married!!!

well, i guess i'll have to figure out what to do with this blog now!

over the next few days, before school starts, i'll try to get some pictures up. r forgot his camera when we went to oregon for the wedding, so we're relying solely on others for documentation. so far it's been pretty good!

let me say this: the wedding was perfect. even the dress, officially the morning of the wedding, ended up exactly the way i wanted it. it was perfect. everything that day was. r and i could not be happier.

pics to come!

S T R E S S

well, it finally happened. this wedding has been, despite crazed fabric searches and much indecision, pretty smooth sailing. there has been virtually nothing to stress about and i thought i might be lucky enough, just easy-going enough, to get to the final day without a lot of tears and freakouts. alas. our eco-friendly, budget-friendly wedding is not emily-friendly.

maybe i'm just plain stressed out by it all. maybe it's that it's just a couple of days away now (although i really do not think i'm nervous in the slightest about marrying r), maybe it's seeing all my family for the first time in a long time last night... or maybe it's the dress.

the dress just happened too last minute. i didn't find the right pattern in time, so the test dress couldn't be made far enough in advance to cope with all the changes that need to be made. the pattern needs to be altered in many places, i think the fabric needs to change... but today is the only day left for putting it together. and that is just too damn close. i found a dress that i think could substitute - i think a was pretty unhappy that i might be pulling the plug. i don't blame her, she worked hard on it yesterday and i know she knows she can make the dress. and i know it too, there just plain isn't enough time to make that dress work on me.

i don't even know if i like the other dress i found, i'm just desperate to actually have one at this point. now i'm wishing that i'd bought the backup dresses i found all the times i went thrift-storing, all the times i thought "no way, i'll have the dress i want." the thing that sucks about it all... i don't necessarily care that much what the dress looks like, i just want to feel pretty in it. and i don't, not even a little bit, not in anything i've put on in the last few days. and THAT is what finally sent me into a breakdown when we got home last night. i just want to feel a little bit like a bride in my dress and as of two days before the wedding, there is no dress on the horizon that makes me feel that way. well, i guess something had to give.

you say luminaria, i say farolito

in new mexico, farolitos are the paper bags with sand and candles inside and luminarias are the little (or big!) open bonfires. not at all the same thing. elsewhere, it seems, the terms are used largely interchangeably and luminaria seems to be preferred... dammit, i'm sticking with farolito!

tomorrow i leave for eugene and will be pretty much out of commission until the wedding, although i'm planning to try to take some photos of things in process and post a few more entries before the event. but so i thought today i would try to cover one more aspect i don't think i've talked about yet: lighting.

as with the flowers and everything else, there was nothing fancy i wanted here, nothing over the top. just something to set a tone - still sticking with that kind of overall rustic-y, september feeling. so farolitos are one thing i've known i wanted since day 1. firstly: how cheap can you get? a package of paper lunch bags? second, since the bags can just get recycled, it's very minimal impact. the only thing that changed that was when i realized i'd need to go with the fake plastic tea lights instead of real ones. having the open flame just wasn't going to work with a public park and then a b&b... but i decided to do it anyway, knowing the candles will get reused by my friends & family instead of thrown away.

the shelter we have has great little ledges all around where they can be set up, and a big huge fireplace that i think kind of makes the farolitos make sense. but it'll be daylight while we're at the park, so i'm thinking we'll just pack 'em up and truck them over to the b&b, where there's a great little outdoor patio and garden area that they'd be perfect for.

i thought about something like martha stewart's lacy luminarias, but decided even that was just too much.

i want it as simple as possible. less = more:

programming

whew! things are getting crossed off the list, now. got our liability insurance squared away for the park (since there will be alcohol there), food stuffs are getting figured out, and now the programs are just about wrapped up. since we have stuff going on all weekend, we have little "what's happening" cards for each day, and maps to and from the actual events of the wedding and the dinner. we also have instructions, of sorts, for the ceremony. have i mentioned that we're doing this sort of quaker-style? so we'll have our guests all say whatever they want to say instead of having someone talk about a lot of stuff that doesn't mean anything to us. and so our program packets include a blurb about that, so people will be expecting it, and some blank notecards for them to jot some ideas down during the days before the wedding. so close now!

