SheaShells SeaShells, Beach Wedding ideas, tips and things for a Beachy Life!

Kids at the Wedding?

2006-11-07T12:47:00.000-05:00

It's a question all brides and grooms ask and it's a valid one:

Should we invite kids?

It's possibly the most important decision when it comes to putting together your guest list; you don't want to hurt anyone's feelings with a cutoff age or by playing favorites, you don't want to put people out by having to hire a sitter, you don't want to pay full price for a plate that probably won't be touched and you don't want the little ones running around wreaking havoc during your perfect day. There will be different deciding factors for each couple, so I'll share with you what we did (EVERYONE was happy!!!)

Because we had a beach wedding that was less than a day's trip away for our guests with children, we agreed that having the kids there was a wonderful idea. There was a small playground on the site, a beach and large grassy grounds - perfect for children to play on a sunny, happy day. Once we decided to invite the children, the next logical idea was to have all the little girls in our families, ranging in age from 4 to 12, be in the bridal party. Not wanting to put too much expense on the parents' wallets, we asked them to dress the girls in summery dresses of their choosing, in whatever color and style they liked. A terrific idea! They were adorable walking down the grassy aisle in their colorful frocks, all looking like pretty princesses.

We told the parents they could pack bathing suits and towels in case they wanted to swim. We provided two tables as a kids area and had an array of activities on hand for when they were indoors. Lots of coloring books and crayons, Play-Doh and glass bottles with buckets of colored sand to create a layered work of art to bring home as souvenirs. They also had little buckets for collecting shells or building sand castles and ribbons, paper, sparkles, colored markers and glue to make a masterpiece.

Our menu was simple too. We had the "grown-up" food in one area and a buffet table of kiddie treas in another - hot dogs, burgers, barbecued chicken fries and salad were all part of the menu and the children ate heartily!

Our guests couldn't tell us enough of how appreciative they were that their children could be part of the day and were thrilled that we had provided fun things to keep them busy. Even the guests without children thoroughly enjoyed their presence and there was not one sad, screaming or crying child during the whole event. All I can say is that I remember being bored beyond belief going to weddings with my parents when I was a child and so we tried to come up with fun things to keep the little ones busy, while their parents could enjoy our wedding!

Hmmm...now that I think about it, I remember an awful lot of guests OVER 5 feet tall playing with colored sand too!

Rancho Sak Ol in Puerto Morelos, MEXICO!

2006-10-28T15:32:00.000-04:00

The azure Caribbean Sea is just a few yards away. You, your beloved and a small group of your dearest people are standing barefoot in powdery sand and you're about to say the two most magical words ever uttered ("I do" of course!)... Does this sound like your dream wedding? Has SheaShells found a spot for you!!!

If you're the type that enjoys all-inclusives, lots of people and families and planned group activities, do not read any further.

However, if you fantasize a romantic, intimate exchange of vows on the sand at sunset, or a tranquil honeymoon destination, then this small and serene oceanfront inn, located on the edge of a tiny Mexican fishing village on the Yucatan Peninsula, could be your dream come true. Ah the Rancho Sak Ol...

To read the entire article, please go to SheaShells visits Mexico

It's all about the FOOD! Beach Wedding Menu Ideas

2005-08-09T01:48:00.000-04:00

Whenever we're invited to a wedding, our second question, the one we spend many long moments divining, is ALWAYS what will be the eats? Will it be a cocktail reception? Full six course feast? Appetizers...brunch...? Eyes glazing as we fantasize about the menu, we try and match the personalities of the about-to-be-nupped couple with dishes we adore. We are very big on food and drink, it excites us and can make or break our day. We love hot dogs as much as iced oysters, Johnny Walker Red as much as Dom Perignon Rose. Refined tastes and decorum be d____d, we eat with our fingers as much as we do with a fork - perhaps more so!

For our beach wedding, we planned our menu based on typical beach fare, both elegant and finger-style, with a few touches of Greece (my Daddy was from the island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea). When choosing your menu, make sure it fits your personalities and tastes. There's really no such thing as tradition these days when it comes to food for your beach style wedding. Eating is a completely emotional and intimate part of life. Food nourishes and comforts, excites and relaxes. When you include food as part of your wedding day events, to be shared by family and friends, it can be thought of as breaking bread in ceremony as a symbol of shared life, unity and solidarity. Because of the emotional attachment many of us have to food, it is often what your guests will remember most clearly, so no matter your menu, be it elegant with baccarat crystal or a 3 kegger with paper cups, be sure it's cooked to perfection and served beautifully!!!

