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!