Ok, so I know I'm supposed to update you all on the most recent trip of mine with pictures and stories and such, BUT I just had to share one of the best/ most interesting parts of my trip....
After 5 months of intense searching - I finally found the perfect shoes for my wedding.
First let's rewind to March. I get this awesome idea to spice up things a bit and wear colorful shoes to the wedding Creating a cute, flirty effect like below:
Perfect because I'm not into white shoes at all and i want to be able to wear my shoes again after the big day. I love heels, so
that's a must and it should be a fabric that complements the cotton of my dress. So I decided I want Navy Blue satin
peep toe heels. Simple enough, right?
wrong. Big
ol' freaking wrong.
I begin to scour the
internet while I'm taking breaks working on my final study project. I look at
Zappos,
Piperlime,
Ebay,
JCrew, Nina, Nine West, Kate Spade,
Nordstroms,
Neiman's,
Bergdorff (I was getting desperate),
Glassslipper, visited
DSW, Off Broadway and even Googling "Navy blue sating
peep toes" and going from there. At one point I think both myself and another classmate were taking breaks from work in the studio just searching for navy satin shoes online. This routine of regularly scouring the
internet for shoes went on for months into July. The result: no navy blue satin
peep toe heels that were (a) in my
price range, (b) fit the casual, classic simplicity of the wedding. Lots of leather (wrong fabric) and lots of closed toed (not appropriate for a
beachy wedding), but nothing I was "excited" about - and truth be told, if you're someone like me who LOVES shoes, the shoes you should be excited the most about should be the shoes you wear for your wedding.
Feeling defeated, I decided that I would just have to buy shoes and have them dyed to match. I figured I'd buy a pair of
dyable satin shoes after my trip from Glasslipperand just MAKE them blue, even if I had to go over a little on my budget.
So I then go abroad to visit my sister (more about that later). We're just casually walking around city 1 and my sister says "oh look, a Zara! They had a coat there I wanted, lets see if they have it in this store in my size." We walk in and she goes off to look for her coat. After browsing the first floor, I walk up to the second and then I see them.
Sitting on a shelf are the exact shoes I've been looking for: navy blue satin high heeled shoe with a
peep toe and a little casually tied bow. They are PERFECT. Since I
dont know my size in European numbers, I try them all on. Turns out, they have all sizes EXCEPT mine. Since it's a very popular chain in Europe (
there's only one in the US - NYC), I figure they will have to have my size in another store. So I leave feeling hopeful that at the next store they will have my shoe. In our travels over the next 3 days we come across 3 more stores: 1 doesn't have ANY of the shoes at all, another
doesn't have my size, and the third one.... well, lets just say I found 1 shoe in my size. No,
that's not one pair of the shoes,
that's one singular shoe. I scoured the entire store for my shoe's partner to no avail. I even asked a store attendant (rather, i cornered her b/c she was the only person I could find who looked like she worked there and asked her politely if she could help me find the shoe. She replied then, in perfect English "I
don't speak English" and walked away. Wonderful). Note: Its sale season in Europe right now, so these stores are a mess -- piles of clothes on sale, the stores are swarming, and things are left everywhere. Incredibly intimidating to most people, but I had a mission.
So we left country 1 and visited country 2 - which I knew had establishments of the store in the city. So, while
site seeing, I took a small detour to the first store I saw. I checked out their shoe area, found the shoes and once again, saw that they had the shoe in every size except for mine. I went to another associate, asked her if she may have had my size in the back. She said she'd look, ran off for 5
mins, and came back with a no answer. After a few moments of feeling defeated, I snapped out of it and then entered my determined, semi-
bridezilla moods (which I am really trying to make a rarity) and marched up to another sales associate and politely asked her if she could see if they had a stock of my shoe in any other stores... I was tired of chasing after a shoe that I wasn't going to let dominate my vacation. The sweet store employee said "no problem," checked the stock, called the stores in the vicinity and within 5 minutes had a pair on reserve for me at a neighboring store. I had to
restrain myself from hugging the woman in the middle of the store I was so elated.
So after 5 months of searching, and an shoe chase that covered 6 stores in two countries, here are MY wedding shoes:
Now onto breaking these bad-boys in!
(names have been smudged for privacy.) 
(clockwise from top left: The RSVP Postcard, Directions Card, Accomodations Card and Reception Card inserts) 
Directions Card: 
Reception Card:
All 4 inserts stuffed into their comfy little kangaroo pocket (the actual invitation was mounted on the other side of the pocket):
The pages are full of a lot of open space, where guests can write their sentiments and well-wishes. The pictures are also exquisite -- Mollie 
The front of the envelope. The label wrap came out spectacularly and I love how the 62 cent stamps (yes, these things, with all of their inserts do get very heavy) actually ended up matching the envelope!!
The labels wraps to the back -- our return address is there, but I had to smudge it out b/c of the privacy thing. The label actually seals the entire envelope.
When opening the envelope, this is what you see -- only a sneak peek for now.
What is wonderful is that we're actually on vacation right now in Corolla and so we're shipping them from the little post office we've gone to for ages while visiting down here -- the invites will actually be postmarked from the wedding location (we didn't plan this, it just happened that we would finish stuffing and sealing the invites while we were down here.)
