After the Wedding Wednesday: Rehearsal Dinner

As promised… starting to share the wedding! We got our professional pictures back earlier last week, those will be up eventually! For now I wanted to share the Rehearsal Dinner & the Bridesmaids Dinner I held! (excuse the lack of pictures, I was having too much fun!)

I've never been one for tradition, so obviously a bridesmaids luncheon sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me, I went with a bridesmaid dinner, at a nail salon! My mom had her favorite local restaurants cater the event and we rented out the nail salon for my 15 guests! the wine flowed, the food was fabulous and the nails were perfectly done! It was such a fabulous little evening, exactly what I had in mind!

Earlier that day I gave Jeremy his wedding present, he obviously LOVED it! I just had to share!

Our rehearsal dinner was at Carolina Marina on Belews Lake in Stokesdale, we rented the event center at the marina and invited more than half of our wedding guests. We really felt like since all of our family had traveled so far that we had to invite them! It wash't even a question, we wanted all of our family and friends there. We ended up having about 90 people at the rehearsal dinner. 

We set up and decorated everything ourselves, it was fun to be so involved in everything going on, huge thanks to my bridesmaids for the help!

This was obviously earlier in the day before all the alcohol was delivered! I had my aunt and uncle bartend the event and we had a local church guy cook the pig all day! We had amazing chopped BBQ, asparagus, salad, cheesy potatoes and of course, banana pudding! My mom surprised Jeremy with a steel drum guy out on the patio, he loves the sound of a beautifully played steel drum! 

And because my dress was SO fabulous, I never got a picture of the best part, the back of it! We can thank Morgan for this classy grocery store picture, the Bride needed some (more) wine, duh. 

My dress was from KK Bloom & my shoes from J. Crew Factory!

Everything was PERFECT! I couldn't have asked for a better two nights leading up to the big day! Next Wednesday I'll share the "getting ready" pics with y'all!