The Honey Fund

I'm an avid Pinterest surfer - it's somewhat of an obsession. For better or for worse, I search through the wedding boards regularly to see other peoples ideas to hopefully glean some inspiration myself. My one rule I have for my wedding is to not make it look like it came right off of Pinterest. While those weddings are beautiful, they're a little overdone and just not me. With that in mind, of course some things just won't be truly unique - but at least I can put my own spin on them! So I give you the Honey Fund- the wonderful container used to store our spare change and cash that will be used towards the honeymoon.

This jewel was inspired by a pin on Pinterest, naturally, but I had my own technique of execution.
My fiancé works for Aaron Brothers, the art and framing store, so the frame we got was from there during their amazing penny sale. Since its a back loading frame, he had to carve the slot out of the top and then sand it down to make it "pretty".

My job was to make the words. My parents got me a Cricut craft cutting machine for Christmas, and since my mom has had many of them over the years, we have lots of the cartridges to choose from. The one I used was the Mickey font (since they don't have a Disney font cartridge and I haven't been daring enough to try the online stuff yet) and used a sticker vinyl to cut from.

(It's really hard to see the cuts, but they're there, promise!)

All that was left was to pick a picture, of which we tried a couple before making the decision. Since we plan on honeymooning at Disney World, it made since to use one of our photos from Disneyland. The one we decided on was from our engagement trip, but its possible that will change with our upcoming trip (or maybe the engagement photos we're planning on taking in a few months down the road.)

My BRIGHT idea

Tomorrowland has to be one of the biggest challenges I've been facing during the planning process - it's hard to be creative and futuristic without being cheesy and fake. Initially, I was going to go down this whole route of underwater lights and floating plants, but I really hated the idea. With no better ideas, I decided to shelve it and work on the other lands that were coming to me more easily. After almost six months, I've finally made a breakthrough I'm proud of - "wireless" light bulbs!

I was wandering through our local Hobby Lobby with my mom about a week before Christmas when I discovered their glass jar section, and subsequently located their glass light bulb jars. I immediately fell in love with them, but wasn't sure how I could possibly use them. When later trying to locate them online and trying to think of an idea of how to use them, I came across these small LED twist lights and knew exactly what I was going to do with them!

All it took was a little bit of creativity and some hot glue - and voila! You have "wireless" light bulbs!

Dreams Do Come True (My Disneyland Engagement)

On July 5, 2014, I got engaged at the Disneyland Resort. Call it stereotypical, call it cheesy - it was my long time dream-come-true. Quite frequently, people ask me why I love Disney and Disneyland so very much, and this is the perfect example to explain it.

Disney is a magical company where no matter your age, it's acceptable to act like an overexcited five-year-old, and not only do they allow it, they encourage it and embrace it. And while I certainly didn't feel five when I got engaged, Disney knew exactly how to make me feel special.

This is where I mention all the cast members involved in making this happen - yes, it is these people's jobs to make their customers feel special in order to encourage them to come back, but they go above and beyond. Take for example the above video - when I got engaged, we were on vacation, just the two of us. My parents knew he was proposing and it was killing them to not be there - but then an excited cast member who overheard the news that someone was about to propose as she was getting off work took the time to wait, watch and even record the whole event for us without us even knowing, and then tracked us down to make sure she could send it to us. My parents were ecstatic - it was the one way they were able to share in the moment too.

But how exactly did this amazing cast member find this out? My fiance asked a cast member if Mickey and Minnie would be out that night and explained to her why he was asking, so she went in the back to find out the schedule. Turns out, only Mickey was supposed to be out that night, but they wanted to make sure it was special so much so that the cast member who plays Minnie volunteered to get back in the suit unnecessarily. The super perk to this whole ordeal? The cast member photographer who took photos of the entire proposal.

The most amazing part of this was the cute photos we got to take afterwards as a stalling tactic - yes, we tried to leave and they wouldn't let us because they had a surprise for us. The cast member my fiance had talked to was from the hat shop on Main Street, who then went up the proper channels in order to give us bride and groom ear hats, of course from Mickey and Minnie.

If this was all there was to our Disneyland engagement, that would have been more than enough to satisfy for a lifetime; however, it doesn't stop there. Throughout the rest of our trip, we were showered with so many blessings from so many cast members. In case you didn't already know, Disneyland used to give out "Just Engaged" buttons - I say used to, because a couple of months before our engagement, they discontinued these buttons. What they still had at the time were "Just Married" and "I'm Celebrating", of which we were told the "Just Married" buttons were also on their way out of the parks - so we had a few cast members give us sets of those, as well as quite a few of the "I'm Celebrating" buttons.

And here's my favorite moment with any of the cast members. Just hours before we got engaged, we met and befriended a cast member while pin trading. She took a liking to us because we traded good pins - not the broken ones to be discarded. She had asked us to come back the next day as she wanted to look through the bin in the back for any good pins available for trade. When we came back, we were wearing our new awesome ear hats, and she got so overly excited, she made us special buttons to wear around the parks.

To top all of that off, she then decided to comp us the two brand new pins of Anna and Elsa from Frozen that had only been released the day before and were almost entirely out of stock in both parks. It was more than I ever expected, and I will cherish those pins forever as a sweet reminder of my wonderful engagement to my amazing and goofy fiance. 

So if all of this doesn't make you the slightest bit impressed with Disney and their entire "cast", I have no other experience that could possibly do the trick. My engagement was amazing, special, and will always bring a smile to my face - and I will always want to go back to Disneyland for more.