterfly wedding favors on the site Daisy-Days.com and I wanted to share some of my favorite pieces of inspiration!

If you want a less DIY approach, I like this whole Butterfly Dreams Wedding collection. They have four popular colors and you can get all the accessories like the ring bearer pillow, flower girl basket, etc. If it gets down to the wire and I’m still missing some of these things, or haven’t found anything I really want to make, I might pop back over and pick some of these up.

Next up are some fantastic jewels you can use to dress up your bouquet. I’ve seen other brides do the little crystals in the flowers, but what about crystal butterflies? I love the idea of that extra sparkle in my flowers, and it will tie my look in with the rest of the theme.

I’m not going to do individual place cards on each table (just place cards at the door with their table number, not assigned seats), but if I was I would use these butterfly name cards. They are so freaking cute. The little pieces of glitter they have in the sample pictures on the site just add to the overall adorableness of that table!

Finally, the creme de la creme: butterfly candy favor bags. DREAMY SIGH. The candy buffet is happening, but I still need bags for people to take the candy home in (or I could just tell everyone on the invitations that pockets are required… lol). We could do them in our colors, with our names. Look how hot these are:

I can’t even handle it any more. I need to go lay down and recover, ha!

Has anyone else ever gone into wedding inspiration overload? How do you not end up buying/making every cute idea you see?

As we wind down 2009, I wanted to share one of my favorite songs, and a possible contender for the First Dance. Sorry NEPA Groom if this is news to you, lol. It’s really a beautiful and emotionally raw feeling song, and I’d like to think it captures at least a little part of what makes us, us.

I love love love this song. This ranked up there as one of our songs in the early days of our relationship, even though it wasn’t quite THE song. It has to show up somewhere in reception!

I’m a big fan of beach weddings. I know, I’m not having anything that even remotely resembles a beach wedding, but I adore them anyway. NEPA BIL and his wife were married a year and a half ago on the beach in North Carolina and it was a simple, yet breath-taking ceremony.

As per usual, I was browsing around for all things wedding and i came upon QualityShells.com. The best way I can describe them is a ready to go beach wedding in a box!  From bulk shells for decorating (think – filling a large hurricane vase with them as a base for a candle) or even large shells that could serve as the focal point of each centerpiece.

If my family could travel easily, I’d probably blow off a lot of this wedding stuff and just have everyone gather at the beach during sunset for a quick ceremony. Then we could sit at tables draped with seashells and candles and enjoy the night. As much as we all probably love combing the beach for shells, it would get pretty exhausting to gather enough shells for 20 or so tables.

What kind of ideas have you had for a beach-themed wedding? If you could just run off to the ocean and get married, would you?

Sort of keeping with my Baz Luhrman soundtrack theme from last week, this is the love theme from his Romeo & Juliet soundtrack (Remember? Leeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooo when he was young and we all thought he was so purty). This song has a beautiful and somewhat melancholy vibe to it.

Maid of Honor M knows why I love this song. If you’ve seen Moulin Rouge, you probably know why too!

It took us a long time to find a DJ. We had a set budget in mind, along with a certain ambiance for our reception music. Here’s what we were looking for in our NEPA DJ:

• Our budget was roughly $500. We had some wiggle room here, but that was our median number.
• Someone who could emcee the evening and do all the introductions, etc.
• 5 hours of music.
• Lighting would be nice, but wasn’t a deal breaker.
• Someone not cheesy or creepy.

The first and last points ended up being the most difficult! The nice, classier DJs that I found online or spoke too were fairly expensive. If they were affordable, that meant they liked to dance on tables and had fake bobble heads they would wear and walk around in.

Enter E.J. The DJ (he doesn’t have  a website! There’s another E.J. out there, but he’s actually from NY). He came recommended to me by a friend from work. I wasn’t sure at first, but she’s generally right so I sucked it up and gave E.J. a call. He and I had a good talk, and he went through his whole process, and gave me some of his references for me to check into. I didn’t know it, but he’s been voted best NEPA wedding D.J. for 7 or 8 years in a row. I felt really confident in him based on our conversation, which is more than I can say for everyone else I spoke to. We’re so excited to have another piece to the puzzle locked down. Yay!

Did you find any of your vendors through a friend? What was one of the hardest vendors for you to find?

So a while back NEPA Groom sent me this:

(source)

Sigh. Yes, those are zombies. The boy, he loves them. I’m fairly confident he’s joking about the zombie cake. We’ve made a game out of searching for the most ridiculous wedding pictures we can find and send them to each other over Facebook. I think our friends are still amused. At any rate, a lot of our friends have told us that I ‘just have’ to let him do the zombie cake. Um. Sure.

Though I’m thinking maybe we should make some concessions. We are prepping ourselves for married life, right? He can have the zombie cake if I can do this:

(source)

Two of our favorite inspiration sources are Wedinator and Awkward Family Photos. Do you have any favorite sites that you go to for some wedding laughs?

I previewed the new John Mayer album on iTunes this week, and I really hate it. I’m a big fan and I couldn’t bring myself to buy it, or even be hassled with illegally downloading it. Yuck.

I am a big fan of his bluesy albums though, such as the John Mayer Trio album. Another Shade of Green is an amazing song. I feel like it’s my answer to some of the questions I’ve been getting from friends lately. Basically, yes, NEPA Groom is my friend, and I like spending time with him, along with being in love with him. And yes, I don’t really ever feel the need to wonder if this is right or what else is out there. We’re good, thanks.

Kind of tired and short on inspiration this week, then I stumbled across this in my itunes. It’s a really sweet and lovely emo modern rock kinda song. It’s also over 7 minutes long, so um, I’m not quite sure where this would fit in your wedding. Our guests would mutiny if it was our first dance song. Maybe during dinner?