Our Beach Wedding Menu:
To start...Cocktails on the veranda with bowls and bowls of fried clams and steamed shrimp with cocktail sauce.
Move indoors for the Introductions, First Dance and then......Dinner!
We decided to serve semi-buffet style:
New England Clam Chowder
Steamers - Little Neck Clams
Stuffed Clams - Bread Crumb stuffing
Spanikopitas - Greek Spinach Pies
Tiropitas - Greek Cheese Pies
Baby Green Salad with Julienned Veggies
Marinated Sesame Green Bean Salad
Baked Baby Red Potatoes with Rosemary
Sweet White Corn on the Cob
Barbecue Jerk Chicken - for my FIL, who doesn't eat Lobster (!!!)
Steamed 1 1/2 lb lobsters, cooked to order with drawn butter
We also had a kids area with hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue chicken and corn. (On our invitations, we requested parents to let us know if the kids wanted lobster and most did not)

Our amazing Seashell Wedding Cake, seen above, was created by Scrumptions Pastry Shop in East Greenwich, Rhode Island. Incredible!
We also served Ice Cream and Chocolate Chip Cookies because we both absolutely can't get enough of either!

Other Beach Wedding Fare:
Raw Bar with an Oyster Assortment and Clams with Iced Lobster and Shrimp
Alaskan King Crab Legs
Steamed mussels
Any Jumbo Shrimp dish
Lobster Rolls
Seafood Spring Rolls
Beautiful Filets of Fish with a delicate sauce
Bouillabaisse
Seafood Gumbo
Potato Salad
Marinated Cucumber Rounds
Soft Shell Crab
Mushrooms Stuffed with Crabmeat

If you have a favorite food or an ethnic dish you would like to include, do it! You'll be so glad you did, you will proudly remember later honoring your culture or nationality, and your guests will be thrilled to try something new (well, usually!)

Keep having FUN!

Visit SheaShells SeaShells for beautiful, custom Beach Wedding Decor!

Decorating with SeaShells "On the Cheap"!

2005-07-30T11:42:00.000-04:00

If you've seen the movie "Something's Gotta Give", you may remember Diane Keaton in the role of a playwrite who has a fabulous beach house on Long Island. You may also recall that she had bowls of seashells and white beach pebbles scattered throughout her home. These bowls looked great and gave a casual and elegant beach flair to the airy rooms. This is a terrific idea, easy to do and is very inexpensive! Nearly everyone has a collection of prized seashells from their beach vacations, collected as pretty memories of a wonderful trip. Most of the time these shells are tucked away in a corner somewhere, catching dust. Bring them out of hiding today and show off your rich treasures from the sea!

Start by cleaning your shells. Mix equal parts of household bleach and water and let the seashells soak in this solution for at least 30 minutes (more if necessary). If there are barnacles or stains, clean with an old toothbrush and soak again. Rinse your seashells thoroughly and let dry.

Now the fun begins! Choose a pretty glass bowl, mason jar, or any glass container you like. Combine seashells you think will look nice together and place them in the container. Spend time arranging the shells to suit you, checking to make sure you like the way they look through the glass, as well as from the top. I like to use different combinations of seashells, mixing softly muted pastel shades with creamy white, in multiple sizes, but you may want to use seashells of the same size, with similar colors so that there's a uniform running motif in your containers to match the decor of the room - mix them up in a variety of ways to achieve the look you want. If you are into having scented potpourris around your home, you might want to add a few drops of your favorite scented oils to the shell bowls - instant seaside aromatherapy!

Another idea you might want to try in decorating with your seashells, especially using larger, more unusual specimen, is to place them singly on a mirror as a centerpiece or on a shelf for a unique focal point. If you have a special piece of driftwood, this could become part of your design. You may also arrange several shells together, but always decorate using odd numbers, even amounts tend to look unnatural and your goal is to give your home an organic, beach flair. What's nice about this method of decorating is that you can change it whenever you want a new look - at least until you run out of seashells!

