Getting closer...

It's almost done! I get to pick it up Friday, hooray!



It looks a tad odd because it's not laced up on top, but you get the idea.

Shoes!!

Just ordered them (from the UK, blah)



Eep!

Collecting

It will look very little like this.

The underparts of my dress are done!



There will be great many over-parts on top of it, but hey, it's kinda cute now too. Here is one of the many overparts, held in place, ish:





(And no, don't worry, Travis never reads my blogs.)

Venue!!!

Finally!

We've booked the Environmental Discovery Center at Indian Springs Metropark in White Lake, MI. It looks like this:







The whole place, while super nice, doesn't really fit with the original color board...soooo....



A work in progress, clearly. But...yeah. Neat. So glad to have that done, now.

DIY List

Trying to get straight all the stuff I want to make in some capacity. In no particular order:

- Veil
- Bridesmaids headpieces?
- Shhhhsecret
- Boutonneires for groom, groomsmen, ring bearer, parents & grandparents (corsages where applicable, obvy.)
- Bouquet
- Bridesmaids bouquets
- Ring pillow
- Flowergirl basket or something
- Flowergirl headpiece
- Centerpieces
- Guestbook of some sort
- Escort cards or chart
- Table numbers
- Tablecloths & Settings? (Not sure what we're doing with these)
- Favors
- Invites
- Website
- Menu- labels for food, etc
- Ceremony backdrop
- Aisle runner or hangy things or something
- Various reception decoration- garlands, wall thingies, etc
- Figure out lighting
- Cake plates, etc
- Wine & beer labels
- Welcome basket type goodies? (I don't know if we'll do this since pretty much all of our guests will most likely be staying overnight but who knows)
- Cake toppers
- Design cake
- Card box
- Garter
- Photo "booth"?

I'm sure I'll think of more. Eek. It falls to me now to figure out which of these I can do while I'm here in Portland and bring/send home without any damage befalling them. And I need to commit to a decorating theme. There are just too many options, man. My mother and sister are (I think) checking out the venue tomorrow so hopefully there'll be pictures and I can get a better idea of what will look good there, and whatnot.

At least I decided against making my dress (though some days I wish I still had, because it would give me major crafty cred. But I probably would've gone insane.)

Behold, ye, and wonder...

...at the biggest-ass mood board ever.




Yeah, I may have let the photo-collection process go on too long. (I am a bad person and didn't keep track of where they are from, so if one of them is yours let me know and I'll credit it...or remove it. Whichever you please.) Unfortunately, the colors when pulled from this don't look much like my little collection of yarn. They look more like this:



(Yes, I borrowed the swatches from 100layercake. Though I changed the colors a bit. No, there isn't a square in the top left-hand corner. Cool illusion, though, eh?) That seems like a lot of colors to me, but...eh. I guess they kind of work. I'll have to think on it a bit.

Meanwhile, making mood boards is fun. I hope you'll humor me if I make some more for giggles. Completely unrelated to my wedding, of course. I think it's easier that way. Less pressure. And I'll make sure to credit those ones...and make my own damn swatches. Heh.

Graarragargh (blah blah blah)

Man. I'm starting to understand why brides freak out so often. I mean, I have a ton of time, so I'm not even close to freaking out, but if I didn't have over a year...I could imagine getting stressed about now.

This is what I don't understand:

Imagine you are a vendor. Perhaps you make dresses or own a bit of property that you rent out or something to that effect.

I send you an email that says something to the effect of "Good day sir or madam. I would like you give you more money than I make in a month. Please respond with your rules and demands so as that I may give you this money."

You have several options:

A. Don't email me back, ever.
B. Email me back a poorly formed half-sentence with no punctuation or real useful content, and ignore whatever questions I asked. Optional: forward my email to someone else who will ignore it.
C. Send me a few emails with content, and then disappear when I try to close the deal.
D. Be a damn professional, respond to me intelligently, and take my money.

The only person to choose D so far (the photographer, Nicole Ladonne, a good friend of a good friend) already has a juicy deposit in her pocket and I am super excited to work with her and confident that she'll do an excellent job. The rest... heave a sigh and move on. If you're not going to be easy to work with, I don't want to give you bazillions of dollars, kthxbye. But finding people who are easy to work with seems to be harder than one might think.

Meanwhile I made the mistake of putting up an etsy alchemy ad for my dress (rather than just finding and approaching designers directly) and had to craft 20-odd polite responses to people who seem to have never made a wedding dress before in their life but are really very confident that they can totally do it, because, you know, they made a tutu or some pants or something. The weirdest part is that about four of them offered to make me a dress from the same McCall's pattern which, A. didn't look anything like what I was asking for and B. Is illegal. You can't use commercial patterns for profit. It says so right on the package. And as as knitwear designer I'm a little sensitive about that sort of thing. So no I will not give you $1000 to violate copyright and dress me up in a McCall's halloween costume tyvm.

However, I WAS lucky enough to accidentally stumble upon a dres that I remember absolutely loving a year or so ago (and didn't save since I wasn't engaged yet.) And, provided the very nice people at Cocoon Silk downtown respond to my emails, I am going to have them make a similar dress. The store is run by a Cambodian family and they make some very nice stuff for quite a bit less than most of the Portland-based dress designers (I was prepared to pay a lot more for another designer I love but she seems to have disappeared :-( so...bummer.)

http://braedonsblog.com/2008/12/25/seth-and-dionna-el-capitan/

Nice, eh?

