This is chapwoman's Blue Wedding!

I have created about half a dozen wedding websites trying to find one that would accommodate my unique needs and custom wedding events. It has been extremely frustrating and incredibly time consuming creating each of them. None of them really had what I needed.

So THANK YOU TO CARISSA for your posting about www.mywedding.com -- This is truly the perfect wedding website. It's FREE, it has all the pages I wanted without REQUIRING me to add certain info (i.e., not everyone is invited to the ceremony, so I didn't want that info on there) and yet also has pages I can CUSTOM create to my needs (such as my poll questions). Plus, it had a good array of design choices.

It really was PERFECT. I could upload tons of photos, it provides direct links to websites and maps, it's esthetically pleasing and easy to use.

THANK YOU, thank you, thank you.

Yippee, I finished my first DIY project. It is so satisfying!

I made our wishing well, "Well Wishes and Wisdom". The top took 2 tries to make it look its best, but not bad for a first project.

I bought the box at Michael's for $12, as well as the alphabet stickers for $5, and the tissue paper at Target for $3. $20 wishing well, not bad.

Check!

We have found a caterer who can do what we want!!

Antonio Laudisio is an Italian-American who has a fantastic restaurant in Boulder. His pizzas are so authentic, they took Mark and me right back to Italy, where we met!

He has 3 portable wood-burning ovens that he'll bring to the park. Our guests can order any type of pizza they want -- they choose the toppings, Tony and his chefs will make it fresh right there!

I'm thrilled to have found someone who can actually do this.

In addition, we'll have several antipasto on the tables as guests arrive (olives, cheese, artichoke hearts, grilled peppers, marinated mushrooms, pizza bianco -- pizza dough with salt, pepper, and rosemary -- really accentuates the delicious taste of the crust!!)

With the pizzas there'll be mixed greens salad and caesar salad. We'll serve authentic Italian Prosecco (champagne) for our toast. Dessert will be authentic Italian homemade gelato with our wedding cupcakes.

Woo-hoo for booking the caterer!! Check!

After SO MANY DAYS (not hours) of researching on the internet and getting *wonderful* advice from all you brides, it feels so good to be actually placing orders!

Last night I ordered our favor boxes (chinese take-out style, plain white -- yep, we scratched the pizza box idea), bought blue striped ribbon for the boxes, and ordered personalized stickers to wrap it all together.

I also ordered some fun personalized napkins, all in our colors.

There's still a LONG list of things to check off, but progress is progress. I start my bike guiding season in mid-April, which means I'll be gone a lot, so I have to get AS MUCH done in the next month as possible!!

Ladies, please keep the advice, suggestions, hot finds, and questions comin'! I'll be needing you all extensively over this next month!!

YAY for checking things off!!

What are you other brides giving to each set of parents for gifts?

For my mom and my future mother-in-law, I've ordered Irish linen handkerchiefs. I'll have them embroidered with "For your tears of joy". My parents are Irish (still have their accents) and having an Irish hanky is tradition.

However, I can't really think of anything appropriate for the dads. One thought is Celtic Cufflinks. I've found a reasonably priced pair online, but I'm just not sold on that idea yet. I'd love to tie in some Irish tradition for the dads too, but...I don't have to be stuck on that either.

Any suggestions?

Mark is famous for his cookies. He is a known baker actually. So we've decided to give a small batch of his signature cookies to each of our guests.

To tie in with our Italian theme, of which we'll be serving wood-burning-fire-oven pizza, made to order, Mark thought it'd be really cute to give our cookies in a pizza slice-style box.

Any ideas where we could find this? Any type of SMALL pizza box?

My thought had been to use the small Chinese-take-out boxes with cute ribbons or something. So that will probably be our fall back if the pizza box doesn't work. Any suggestions on where to pick them up cheap?

PUH-LESE!!!

If anyone can help me find a dress like this, I would be so appreciative. However, I don't want this exact one -- this is a David's bridal and while I like it, I don't love it.

I LOVE this style halter. It's totally flattering to my figure.

I don't want the beading on the side; just PLAIN would be great. (But I do really like the sweep to the side.)

If I could get it less puffy on the bottom, that would be ideal!

