Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend

Everyone loves looking at diamonds, so without further adieu:

(With fresh cut peonies from my parents' front yard!)

I absolutely love that David and I picked out my ring together. He actually found the setting in a catalog they had in the store and we had it ordered it so I could try it on. I know he wanted the ring to be a surprise, but after seeing it on my finger, we both knew it was the one. It was still sort of a surprise when he proposed, because I'd never seen it with the center stone we chose set in it. I love that it's unique and exactly what I wanted! I want to take more pictures following Anne Ruthmann's tutorial - I'll be sure to post them!

Did you help pick our your ring? Or did your fiance do it all himself?

Pretty Please?: Asking Our Flower Girls

Our flower girls are my two precious nieces. They both hold extremely special places in my heart, and they love David as well! I call them both my princesses, and they love the Disney princesses, so I knew I wanted to play off that when I asked them.

I was able to find fairy princess wings and a wand and collected a lot of princess stuff from the $1 bins at Target:

And I put it all in a pink canvas bag that coordinated with our colors and made them a card:

That said:

They looked at it briefly (Who wants to read a card with all those goodies?!):

And gave us a resounding yes! I can't wait for them to walk down the aisle in their adorable dresses - I'm fully aware they'll steal the show, and I'm ok with that!

Are you having children in your wedding? How did you ask them?

Pretty Please?: Asking My Bridesmaids

I knew I wanted to do something special for the ladies that would be standing next to me on my big day. I absolutely love pictures because each and every one brings back a memory and the feelings/laughs/joy that go along with the memories. I also love scrapbooking, so I decided scrapbooks for each bridesmaid would be the perfect solution! I was able to find pink scrapbooks in the dollar spot at Target, which worked perfectly. I found some damask scrapbooking paper at Hobby Lobby and some pink letter stickers so that each of the girl's books had their initial on the front. After I went through pictures of myself with each of them, I had them printed and then cropped and rounded the corners of each of them. At this point they looked like this:

And after putting in the pictures and some scrapbooking paper, also found in the dollar spot at Target, they ended up like this (this particular one is one of my MOHs - my best friend who is also engaged to her high school sweetheart!):

(This is her proposal picture and our proposal picture next to each other - They were kind of similar! :) And then us with our rings!)

The last page was a card actually asking them to be part of our bridal party.

I made a scrapbook for each of my 5 BMs and also David's little sister, our JrBM. It was a lot of fun going through all of the pictures and remembering why each of them is so special to me! I gave 4 of them their books in person:

Giving BM M her book

Giving JrBM K her's - She and FMIL cried!

And a few of the books had to be sent - BM B (my sister) lives in Arizona and MOH A is in the Air Force and is in tech school in Texas. MOH A called me from the post office crying to say yes!

I loved that each of them has a keepsake now and that they were so grateful for and touched by the gesture! It was totally worth the time and effort that went into them.

Did you do anything special to ask your bridesmaids?