The Wedding, Part Three

In Which I Go Nuts With the Hot Glue Gun
And Eschew Oriental Trading Company and Claire's

(read part one)
(read part two)

When we last left our hapless heroine, she was sewing up fashion like a freaking Donatella Versace.  But I couldn't stop there, in my quest to be "unique" and "meaningful" and, oh yes, "cheap."  Next up was my flower girl basket.  I got a metal pail at the craft store, made a big bow out of Holly's purple sash material, and glued it on.  For Faith the ring bearer, I got a little wooden treasure chest at the craft store and stained it dark brown.  Then I made a cushion out of Faith's pink sash material and tucked it inside.  Both the pail and the treasure chest also got metal starfish that I found in the jewelry-making section at Walmart. Thea was going to hold my bouquet during the ceremony, so I sewed up a long ribbon out of her blue sash material to tie the flowers with.  I intended to just buy some flowers at the grocery store the morning of the wedding.

During the multiple-trying-on process for Thea's dress, the plastic pieces that attached the removable straps broke.  Thea thought this was a sign that she should just wear the dress strapless, but I took this opportunity to sew the straps on permanently.  As a compromise, we decided to attach little white flowers to the bodice at the straps.

An idea I had seen several times in wedding pictures on the internet was that of a hand-painted-looking sign that the happy couple held.


(photo credit www.katherineashdown.co.uk)
You can purchase such a sign in various degrees of hand-painted-ness on the internet, ranging from under $10 at Oriental Trading Company to over $60 on Etsy.  I have zero artistic skills, so I knew I wouldn't be able to make this myself, but I happen to have access to a pretty good artist:  Thea.  I bought her a blank canvas and four bottles of paint in shades of orange and pink to match the sunset we would hopefully have on our wedding evening.  Then I gave her the supplies and turned her loose.

Chester being super helpful

The finished product was even lovelier than I had imagined!  And I think the total cost was under $10, so suck it, Oriental Trading Company!

I don't have pierced ears, and neither do the girls.  And I was not intending on wearing any necklace or bracelet.  But since we would all be barefoot, and it was the beach, I wanted anklets for all of us girls.  Of course, I decided this less than three weeks before the wedding.

A quick perusal of brick and mortar stores found nothing that I liked.  I had a particular look/style in mind, and I turned to Etsy.  I found just what I was looking for in Brasslady's Etsy store, but the anklets were made in and shipped from Thailand.  I was doubtful they would make it in time, but I placed the order.  It took four days to get a shipping notification, and delivery was estimated in 14-24 days.  At this point the wedding trip was 11 days away.  I decided I would have to use my own jewelry-making skillz, so I got some colored thread/cord and some beads and went to work.

This picture does not even do justice to how awful my anklet attempt was.  It looked like a friendship
bracelet woven by a four-year-old on a bumpy Jeep ride.

Would you believe... the package from Thailand arrived in the mail just hours before we left for Florida.  I was so excited I just about cried.

Becky's	Thea's
Faith's	Holly's

LOVE IT!  It even jingles when I walk!

So here we are at zero hour.  The night before we left for Florida, I still had the trusty glue gun and all the craft supplies out, putting together flowered barrettes, clips and headbands for our hair.  Why couldn't I have just gone to Claire's at the mall and chosen from their large selection of pre-made hair flowers?  This is a burning question I can't really answer.

Oh and one more "mishap" -- less than a week before the wedding, the girls and I went to a birthday party where a henna artist was doing tattoos.  We each got one.  Mine was a stylized bird.  It was really gorgeous.  When the tattoos were dry, I suddenly put two and two together -- these henna tattoos would last at least two weeks, and my wedding and professional photographs were six days away.  Guess we got lucky that the tattoo artist was so good, because these tattoos were here to stay.

Stay tuned for the forthcoming and final installment:  The Wedding, Part Four, when we wrangle everyone to Florida and the big day finally arrives!

The Wedding, Part Two

In Which Everyone Gets Dressed Up
And I Get All Sentimental Over $30 Worth Of Satin

(read part one)

Even as I was standing in David's Bridal admiring myself in the dress I was about to buy, I was thinking about how my girls would be dressed for the wedding.

I had to keep in mind their individuality.  Thea and Faith, especially, have very different styles.  I wanted each girl to be dressed in her own way, in something that made her feel happy, but still have all three of them complement each other and me.  My green sash planted the seed that grew into the idea we went with -- each girl would pick her own white dress, and then would wear a colored sash with it in her favorite color:  Blue for Thea, pink for Faith, and purple for Holly.

