Our Wedding Album

Back on August 31, Charles and I went to meet our photographers to pick up our wedding album!!! I absolutely LOVE how it turned out! Here are pictures of it!

When All Hell Broke Loose Part 2

So I last told you about the nightmare with the flowers which ended up working itself out thank goodness! Now I bring you the fiasco that was getting our cake and cupcakes.

After we left Food City and had the perfect flowers in hand, we headed on to Knoxville to get the cake and cupcakes we had ordered. Let me set this up a little for you....

For those of you that have followed me for a while, you know that I didn't want and couldn't afford the traditional wedding cake. So I opted to go with cupcakes and use a cupcake tree! You can see how I decorated the cupcake tree here. (It is up for sale by the way so if you're interested in it let me know!) Even though I was going the cupcake route, I still wanted Charles and I to be able to have a cake cutting ceremony so we need a cake for just me and him. This became a much harder task than I ever though it could be! Apparently grocery store bakery's don't do square cakes!? I never expected that one. And since the top of the cupcake tree is square, it had to be a square cake. Another complication...the monogram cake topper I bought had like 4" long stakes that were meant to go do into the cake. That meant it had to be one tall square cake. And last but not least, the cake couldn't be more than 7" square in order to fit on the top of the cupcake tree!

All of that said, local grocery store bakeries couldn't help me in this area. We turned to Sam's Club and spoke to the manager of the bakery and were first told they couldn't help us either. But after my mom talked to him a little longer, he finally said they would make an exception and do it for us! A huge weight was lifted off our shoulders at this point! We made an appointment with him to go in and discuss exactly what we needed done. Seven inch square layer cake with 4 layers, solid purple icing to match the 125+ cupcakes. The manager was so nice and said he was happy to make this exception to help us out, we were so thankful!

A few days before we were supposed to get the cake, my mom called Sam's to speak with our contact Brian just to confirm everything before it was to be made. This is were we started running into problems....my mom was transferred to several different people while trying to reach him and then was finally told he no longer worked for the company. Commence FREAK OUT!!!!! I was beginning to panic. What on earth would we do!? My mom spoke with another manager who said they would go ahead and honor our order for the cake even though custom cakes aren't something they are supposed to do. She said everything would be done for the same price and done exactly as we had discussed it with Brian. Relief yet again.

So on Thursday the 29th we headed to Sam's to get the cake, rolls and fruit and other items we needed for the reception. We went straight to the bakery when we got there. The girl that "greeted" (I use that term loosely as she was a JERK and had a major attitude problem) brought out one box of the cupcakes. My heart sank, the icing wasn't put on them correctly and they looked horrible. I wish I had had my camera with me so I could have taken pictures. The icing was supposed to have been swirled all the way around the cupcake and reach a pretty little peak in the center. Instead, there was no peak and the icing didn't even go all the way around the cake of the cupcakes! We asked to speak with the second manager my mom had talked to on the phone because when we tried to tell the girl they were done wrong she gave us major attitude! I was about to loose my cool and go Bridezilla on her butt!!

While we waited for the manager to get back to the bakery, we asked to see the cake. Again, my heart sank even lower and I almost began to cry right then and there. If it hadn't been for Charles and my awesome Uncle Tom and Aunt Cindy, I would have lost it and it wouldn't have been pretty. The cake was supposed to be iced solid purple with smooth sides. The only emblishment to the cake was to be a "smooth ribbon" of icing around the base of the cake, this was to be in the same purple used everywhere else as well. What I saw however was a hideous WHITE cake with a purple ribbon around the base. COMPLETELY wrong and totally unacceptable!!!

I couldn't believe what I was seeing and further more, I couldn't believe how they could have screwed everything up so much! Brian took amazing notes and wrote down everything we wanted and even asked the lady that would actually ice them to come into the conversation as well! She told us she clearly understood what we wanted.

The manager finally arrived and asked what the problem was and we politely explained. She started giving us trouble by saying the only reason they were doing this was to honor what Brian had said and she rudely reminded us again that they shouldn't have done it to begin with! My mom did all the talking...because I'll be honest, if I had it would not have been pretty. She calmly explained that the wedding was in TWO DAYS and said we had no other options to turn to. That Brian and the other lady clearly knew what we wanted and this wasn't it. She finally agreed that they would make it right. Yay! But then discovered they didn't think they had enough purple icing left to ice the cake and re-do the cupcakes! OMG WHAT!? How can you not have enough purple icing going into an order like that??

