An Extraordinary Saturday: Details

My mom once referred to my wedding planning process as a year-long art project.  I’m not sure how she meant it, but I think that’s fair.  I fell in and out of love with various projects, and the wedding reflected most of that process.  I said before that the details don’t matter, and that’s mostly true.  They don’t matter unless you enjoy the tedious, laborious, often-solitary process.  Hi, I’m Julia.  I’m a process person, and if you know my day job you probably just laughed.

So here are the rest of the details, which may or may not matter – but they sure were fun.

About a month before the wedding I discovered that the catered beverages at the ceremony would be ugly.  So instead of serving ugly catered iced tea and lemonade I bought several flats of bottled water from Costco.  I swore to DJ that I didn’t need one more project, that I wasn’t going to mess with them.  

But I couldn’t help myself.  I ripped off the labels and made new ones.  Two versions, for fairness: “juliaLOVESdave” and “daveLOVESjulia.”  DJ laughed big and long at my inability to leave things alone, then helped me finish the job.  It’s always a good idea to test your boundaries right before the wedding.  Just so you know where you stand.  My boundaries: nonexistent.  Still true for marriage, by the way.  Right now we’re planning a bathroom remodel that started with a new shower curtain. 

The water went to good use.  It wasn’t too warm a day, so there were a lot of bottles left after the ceremony.  But Elizabeth thought to bring them indoors next to the dance floor, where they quickly disappeared.

The flower backdrop was a hit, thanks to DJ’s dad.

Just before the ceremony I set the spun sugar crown on our cake and filled it with flowers.  It was exactly what I had in mind, I love when that happens. 

The cake pedestal was a bit of a waste.  It was pretty, but the foil-covered board the bakery used was too big, so the pretty plate was completely hidden.  Too bad, but it wasn’t a huge loss.  It was less expensive than renting a pedestal from the bakery, and I may very well use it again for non-wedding cakes.  The vintage sterling serving set will definitely be used again by me - and maybe one day I will call them family pieces and watch a niece or nephew use them to take their first bite of married life.

DJ and his dad built these chalkboards, and my sister-in-law wrote the dinner menu in her perfect teacher handwriting.  I think they’re going to find a home in our kitchen soon, I’m still crazy about them.

You all know about the chair covers and table runners… right?  If you like them too but want to do less hemming of rectangles (and who could blame you), they are for sale.  Inquiries to ordinarysaturdays at gmail, please.  DJ would love to have them out of our guest bedroom, a.k.a. his closet.

Although I didn’t intend to theme our wedding, there were a lot of books.  I bought them in bulk from Goodwill on a sale day, then covered them in green and kraft paper.  I’d intended to donate them back to Goodwill, but, um, now I want to read some of them.

We used the covers of nine of our favorite books to designate tables.

I printed the cover graphics on linen paper business card-sized, and once cut apart they went in miniature envelopes.   Like Memory for grownups.

My mother in law wrote the names on the envelopes in her pretty script, and I attached them to a moss-covered corkboard with pearl pins. 

Friends warned me to have something to hold the cards, or I’d be stuffing them down my dress all night.  They turned out to be right, a card box was needed.  But we didn’t need a huge container for our petite wedding, so I bought a mailbox.  Captain Obvious says mailboxes are good for cards, right?  I primed it and painted it pewter, then glued moss around the base and inside the lid to hide my sloppy paint job and finished it off with a sweet bow.   A Secret Garden mailbox, totally unnecessary but fun for this process person.

The centerpieces… ah, I just love blowsy roses in silver.  Can’t help it, they’re so romantic.  DJ was very tolerant of my fervent lust for garden roses.  He stayed far away from the floral decisions, said nice things about the arrangements, and is still tolerating my sighs over the short life of cut flowers. 

I know these centerpieces wouldn’t have been right in a ballroom, but the casual arrangements worked with the barn atmosphere.  They were off-kilter, overblown, shades of white, and trailing messy bits of moss.  There I go again, sigh sigh. 

While most of the centerpieces were mossy roses in silverplate, I did something different for the head table.  I wanted to hide our plates from Kim’s camera (hello, I ate a full meal that night), so I painted five Ikea planters pewter, filled them with floral foam, and covered the foam with moss. 