Have fun, play and give new life to those dull hidden seashells! Sometimes we pull out a shell and wonder why we decided to keep it. Most likely you originally saw your seashell when it was still wet from the ocean, when the hues were brought out by the water. If you want to bring back the color in these seashells, you can brush on a thin coat of crystal clear nail polish and let dry, usually in just 15 minutes. This will give your seashells a pretty sheen and permanently accentuate the rainbow of colors that first caught your eye and made you lean down to pick the shell up and take it home. When your run out of shells (not possible in our house!), you'll be chomping at the bit to get back to the beach so you can collect more seashells for your decorating projects and you'll be giving the set decorators of Diane's movie beach house a run for their money!

To see an example of my seashell decor, check out SheaShells SeaShells and take a peek at my newest Driftwood Centerpiece with seashells, waving fronds and silk and dried flowers, created with the colors of Key West and Sanibel Island and my bedroom drapery as inspiration.

Play with your Seashells - you'll feel like a kid on the beach again make something pretty too!

SeaShell Memories

2005-07-30T04:44:00.000-04:00

My earliest memories with my family always seemed to include collecting seashells. Throughout my meanderings here, I'll share some of my SeaShell Memories...

Yep, that's me!

Today I'm thinking of the days when my family would pick blackberries on the bay side of the beach in Rye, NY. It was beautiful then, peaceful and clean, a rare gentle breeze moving through the trees, relief from the hot stillness of August.....I remember.....there's the tiny lap of water on the dark coarse sand, littered with the tiniest of seashells.....joyful sounds of screaming teens on the roller coaster across the way.....sweet cotton candy perfume drifting through the scent of the salty bay, my Daddy's Old Spice and smoke from his eternal cigarette.

After a lunch of lukewarm hot-dogs-from-home on soggy slices of white bread wrapped in newspaper and aluminum foil, my cousins and I would pull on our long-sleeved going-home shirts and pants over sticky bathing suits and bravely march into the brambled berry bushes separating the parking lot from the narrow beach, racing to see who could pick the most berries. In among my bag of berries were perfect tiny seashells...snail shells, bitty clams, mussels. They looked like little pearls and gems to me and I would tell myself stories about a mermaid's necklace. We'd have to be coaxed out by the adults with promises of visits to the funhouse and jostling in the bumper cars. I would always lag behind, looking for the real pearls among the seashells and picking up even more shell treasures and berries before finally emerging. We would tumble out of the thicket hysterical with laughter, covered in berry juice and blood, arguing loudly over who had picked the most berries. The adults would smilingly take us over to the beach side where the ocean would wash us salty clean again.

At the end of the long day, after the rides, haunted house, all the junk food we could stuff ourselves with, tired and droopy, I would sit in the back seat of my parents' rumbling giant Buick. My big bag of blackberries and seashells proudly next to me on the bench seat the size of my bed, my parents talking softly in the front, I'd gorge until I fell asleep, dreaming of undersea palaces. Waking up next morning with stained fingers and the smell of blackberry pancakes, creating mosaics of seashells that covered the whole kitchen table - fish, flowers, mermaids, rainbows, butterflies...seashell drawings from the happy heart of a little girl. Good memories these.

Those days on the beach with my cousins were the seeds of my lifelong love affair with seashells. To see what that little girl creates with seashells today, please visit SheaShells SeaShells & Silks

Rock on: Neil Young

2005-04-04T01:36:00.000-04:00

Though this is not specifically related to Beach Weddings, it relates in a very personal way to my beach wedding...

Neil Young has been a friend in my heart for a very long time. He got me through some tough times and got crazy with me during the good times. I love Neil's music and his beautiful soul. I first saw him onstage in the early 80s with CSN and fell hard, his searing guitar and lyrics belonged to me from then on. When I met my husband in a Manhattan dive in 2000, we played "Harvest Moon" on the jukebox 5 or 6 times a night and would have played it even more had the regulars let us. I've been to more of his concerts than any other rock show and have most of his recordings. We had two wedding songs - Etta James' "At Last" and Neil's "Harvest Moon". In short I am A FAN.

This post is to wish Neil Young a full and speedy recovery. I love you Neil (though if we were to ever meet face-to-face, I'd faint dead away - can't say that about anyone else on this planet)

Wishing you continued godspeed on this life's journey.