At this point, I had to walk away. I couldn't handle it anymore. My mom and Uncle Tom said they would take care of everything and make sure they made it right. So Charles and I took off in the opposite direction and being the wonderful man he is, tried to encourage me that everything would be fine and tried anything to make me laugh!

I know this is long so I will sum it up. Everything did work out and Sam's did have enough of the purple icing to fix the cake and all of the cupcakes!! And they were all BEAUTIFUL!! I had bought some silver pearlized sugar to sprinkle on the cupcakes and for our cake, I had bought some purple edible glitter to sprinkle on it. Until we get our image CD, this is the only picture I have of our cake and cupcakes....

I know the icing looks blue, however in our pro pictures it is the correct color...purple!

So there you have it, the things that nearly turned me into Bridezilla just days before the wedding! Thank the Lord that everything worked itself out and was more than ok in the end! All I can say is expect things to go wrong. And expect it to be more than one thing at a time too.

For those of you still in the planning process....make sure you have as much done before the wedding as possible! Besides setting up the day of, I didn't have any projects left before the big day. That made handling these situations a lot better!

When All Hell Broke Loose Part 1

So we still don't have all of our professional pictures yet. And it pains me to say that I have no idea when we will be able to afford the image CD. So in the meantime, I thought I might as well start a few recaps of things that happened before the wedding.

As you might guess from the title of this post, not everything went smoothly leading up to the wedding day. I knew things could and would most likely go wrong but it all seemed to happen in a three day window right before the wedding and that stressed me out majorly! I didn't expect it to all happen at once!

My mom and I had been working closely with the Food City floral department manager Olivia (she's amazing by the way and works at the Sevierville location). I went in knowing what I wanted, a deep yet bright purple carnation. I had seen some in an arrangement in a local restaurant and she said she had placed the order for them and knew exactly what I was talking about! Still to be sure, we had her order a few stems so that I could be 100% positive that it was in fact the correct color purple. The stems we ordered came in and they were PERFECT!!! I was sooo happy...you have no idea. So we placed an order with her for the number of stems we needed for my bouquet.

On Wednesday the 28th of April, my mom and I were to pick up the flowers for my bouquet at Food City. When we arrived and the worker pulled the carnations out of the cooler I almost cried. They were absolutely without a doubt not the right color! They looked maroon, not purple!! I was beginning to freak out. The wedding was Saturday, what would we do!? Olivia wasn't there that evening and the lady that was working didn't know anything about the order because Olivia had handled it all from the beginning. She was so sweet and so worried and offered to do anything she possibly could to help.

Since my mom had worked in a floral shop when she was younger, she knew there was little possibility that the carnations could change so drastically in color and become the correct color. But we had to try it. So my mom requested that the stems be freshly cut and placed in warm water to make the blooms open faster. We were to go back in the following morning while on our way to Knoxville to pick up the cake.

To our astonishment, the carnations did open up more and change into the correct color! It was amazing, my mom had never seen or heard of flowers changing so much in color....especially overnight, neither had Olivia. I was sooooo relieved!!! As were my mom and Olivia. Poor Olivia was stressing about it as much as I was, she's so sweet! So all was again well with the flowers and the panic attack I was about to have vanished.

Here are some pictures my Aunt got of my mom making my bouquet and the toss bouquet. Making my bouquet turned out to be a two person effort that kept us up until about 2am the night before the wedding!!! I was so tired, as you can see from the pictures. It had been a very long day for me. My mom was up even later than I was working on the bouts for the guys. She's amazing I tell ya!!

The darker carnations are for my bouquet and the boutonnieres. The lighter shade of purple carnations were used for the toss bouquet. We ended up getting that bunch for free because they weren't very fresh. But for the toss bouquet, that didn't really matter. The baby's breath was also originally only for the toss but I loved what my mom was doing with it so much that I wanted the baby's breath in my bouquet as well. We also purchased a Peace Lily from Food City for $9.99 and used the leaves from the plant to frame the bouquets.

My amazing mom making the toss bouquet.
Mom and I working on my bouquet.
The finished product!! It was everything and more that I wanted in a bouquet!! Purple, full and absolutely stunning!! I even took it on our honeymoon in a cylinder vase so I could enjoy it even more! I tried to dry it but unfortunately because the flowers were so tightly packed, it began to mold and I had to throw it away.
My bouquet in action! More pictures to come when we can get the image CD! (Source)
Charles's bout also made by my mom. She made I think around 8-10 bouts. She used one large carnation, some baby's breath and some english ivy leaves from our backyard. They all looked awesome and held up very well throughout the day! (Source)

Next up we head to Sam's Club in Knoxville to pick up the cake and cupcakes!