counting down

our wedding is less than three weeks away!

and r, at least, will have something to wear.

yes, it was hanging in front of a very bright window, but i don't feel like taking another photo, so let's just call it divine light! so there it is: the finished vest. i've got to say, i can't believe how well it came out. i had no idea i could do that. and it fits him beautifully.

we went shopping for a shirt & tie this weekend and the salesman at the men's wearhouse, when r pulled out the vest to match things up, looked at it and said (in admiring tones) "wow, that thing's been around for a while!" goal: achieve vintage look. SUCCESS! we were pretty happy with that.

on this week's agenda now is finishing the programs and getting those sent to oregon before the trip next week. after that, i'll be in oregon finalizing the food & flower details, and then we'll have us a wedding!

resurrecting the dress

the final word is this: we are going back to the original dress. after all of that. the lace and the internet hunting and the trip to LA (although we needed to do that for r's vest, anyway) and the silk and everything... i'm scrapping the lace dress idea.

why? well, for a couple of reasons. one big one is that it's really more involved construction than i initially realized. the kind that, if not done juuuuust right, will really look off. another huge thing is that i never found a pattern that really came close to the envisioned dress. i thought i had, but it really didn't measure up in production. had i decided on this dress months and months back, that might not have been a problem. we might have had enough time to figure out the details. but i'm getting married in about three weeks and such time does not exist. and lastly, i guess the most important, is that i just couldn't ever get the first dress out of my head. i scrapped it in the first place for the same reason i gave for this one: no pattern. lots of basic, simple dress patterns but nothing with that cut, that neckline. and what i really wanted was that dress, so it started to just make sense to go with something else. but the more i got into lace and silk, the more i realized how much i hadn't wanted exactly that in the first place. the dress we were going for was still ultra-simple, but i wanted even simpler. and when i finally finished r's vest, i kept picturing the original dress next to it. i still wanted that one. but the magic happened when, poring over vintage pattern websites again, i actually found it! as a refresher, here again was the original dress:you might wonder what it is that i love so much. that's hard to say. i love the simplicity of it, the way it isn't about any particular detail, it's just perfect as it is. and the mock turtleneck. and the shortness of it - i love those two things combined. i think even the color made me like it initially, the soft winter white as opposed to the bleach white. and i think, mostly, that it's just very much me. but the dress patterns we were finding were just off. no turtleneck (and it's hard to just make that up), or the seams were all off, or the front was constructed in pieces, or there was a slit at the neck... just stuff that really changed the look of it. and then this!! in my size!!

i was sooo damn happy. i don't know if A was, since i've changed this on her so many times now. having had so much success with r's vest, i think if i was gonna do the whole show over again, i'd want to make the dress. as it is, i told her i wanted to help, because i really do want to have a hand in making my own dress. i have so much more confidence in my sewing abilities now. so she got the pattern yesterday and i'll be there in just over a week to try to pull this out of our hats less than two weeks before the wedding! thanks, momspatterns. way to get me back on track!

let there be pulled pork

last month, when we went to eugene and kind of finalized our wedding plans, we realized that despite our extremely modest approach, we still had a lot of money going out. there weren't many places to trim up, and by far the biggest one was the catering. we'd found these wonderful caterers - they use all local, organic, seasonal ingredients. we'd sampled their lunch at the farmer's market and it was delicious. they gave us a very reasonable price, but in the end even a reasonable price times 40 - 50 people is still a lot of money. so we bit the bullet and decided that since we're doing everything else ourselves, why not the food, too?when r's brother had his wedding celebration last year, the other brother D did an amazing job with pulled pork. that was the one and only thing we'd sort of known from the start that we really wanted. so he agreed to pull out the stops again. and now with the wedding only 3 1/2 weeks away, we really need to figure out wtf we're doing for the rest of it! i've been trying to think of things that can be made ahead of time and are easily transportable, can be made in a variety of flavors to appeal to the masses, and are appropriate for a mix'n'mingle buffet. crostini, anyone?

i'm thinking lots of lovely little toasts with tomatoes, like this one, and white bean dip, and hummus, and olive tapenade... oh yes, lots of tapenade.