Please, please, please help me find a comparable dress.
Thank you!!

Update: Just to be clear, I'm looking for something like this somewhere other than David's -- I've definitely tried on a TON of dresses there already, with no luck. And there's just something about this specific halter style that I really like. I know the dress for me is out there -- I just don't know where yet!! Aren't we all looking for that *perfect* dress?

I'm having an outdoor wedding.
I'm a redhead.
I have lots of freckles.
I don't want skin cancer.

I like to be different, so when I first got engaged, I started thinking about a wedding hat. At that point I was convinced I wouldn't wear a traditional wedding dress (and am still undecided but seem to be converting) and thought a wedding hat would be a nice touch and also different.

I was in Europe when I got engaged and went into a specialty hat shop where the hats were just exquisite. I'm having a hard time finding something similar here. Again, I don't want to pay through the nose (would I wear it more than an hour or two, especially since our ceremony is at 4pm??).

Can any of you other beautiful brides suggest a website or something? What are your thoughts on wedding hats for brides? I realize they seem to be coming back in style for *guests*...

Mark wants me to wear my hair down; I think I want to wear it half up, half down (otherwise I'll be playing with it all night) and I think that would work well with a hat.

Looking forward to your comments...

So I've been trying to decide on flowers and centerpieces.

At first, I wasn't going to even carry a flower bouquet b/c I thought, what's the point if you don't even hold it during the ceremony...I want to be holding Mark's hands. But then I thought a splash of color against a white dress would make for really pretty photos (and I've hired a phenomenal photographer). So, I think I've bought into the bride's bouquet thing now.

At first I thought I'd like a bunch of super colorful Gerber daisies. And maybe I still do. But I also really love orchids, although they're super expensive.

My future sister-in-law keeps reminding me that this is a "once in a lifetime event" and that I should make sure that I do things right -- and not just do whatever. (I'm always very cost-conscience.) So maybe I pay the price for some orchids.

But I'm having difficulty getting inspired and finding orchid-style bride bouquets. Can any give me some suggestions? I am in the midst of a DIY-Google search as well as any florist search for ideas. I'm also looking into wholesalers. Have any of you other brides found a good wholesale website?

As for centerpieces, I can't decide if I want flowers or something else. What would that something else be, I'm not sure. Candles, well maybe, but not convinced yet. I hope to only have a few small tables, perhaps the cabaret style maybe bigger, so I certainly don't need an elaborate centerpiece. Spider mums are pretty funky...Oh, one fun centerpiece idea I had was to put battery-operated LED lights into empty wine bottles. Maybe there could be single flower stems coming out of them. I'm not sure that we're allowed candles.

There are so many beautiful, exotic, unique flowers out there, I'm having such a hard time deciding. How have you other brides decided? What questions do you ask yourselves? Although I'm having a "blue" wedding, I haven't really found any blue flowers that I like.

Orchids are also pretty delicate, although if I combine them with other flower types, they should be more sturdy, right?

Ah, decisions, decisions...

I'm still trying to decide if I even want a wedding dress. I've been very anti-traditional wedding stuff for many years. I always thought I would elope, just the two of us, then have a huge house party. Never any thoughts of wedding cakes, dresses, presents, invitations, etc. But now that I am getting married, and family is so important to both of us, our families really want to be there. So I've compromised to have an immediate-family only ceremony. The party, since Mark's family is SO big and close and will definitely come, won't fit in our house, hence the boathouse.

But the debate about a wedding dress continues. For the fun of it, I went to David's Bridal to try on a few simple dresses. I had looked online and seen a few that I liked...I find halters especially flattering and I thought a short dress might work with the casual, outdoor theme too.

I had fun trying them on. Initially, I REALLY liked the short one. But then looking at the photos, I started to really like the longer ones. So I had my future mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and niece come see them. At first, they were split, but by the next day, everyone liked the short one best...but I was liking the long ones better.

So, I haven't made a decision yet. My mom is coming to visit for a week next week and we plan on trying on lots of dresses. I can't wait to get her input. Neither of my sisters are close by to help, but they've given good advice when I shared the photos.