Hold on to your hats folks...

5/28/2011. Let's do this thing.

The colors, Duke! The colors!

(what is that from??)

Anyway, I think I've picked my colors. And rather fittingly, I used yarn (well, technically crewel wool.) I was organizing it into rainbow-ish order (which is a surprisingly large and enjoyable part of my job) and then reached in and grabbed this whole neighborhood.

I may have also snuck a skein of Malabrigo lace in there...and it turns out that a teensy skein of handspun that Vivian gave me happens to match pretty well too (these are total Vivian colors, as it happens. What can I say? The gal's got taste.)

Describing them has been a bit of a challenge. "Um, gold, and, like, gray, but more of a bluish purplish greenish gray, with a little bit of beiginess, and maybe some greenish goldish grayish..." Pantone can't touch this.

I also finally got around to taking a picture of my ring with my good camera (I waited until it had been resized and re-shined-up...I'd managed to scuff it quite a bit already. I'm sort of a bull in a china shop. I really shouldn't be allowed to have such nice things. At least my gigantic knuckles will keep it from falling off.)

Pretty!

Ceremony Schmeremony

And we've got wedding colors! But we're in the middle of moving so I can't take a picture yet. Soon.

Meanwhile, I found this bit by Ariel Stallings (the "Offbeat Bride" gal) that nicely sums up how I feel about the whole ceremony bit (I say "I" because saying "we" makes me sound like a tool, but I think Travis agrees.)

"Andreas and I are basically pragmatic agnostics: We have faith when we need it and beliefs when we want them, but they're pretty quietly integrated into the rest of our lives, and we don't practice them publicly. Neither of us is really into ceremony or spirituality on display. 'She who knows the most, waves her crystals and DNA activations around the least,' I say. By this logic, the couple that is the most committed feels the least need to prance around and crow about how committed they are- this questionable leap in logic isn't exactly accurate, but it goes a long way toward explaining why we approached the ceremony with such hesitation... My rebellious streak pushed me toward impatience with ceremony. The pretense and sanctimoniousness grated on my nerves. Shut up about it already. We get it! I'm too irreverent to enjoy social spirituality, and so ceremonies have always lived somewhere near the bottom of my pet-peeve shit list, somewhere between misplaced apostrophes and people who can't walk their talk: I get impatient, irritable, and look for my escape hatch."

Though I think I like misplaced apostrophes less than ceremonies. And quotation marks used as emphasis even more. Quotation marks used as "emphasis" are really "annoying" and "confusing".

But anyway, this is the story of why our ceremony will probably last about 3 minutes and the whole vow thing will probably be done well out of the public eye. I don't need to tell you shit about how I feel about Travis, I just have to tell Travis. And I don't need you judging my writing style and cringing while I do it - which is what I usually do when I have to listen to someone get all sappy in front of me (uh oh, did I just cost myself an invitation to all my friends' weddings? Nah... most of them don't read my blog.)

As I was telling Travis when I was getting all stressed about the location (and he was trying to point out that that's not the important part): The marriage is the important part. And that will happen no matter what, even if the whole wedding goes to shit. And it will be good and I am thrilled to the gills but the details are, strictly speaking, none o' yo damn bizness. All you need to know is that we're married, so don't hit on us, and let us share healthcare. Relationships are like dreams: while yours are extremely interesting to you, other people's are really boring. You don't mind knowing the gist, but it gets really awkward and torturous fast if someone starts trying to let you in on all the details. (Unless it's a messy relationship...then it's more like a trainwreck and the details become juicy. But you don't usually see those at weddings.) Meanwhile, I see the wedding is THE BIGGEST CRAFT PROJECT EVER and an excuse to throw a big party for all the people in our lives who we love. And I am going to kick its ass with my crafty prowess, goddammit! Yes, in theory it is a celebration of the aforementioned marriage, but if our culture used a different event to justify plunking down a bunch of money on pretty things and getting wicked crazy party crafty, I'd be doing it to celebrate whatever event that was.

The ceremony, then, is this weird awkward tie-in where I have to publicize the rather private idea of the marriage and somehow connect it to the party-time extravaganza that is the wedding. Same with the first dance, sort of. I don't particularly like being the center of attention- or at least, the required center of attention. If you're all staring at me because I'm wearing a sweet dress, that's ok, but I don't want to MAKE you look at me. That's weird.

Oh dear, I am something, eh?

Well, it seems like one decision has been made (besides the one about the groom, anyway). We were going to do the wedding in Portland before we move back to Michigan at the end of October, but I couldn't find a suitably rural environment without dragging my poor guests an hour or two out of Portland. It wasn't worth the trouble and the somewhat rushed timetable was freaking me out a little bit, so we decided to bump it back to next May in Michigan, hopefully during the ridiculously short window of pleasant weather my fine home state gets in the spring.

Now to find a farm with a flush toilet for the bride...

Why hello, lot!

My repository for all things weddingy!

For anyone who stumbled across this without going through my other blog, please realize that the name (and address) is not an homage to greed, but rather a spin-off of my other blog, Presents Knits, "Presents" being an old high school nickname of mysterious origin. I promise I'm not just a gift whore.

For now I'm going to leave this blog all boring-looking...when I've finally settled on a theme or something, I'll spruce it up.