we'll also have slaws and salads, of course. and i think i'd like to do caprese sandwiches for our vegetarian friends. and a really nice charcuterie plate for those not so in love with pulled pork as the rest of us. r plans to make bread (yikes! ambitious! - not because of the actual bread-making, he's got that down to a crusty, delicious science. just because of the time and all...) and i think that would go quite nicely with some yummy meat'n'cheese.

we're not having a wedding cake, instead we're doing a big dessert spread from our local patisserie - reigning champions of all things sweet and chocolate. so. ideas?

from pink silk to ivory!

it worked! man, i hope google can pick up on some key words in here because anyone wondering if they can use a color remover to change that silk they thought was a nice ivoryish but is actually a strange beige/pinkish to the ivory they thought it originally was should know that THEY CAN!

so. i've been on this insane lace hunt, we all know. last weekend r and i went on the Great Fabric Adventure to LA's fashion district. and it was so fabulous! i should post one of the quick phone pics i got. so i found some fantastic lace at a great price and figured what the hell, might as well grab the silk at the same time. the lace is distinctly ivory and so i needed a silk to go with that. i got what appeared to be a very nice match at what was also a very nice price and was quite happy. until i got in the car. i looked and looked and checked in different lights but it was not to be denied: my lovely ivory silk was definitively off-pink. no getting around that. oh, suck.

so i started looking into color removers. i never had any thought of using anything like clorox bleach, which i learned was a very good thing because apparently chlorine + silk = disaster. i don't know what happens, exactly, but good to know. but there are a couple of other products out there: specifically, i was looking at jacquard idye color remover. it's formulated for, among other things, silk. but when i went to joann today, all they had was rit's version. which was fine. i hadn't specifically read anything about it and i was a little nervous cause it seemed like it was more geared toward specifically dealing with bleeds... but what to lose? $2.50? so i brought it on home and fired up a test strip of the silk.

it was looking good. good enough that i decided yes, i am definitely putting the whole shebang into that pot (yay for r having a big enamel pot from brewing beer!).

seriously, it is fantastic. amazingly fantastic. i mean, it came out better than i could possibly have imagined. it is exactly what i wanted when i didn't even know exactly what i wanted. and having dried & ironed the test strip, the texture is not ruined in the slightest by simmering for 13 minutes in chemical-infused water. i have my ivory silk!!

the colors are both so subtle that it was almost impossible to get a good comparison picture, but i think this pretty well captures it. although you don't get the sense of what these colors really are, you can see just how much lighter the one on the right is. the change was remarkable. and i am sooooo happy with the final result. so the lesson is: will rit color remover change my light pinky beige silk to a light cream? YES IT WILL!

single welt pocket: SUCCESS!!

YES! this makes two of the hugest parts of this vest that i now believe i can actually do. i'm not posting about it because i don't know exactly how the collar/lapel part will work in the end, exactly, but i did successfully sew a notched collar yesterday. thank gawd for brigham young! they did not, unfortunately, have a tutorial vid for me on a single welt pocket, though. double-welt (found lots of instruction on that, i'm not sure why the single is so much less common) but my pattern is for a single welt. i did, however, come across a wonderfully illustrated step-by-step here. i made my through it quite well, and it gave me the basic understanding of the construction i needed to go back to the pattern. and look look look!

oh - so, obviously, this is just a test run and these are not the real fabrics. i got the grey so that we could get a sense of what it would actually look like, but it's just turned into a total testing ground anyway, there won't be anything to try on with this fabric. and the white was so i could really see what the different pieces were supposed to be doing.

check it out - a pocket in the middle of the dart - successfully!

a close up. here you can see the things that are off: the seam line at the top is kinda angled, so you can see the white underneath on one side. on the real vest, the white fabric will be the same as the vest, so stuff like that wouldn't show as much. but i'll be working on perfecting the seam, anyway. also, at the lower right corner, you can kind of see how the fabric is pinched up. i overlapped some seams where i shouldn't have (the very thing that is the key to the notched collar, by the way). because of the notched collar experiment, i know how to avoid that in the future.

see? it really opens up and everything!

see how the back of the pocket matches the front of the vest perfectly, so there's no visual disruption when the pocket is opened? yay! oh man, i'm so happy about this.