I figured it would not be easy to find dresses to each of their likings, but actually it did not prove too difficult for Faith.  At Burlington Coat Factory she tried on a total of four dresses, and the fourth was the winner.

This was not the dress we picked (it is hanging on the wall behind her),
but doesn't Faith look adorable in this one?

Thea, however, was every bit as difficult as I expected.  We traversed the entire mall (and Arundel Mills is pretty big) and she didn't even find anything worthy of trying on.

In the meantime, Dan searched online for a shirt to wear (smart guy).  He already owned a pair of white linen pants which were perfectly beachy and yet dressy.  He wanted a similarly classy looking Hawaiian shirt.  Originally he thought he might get a blue one, but as the idea of the girls' colored sashes fleshed out, he didn't want to take the chance of clashing with one of them or of this whole thing ending up a mish-mash of color.  Eventually he found a black shirt with a white flower print down one side at HulaOut.com that was perfect.

Here we are on Valentine's Day, still smiling.  Look what a good sport Dan was as I obsessed over every detail of our attire, and he finished his part after an hour or so browsing the internet on his laptop while in bed.
Wait.... who is the good sport here?

Thea's dress search took us to Marley Station Mall one Sunday afternoon where we spent what seemed like four hours in Vivace Bridal while Thea tried on what seemed to be fifty prom-type dresses.  Most were too fancy, too sexy/trashy (in my mom opinion), or too expensive, but we finally came to an agreement on one.  It had detachable spaghetti straps, which Thea did not want to wear, but I was adamant she would not go strapless.  It also had black piping along the folds of the skirt, but I gave in on that since Dan was wearing black.

Modeling the dress at home.  Notice how Thea has strategically arranged her hair
to give the illusion that her dress is indeed strapless.

Luckily Holly was just excited to wear a fancy white dress and couldn't care less where it came from, so a friend from church gave us a flower girl dress her daughter had worn in a wedding years ago.  It was slightly large on Holly, but I fixed that by shortening and re-sewing the straps.

Off to Joann Fabric to get the material for the girls' sashes.  Dan and I picked vividly colored satin and got about three times the amount of each that I actually ended up needing.  Then I spent the next couple of weeks measuring, sewing, ironing, and cursing.  Each sash needed to be a different length and width.  I foolishly decided Thea's and Faith's should be pleated to really look like they went with their dresses.  Keep in mind that I had not done any real sewing in approximately twenty years.  Not going to lie -- there was cursing.

But the result... just as I had imagined.

I mean, look!  I bought the green sash from David's Bridal, but I made the other three.  You can tell they were done by an amateur when you see the way the satin puckered under my needle, and how the pleat sizes are uneven, but I'm still pretty darn proud of them.  They were custom made to be perfect for each girl in each dress.

Sorry, not done bragging about these sashes yet.  :)  The piece de resistance comes next.  This idea was born while I stood there on the platform at David's admiring myself in the mirror and thinking the preliminary thoughts of each girl somehow having her own color.  What I really wanted was a way to tie it all together -- a way to symbolize that in this new marriage, along with me would come a little bit of each of them.

So, with some of the leftover satin from each of the three sashes, I made flowers.  This was time-consuming but not very difficult at all, after I looked over a few tutorials on the internet.  For each flower I cut out 12 to 15 circles of varying sizes.  Using a candle, I just barely melted the circumference of each circle.  This would keep the satin from fraying, and also curled the fabric just enough to give it a very petal-like texture.  Then I held the center of each circle over the candle just until it puckered.

I assembled each flower by hot gluing the circles together, with a dab of glue in each center.  To the top and final circle or two I gave an extra pinch to give it a little more shape.

Beautiful!

I pinned these three flowers, representing my three girls, to my green sash.  It turned out just as lovely as I had imagined, and the meaning behind it was priceless to me, no matter who else noticed.

OK, I think I'm done bragging about the sashes now.  But never fear, there is more nuttiness to come, because wanting to be all unique and sh** AND being a cheapskate always equals going overboard in, yes, a Martha Stewart way.

All this and more in The Wedding, Part Three!

(How many of these egotistical "parts" will there be, you ask?
AS MANY AS I DECIDE THERE WILL BE.)