I've also looked a little on eBay. I definitely DON'T want to pay a lot. Any other suggestions for finding cheap (but hip and sexy) dresses?

Mark's sister Karen helped a lot with these. We used the photo I have posted as my main blog photo and just added our names at the top, Save the Date along the left side, the date on the right side, and Denver, Colorado on the bottom. We used mostly WordArt which was easy. The cost was so much cheaper. We bought magnetic paper and envelopes at Office Depot for $65 and stamps cost $42, for a total of $107 for a TON of magnets. And, it was fun. We've had really good feedback.

Washington Park is just about the best park in all of Denver, which has quite a few parks to boast. We are fortunate to live just 2 blocks away, so we are constantly there running, biking, walking, swimming in the rec center...it's a daily part of our life. So it was a fairly easy choice when deciding where to get married.

Our ceremony will be in the flower garden which is filled with amazing colors and smells in the summer. We will only have our immediate family attend this ceremony.

Our party, or "reception", will be in the boathouse on the small lake, where we expect about 150 friends and extended family to attend. The photos are from one of Mark's friends who got married in the boathouse last year.

We plan to do a similar style decoration -- with paper lanterns, white linens, etc, but won't have as many tables; we need room to dance!!

Since I was still working in Europe for the few months following our engagement, we sorta looked a rings together while online at the same time. Not such an easy thing to do....

"Whaddya think of the 10th ring on the left...?"

And it was hard for me to get an idea of what I would like without it actually being on my hand. I had no idea what I wanted, but being rather non-traditional (how many other girls do you know who proposed to their boyfriends?) I didn't think I wanted a standard diamond and was leaning towards an antique style. We had talked about the possibility of a sapphire, but I wanted to wait and actually try things on. And I had started to be a little tempted by tension-set rings.

I moved in with Mark in Denver in November. We were going to a friend's wedding in NYC later that month, so we were shopping in the mall one day. We passed a jewelers and I suggested we go look at rings. Mark said he didn't want to look in a mall. I was a bit disappointed, wondering when we would ever look at rings.

The next day was a beautiful, sunny, blue sky day and we decided it was time for our maiden trip on our new Trek Tandem. We road around Wash Park and stopped at the boathouse. Mark surprised me with the most beautiful royal blue sapphire ring, surrounded by pave diamonds, very antique looking. It was stunning. And he had hidden Prosecco (Italian champagne) at the boathouse along with champagne flutes. A toast to us!

So here he had actually already bought me a ring and didn't want to second-guess his choice by having me look at other styles. He did an amazing job picking it out. And later, over Christmas, he gave me matching earrings! What a sweetie.

Mark and I met cycling in the Italian Dolomites, stunning mountains in Northern Italy. We both share a passion for cycling and an active lifestyle.

I was working as a bike guide for Trek Travel in Europe over this past summer and Mark came to visit me while I was in the French Alps. I had arranged some help from my co-guides for my proposal.

We were biking along my all-time favorite bike route: La Berarde near Alpe d'Huez. It's a 26km dead-end road that climbs and hugs a cliff, with stunning views of a river and some of the best and little-touched hiking around. It had rained the day before so the waterfalls were gushing.

We neared a small village with about 12km to the end, La Berarde, a tiny shepherd's town. I told Mark to stop and have a coke while sitting on the cafe terrace and enjoy the views while I went and prepared a surprise.

I continued on and met up with my co-guides. About 5km further up the road, they provided me with sidewalk chalk and I chalked my proposal, "Chap, will you marry me?" with a box for yes and a box for no. This was very a-la-Tour-de-France style, chalking on the road. My co-guides set up a table with champagne and chocolates, alpine flowers and snacks.

I biked back to Mark and we started off together. As we approached the area, I warned Mark to slow down. When he came across the writing, he laughed! Eventually, I said, "So...." He said, "Well of course, after we live together." I had made it clear before I left for Europe that I wanted to live together for a year before getting engaged. I will only marry once and I want to make sure it's the right marriage. But I had changed my mind and decided we could live together while we were engaged.

So, I told Mark, "No, I'm serious. Now." He was very shocked, but of course, put an "X" in the "YES" box!