School of Family Life

yup, that's going to be the answer to the vest woes! so i found some patterns. i ordered them and they looked pretty good. well, looks can be deceiving. actually, the patterns are just fine, i'm sure. if you happen to already know the tips, tricks, and techniques involved in sewing welt pockets and notched collars! if you don't, do not look to a Simplicity pattern for illumination. and trust me, there are tips, tricks, and techniques that you will fail miserably without.

enter brigham young university. i am so not kidding. there is an amazing sewing tutorial series available on their website. clearly it's for a class - or rather, a whole bunch of classes - but the techniques are unbelievably well demonstrated so no syllabus or anything is needed. the first few seconds of my experience had me convinced i was not going to be able to listen to the instructor, who at first sounds like she's either begun to seriously loathe her life or else seriously loathe yours. and then you realize that she's just into sewing and is explaining everything as though it's as obvious as how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. but not in a condescending way, just in an "i do this every day of my life" way. which is kinda what you want in an instructor. plus they never show her face, which i love.

and she has an entire tutorial on... da-da-DA!... THE NOTCHED COLLAR! now, i did not have any idea that this was an incredibly difficult thing to do. on my third failed attempt, i was beginning to suspect that there was something i might not be getting from the pattern instructions. enter faithful google search (i'm now convinced we would not be able to get married without google). any idea how many sewing "instruction" pages there are out there either without illustration or with strange fuzzy pictures and mysterious alien symbols that only someone better at sewing than you would ever be able to decipher, thereby defeating the whole purpose of illustrating a tutorial? i was beginning to despair until the nameless, faceless wonder that is the brigham young sewing instructor entered my life. go figure.

now, i don't imagine that you're going to sit down and watch a two hour notched collar tutorial, but if you ever even want to go back to the basics and learn why your pins should be perpendicular to your cut line instead of parallel with it, a super cool technique for marking dart lines called "tailor's tacks" and other pattern marking transfer methods, or what the hell the point of stay-stitching is, i'd recommend checking it out. And if you ever get around to the notched collars, i have two words for you: The Dot. and if that doesn't mean anything, get thee to the School of Family Life before you make a single cut!

L.A. fashion district

that's where r and i are going next weekend to do a little fabric shopping. or a lot. have i mentioned yet that i sort of hate san diego? gawd, i really do. it's got some amazing weather going for it, and it's a good thing, or else i might have completely lost my mind here already. among the many, many complaints i have about san diego (near "people," at the top of the list) is that it is impossible to buy anything. i am not kidding. i don't know how many times now we've made the pronouncement that we're giving up, that we are just buying absolutely everything online from now on. and yet we keep trying...

there aren't that many fabric stores to choose from, to begin with. not a shocker. so i tried Jo-Ann because, you know, first things first. definitely no lace and no luck with r's wool, either. there's a big ol' place called Discount Fabrics near our neighborhood. funky place, actually. it's in an old theater and is quite huge. but they mostly have upholstery - their apparel selection was limited to about what Jo-Ann carried. no on both our fabric needs. yesterday we made the short journey down to National City to Yardage Town. now that's a fabric store! fabulous! unfortunately, r struck out with all of the wool offerings and though they had a small selection of guipures (which alone is saying something!) - none fell below $80/yard and several went up to $120 and $180.

*le sigh* (to molly and the end of the world: i am stealing that)

r had actually mentioned LA before - i don't know if he said something again yesterday or if i just started looking for stores or what. but i came across several extremely promising stores, and r said again that we should just go. it's only two hours away. so i've been doing my research on LA's 90-block fashion district and reading the store reviews. i've zeroed in on two: B Black & Sons for r's wool, and International Silks & Woolens for my lace (and, i suppose, a backup for r's wool). feast your eyes:

you know, it's worth saying: i started this little blip of a blog because i had a lot of ideas, crafty and otherwise, for our little homegrown wedding. it's been a great place to think out loud, just as it's supposed to be. but i would be over the moon, just the same, if we got married in shorts and sweats in our disheveled living room right here this morning, too. the cats can be our witnesses. in short: we decided to have this whole wedding because we wanted our friends and family there, and our friends and family wanted to be there. and as much as i love these details - they're just that, details. so i'm enjoying the adventures of fabrics and other issues in wedding planning, but i enjoy them 100 times more when it's something r and get to just add to our list of Things We Did Our Way. a list i hope never stops growing...