The boutonnieres were made from my grandma’s vintage button collection, some millinery leaves, guinea feathers, and bits of vintage lace.  They were all unique.  My mom stole Kid A’s boutonniere and kept it, which is high praise.  She is not a process person; she likes a good solid end result. 

I love this shot of my mom’s corsage.  The roses were big and heavy, but she wore it all night.

At the last minute I made little nametags for the head table.  Useless, but cute.   

My friend Jules Someone is an amazing baker, and I couldn’t have given cookies as favors without her.  Over 300 cookies were baked in Jules’s oven two days pre-wedding.   I made the dough and froze the formed cookies ahead of time, but Jules made this one happen.  She and DJ packaged them up in 3x3x2” Papermart boxes with ribbon I’d precut and stickers I’d made months earlier.  I don’t think any of the cookies made it out of the reception before being eaten.

Early on I Gocco’ed cocktail napkins with five “facts” about the bride and groom.  Things people should know about us if they were going to help usher us into married life.  Happily/sadly, they were such a hit that there are no pictures of them.  I’m not even a tiny bit upset about that, people were trading and collecting them to have full sets of five.  I call that a win.  So the best I can do is share the random facts themselves.  Imagine a green napkin with Gocco’ed pewter print for each.

• Dave and Julia named their dog Ignatius J. Reilly, after the main character in A Confederacy of Dunces. 
• Dave enjoys listening to Christmas music year-round, and often sings along.
• Julia once bowled 10 frames with a total score of 6.  She has had a similar lack of success in the following activities: softball, tennis, soccer, volleyball, basketball, and bag-o.
• After moving, the first boxes Dave unpacked held his DVD collection, which he immediately alphabetized.
• Dave says “laaaayg” for leg, “ayyyyg” for egg, and “fool” for full.  Julia disagrees on all counts.

For our guestbook, I used photos from our engagement shoot.  Photos on the left page, and library pockets on the right.  At the last minute I decided to include some of the sassy RSVP notes,  to keep all my ephemera in one place. 

I wear my rings all the time, even at night.  They feel good.  I keep thinking that one of these days I’ll just wear the band, but it hasn’t happened yet.  DJ’s hands are much bigger than mine – I can pass my engagement ring straight through the center of his, stone and all.  It’s been a good party trick, post-wedding.

Here’s a better view of the clutch purses I made for our bridesmaids.  At the last minute I decided to make a fabric and pearl flower pin for each girl, in the same green silk I used for the lining.  Useless, but fun.  (Process person.)

My feather hair ornament was from Castle Bride.  My hairstylist Loved It, as did a lot of the ladies.  Fascinators are fairly trendy right now, but I really liked the look of it and it was fun to have something crazy in my hair after the veil came out.  Trendy doesn’t really matter.  If you like it and it suits you, who cares.

My veil was semi-homemade.  I ordered a cathedral length veil from Megsveils, because I didn’t want to source illusion and a metal comb then try to cut a curved edge on the slippery material.  (Her eBay store is cheaper than her Etsy store, probably due to different insertion fees.  Same stuff.)  Creating the pouf took some trial and error – I gathered the veil in my hand, clipped it together flat, and adjusted the fullness before hand sewing it to a sheer ribbon.  Then I hid my stitches with a length of my grandma’s Alencon lace trim.  I added hooks to the back of the sheer ribbon, and loops just inside the top of my dress.  So the veil could be hooked onto the dress, creating the pouf.  The ladies loved the pouf – I’m still hearing about how original it was.  It was not, really.  I can only take credit for the engineering, not the idea. 

My veil ripped before I went down the aisle.  Just a small rip, near the bottom edge.   A rip in your veil is supposedly good luck, and I really don’t think anyone noticed.  Not until I retrieved boxes of wedding things from  DJ’s parents and DJ’s dad told me, whitefaced, that he’d torn my veil.  No sir, you did not.  That was my own clumsy heel, and I will have good luck because of it.

You’ve seen my shoes.  I loved them, and danced them to pieces.  About a week after the wedding I slipped them into their drawstring bag on a shelf in my closet, and it felt like the end of a chapter.

Kim from Bow Tie Photography took pictures for the album, and for the blog too.  Thanks Kim!