Carolyn

Choose your Wedding Photographer Wisely

2004-11-21T01:57:00.000-05:00

Six months before our Beach Wedding in June of 2002, we compiled a list of Wedding Photographers in New York City and interviewed four of the most promising photographers in the bunch, looking at their preliminary online samples and price ranges. During each interview, we looked at their hard-copy sample portfolios, asked many questions about photographic style, how they plan their scheduling for family shots and the things that were important to us, compared pricing and techniques, and finally chose our Photographer, primarily basing our decision on her sweet demeanor. Though she was only in her mid-twenties, we found Leah Flanagin to be charming, friendly and personable and she seemed to know her business. Also, her journalistic style, as shown in her samples, matched our vision of how we wanted to remember our once-in-a-lifetime wonderful Beach Wedding. She used all the right terminology and sweetly convinced us that she would do a fabulous job. She was hired! We paid half of the fee at the contract signing and the balance on the morning of our wedding.

When the Wedding day arrived, she showed up on time, seemed to be everywhere at once and was extremely unobtrusive. We felt very fortunate to have found such a terrific photographer and were comfortable in the knowledge that when we returned from our honeymoon in Bermuda, we would have proofs ready for picking the shots we wanted for our albums. We met with her for an exhausting four hours, going over hundreds of proofs and chose the photos we preferred. We made arrangements to meet in two weeks to receive our wedding albums, one for my husband and me and two for our parents. After our meeting, I felt a little disappointed with what we had seen, there were blurry shots, some quite out of focus, odd angles and only one picture of our lovely seashell wedding cake. I thought I was just very tired, so I asked my husband what he thought of the proofs. Though he had a similar reaction, we decided that the shots we viewed were really just proofs and that the final products would be beautifully developed and just like the photos in the sample albums we had initially seen. We couldn't wait to pick up our wedding albums!

We never saw or heard from her again.

So upset we could scream, we began a journey beginning with a simple Google search that brought us to the following poem and ending over 2 years later, at least for us, with a refund mandated by the New York State Attorney General: http://www.netspace.org/~kenneroo/main/potree/flanagin.html. We met a group of truly wonderful and committed folks in the same predicament and together we fought for our memories.

Read the links and news articles to get the full flavor or our plight and please PLEASE ask for references in your search for a Wedding Photographer. Don't let your big day be tainted by anything but love and laughter!

Go to http://sheashells.com to view a variety of unique, custom-designed Beach Wedding Decor!

Introduction: SheaShells on Beach Weddings - ocean breeze, seashells and flowers...

2004-09-07T02:15:00.000-04:00

I love the sea! So much that when my sea-salty husband and I married, we had a beach themed Wedding. It was glorious and even though it was by the Long Island Sound on a grassy lawn, we felt like we were right on the beach!

Part of the reason for the seaside ambiance was our dedication to locating the best caterers and venue and also because we decided to design the decor ourselves. Too many times, we came across centerpiece ideas suggesting we sprinkle sand on our lovely coral colored linens - ick, sand in the food! - or to put childrens beach buckets on the adult tables, filled with flowers, nah-uh, not us, we wanted graceful and beautiful, NOT a beach blanket bingo party, it was OUR WEDDING after all!!! I couldn't find any floral style that created the sand dune feeling that we were searching for, so I designed our centerpieces myself, using seashells, seagrasses and silk flowers. Then I made them permanent so that our guests could take them home and have a delightful memory of our happy beach wedding for years to come! The seashell centerpieces were an instant hit! We had such beautiful tables and our guests, caterers, seashell cake designer - everyone - loved my seashell centerpieces!

We recently decided to make the centerpieces available to all beach-bound couples. Since our wedding in 2002, designing floral decor for beach weddings has become something of an obsession for me, if not a lifestyle and I've been making the seashell and silk floral centerpieces, and also bridal wreaths and other items for beach brides and grooms ever since. Our wonderful seashell wedding birthed not only a joyful marriage, but a wonderful and rewarding career working with couples looking to have their own wonderful beach wedding! All of SheaShells' items may be viewed by visiting http://sheashells.com

In the coming months, I'll be posting thoughts and ideas on planning beach themed weddings and info for menus, venues and decor. If you have any questions, comments, or want to share your own ideas, please feel free to post. The only posting restrictions will be on anything I consider unseemly (being a lifelong New Yorker, this is a very short list, but try to keep your commentary clean and tidy - no porn and no nasty, crawly things).

Thanks for visiting and stay tuned for upcoming news and info. Pull up a sand chair and a rum punch and do some summer reading right here with us!