The Wedding, Part One

In Which We Systematically Destroy
Every Original Wedding Idea We Had

Becky and Dan, summer 2010, in the happy early days well before considering marriage.

So.  Dan and I got engaged last year.  See the ring?  Opals -- my birthstone.

We originally thought we'd have a fall wedding last year, but it didn't work out that way.  Circumstances, yada yada yada, and after a while it seemed like maybe we'd just be engaged forever.  Then in February everything just dropped into place and the wedding was a go.  I still wanted a fall wedding, but October of this year was a long way from February and we were tired of waiting.  Plus we really wanted to have a real family vacation to start off our new lives together, so we decided to get married at the beginning of the girls' spring break and then take a week's vacation with them.

Here we are a few days after we picked our wedding weekend.  Yeah it's not the most flattering picture of me, but see we're still happy?  :)

Our original plan was to get married in Baltimore and then go to Florida for vacation.  We thought we'd have a small ceremony at the Maryland Zoo.  Did you know that you can have an "animal ambassador" attend your zoo wedding?  Like.... a PENGUIN?

Zoo Penguin Wedding Photo by Sweet Pea Photography -- I am jealous!

How cool is that?  We decided that absolutely we were going to have a penguin at our zoo wedding!  Unfortunately, the zoo was doing renovations on the main wedding venue that would not be finished until May, and they were reluctant to schedule us an outdoor wedding at the end of March without the indoor venue as a backup.

So we sadly scrapped our plans for a zoo wedding and decided the heck with it, we would just get married while we were down in Florida.  On the beach!  At sunset!  Why not!

Now to find a dress.  I had plans for an informal white dress, something flowy, simple, a little bohemian.  I found several online that I considered ordering, but I needed to know my exact size, so Dan and I went to David's Bridal to get me fitted.  Of course they brought out a bunch of dresses they wanted me to try on.  And I did -- because it's kind of fun.  :)

Enh... not really what I had in mind...  Plus the dress lady kept sticking
veils on me even though I said I wasn't going to wear one.

WHEW this is tight.  Makes my back view look shapely though!

Liked the idea of a halter, just not this one.

The dress lady loved this birdcage veil which she said was so
retro and fashionable.  I did not. 

But then I put on THIS dress, that I grabbed off the clearance rack because I loved the fabric -- bright white shantung taffeta, crisp like cotton instead of shiny or floaty like everything else I had put on.  The dress lady zipped me into it.  It fit perfectly, straight off the rack, and I stared at myself and said, "Wow."  She later told me that I said "Wow" seven times, and she knew we had a winner.

I loved the idea of a colorful sash, as I had planned on adding some burst of color to whatever dress I was going to order off the internet.  I liked the blue sash a lot, but green is my favorite color so I asked to try the green one, even though it looked dull on the hanger.  And... It was good.

Look -- even with messy hair and no makeup, this dress made me feel gorgeous.

The shape, the fabric, the brightness, and, oh yes, the clearance price.  It was certainly not the informal, breezy dress I had planned on.  It was a big and poofy ball gown.  And I LOVED IT.

Stay tuned for the The Wedding, Part 2 -- In Which I Go All Martha Stewart On This Wedding's A--

Catching Up

I have a lot I could be talking about here, but my desire to do things "in order" always makes me fall behind, whether that be in watching TV shows (which I've pretty much stopped altogether), in my gardening, and in my picture posting and journal writing.

Speaking of my gardening, it's moving along.  I put five broccoli plants into the ground, although one appears to be dead.  None of my peppers sprouted, and none of my cauliflowers did either.  I will have to buy seedlings at the nursery if I want those.  But I do have lettuce growing, and potatoes, and about 12 tomato plants that will be transplanted into the garden later this month.  I also have four or five more crops that are scheduled to be planted over the coming weeks.

The blackberry "bush" (it's really not bushy at all) looks good.  The strawberry patch has been pretty much wiped out, though, by weeds, digging, mowing, and nobody caring for it.  My rosebushes look better than ever, after I pruned them for the first time this winter.  The azaleas are right in the middle of blooming and are beautiful.  I got a bunch of pink tulips come up unexpectedly.  And the hydrangeas are looking great -- I hope to actually have all three bloom this year.

So there, I caught up on journaling about my garden, but I still have not talked about the kids in school, the funny things Holly has been saying, what books I'm reading, the music I'm listening to, or the pets.  And there's also the little matter of this:

Yeah... I'll tell you all about that.  :)  Soon!