shawl lapel waistcoat (r's "old-timey" vest)

never thought i'd title a blog post like that! man oh man, dressing for a wedding is a difficult business! holy crap! i thought i had it rough when i changed the style for my dress. turns out the dress i'm so in love with requires "allover guipure lace." and oh my gawd, that stuff runs upwards of $100/yard when you can even find it! now i know why the dress is $2000. holy crap. but i think (i think i think) i've found something suitable. we shall see.

but then there is r's suit. well, waistcoat, to be specific. he found a suit he just loves (and i love it, too) through a custom clothier in portland. of course it would be in portland, everything fabulous in the world is in portland, and that's why we want to move there. but we aren't there, we're in san diego. anyhow, said custom suit (minus the jacket because who needs that?) is appropriately expensive. and this wedding is really all about inexpensiveness.

so a second round of endless internet searching ensued. all the same stuff as for my lace - image search, shopping search, random internet vintage store search, european store search, ebay, etsy, you name it. looks like he's either going to have to get it made in england, cough up the dough for duchess, hope that he can find it in a vintage store somewhere in pdx during our one day there before the wedding, or hope that my sewing skills have magically improved in the ten or so years that i have, ahem, not been sewing:

i found this pattern and i hope it makes some sense to me. what we've figured out is that he likes the collar style of the top one (that's the shawl lapel part, by the by) and the front cut of the lower one. so. do i have magic latent sewing skills just waiting to blossom? hey, you never know. what i learned from making my test dress pattern last week was that i am much more patient with scissors, pins, patterns, and threads than i used to be and that i am much more conscientious of the importance of detail when there's a wedding on the line. so hey, miracles could happen. but i'm still glad we have a weekend in portland in our back pockets, just in case...

and the dress changes again

no pics this time. maybe i don't want to jinx it, maybe i've decided i want something to be a surprise in the end, i don't know. but a and i have planned a total turnaround with the dress. the only thing i will say: it will still be short. i've spent quite a bit of time in the last few months drooling over long vintage dresses, but i've not for a second changed my mind about that.

it's funny, for a girl who never had that big ol' wedding dream, i've really gotten into some of the details of this thing. i think r is... well, not sick of it exactly. he has had a lot of ideas and input about the whole thing - the website, the invites, all of that. and he did pick the park! but i think he's ready to call it good. so the paper details, the dress specifics, etc, i think it's pretty much gonna be up to me and the sisters from here on out. so i hope y'all are ready to do some crafting with me!

pretty paper crafts

when r and i first decided to do this whole wedding thing, M asked if she could assist with decorations by making some kind of a wreath or other wall centerpiece, to which i delightfully consented. she made the most incredible lemon & lime wreath for her own wedding... no, really, with actual lemons and actual limes. amazing. so she was thinking of something like this, but in my fall-sunset-y colors:

last week, i came across these kusudama flowers & balls:

i made a test yesterday and i just love them! i told M i was thinking about making a bunch for the wedding... i'm not really sure where they'll go yet, but i like the idea of having them around for decoration. so, being the super smart lady that she is, my sister pointed out that if they were done in the same papers as the medallion, it would give it a nice, cohesive look and feel. yep, that's why she's in design and i'm in linguistics :)

swizzle sticks

i saw this yesterday as i was wasting yet more time looking at other blogs for wedding ideas, and it popped up again today on once wed. that's ok, i'll repost here anyway. i like this idea! it's simple and small - two requirements for my diy projects - but i think worth the effort.

we'll be providing alcohol so it would be a reasonable thing to do. i think it would be a fun way to incorporate all the colors i've been thinking of - sort of autumn sunset... reds, oranges, that sort of thing. except i wouldn't use the alphabet stickers, that just seems like kind of a pain and not something guests would really pay attention to, anyway. instead, i'd just keep a couple of sharpie pens lying around for people to just write their names on the tag. so for you sisters reading this, expect* to be put to work a few days before the wedding!

*ever notice that 'except' and 'expect' have all the same letters in virtually all the same places? i wrote 'except' first and it took me a long while to figure out what looked wrong...