Having recently finished talking about our wedding, this is a good time to admit that I spent five months lying to DJ. We were married in September. The lying started in August and ended in January. Yeah. Vows and all.
I had a good reason, though. DJ’s 30th birthday was in early January, so his mom and I were conspiring for a surprise party. His dad accidentally blew the secret via e-mail, but I oh-so-smoothly lied some more. Party? Oh, of course – you didn’t think you’d turn thirty without your aunts and uncles, did you? Whoops, sorry for the ruined surprise!
My lying got worse and worse, though. I’m a terrible liar. The day of the party I could hardly be in the same room with myself, I was so afraid I would say something incriminating. I texted Jules to tell her we were almost there, and covered by tellling DJ a story about my sister and thigh-high boots. (???) My sister would like you to know that she would never wear thigh-high boots.
He was really surprised. In addition to the aunts and uncles, quite a few of his friends and family were there. Most of them holding masks of his face. It must have been quite the shock, walking in to 25 of these babies.
Some people defaced them. Actually a lot of people defaced DJ’s face.
People stuck them in their pockets. I think one of his coworkers kept one for use at the office. I still have half a dozen or so kicking around the house.
I had beer koozies printed with DJ’s face, from a Photoshop manipulation of the same picture. It was a little bit frightening, seeing his face wherever you turned.
But also awesome. We have quite a few leftover koozies, so I suspect this party will be haunting him for quite some time.
I went a little overboard on the party gear, even relabeling bottles of wine. DJ’s picture plus “Big Head Red” and “Game Night White.” DJ has an enormous noggin and likes to play board games. Obvious jokes are the best ones.
I used the same Photoshopped picture to Gocco cocktail napkins. DJ’s face was everywhere.
There are two cakes in that picture. One is the standard little-kid party cake, which DJ’s mom and I thought was hysterical and big enough for 30 people. The other is a decoy cake. I always bake birthday cakes, so I felt like it would be a dead giveaway if I didn’t bring a cake to his birthday dinner. You can never have too much cake!
Thank you all for the nice comments about the details. I really thought that no one would care or notice… so thank you! It’s a thrill to have my fidgety habits appreciated. So here we are, this is the last of the wedding series. Unless I realize later I’ve forgotten something wonderful.
The dance floor was doing this. I am not a very good dancer; neither is DJ. We opted not to have video. At one point a friend encouraged my mom onto the dance floor by saying “Don’t worry! There’s no video!” So this is the only full-floor shot I’m sharing, because that is a lot of trust. I’m only sharing this one because you have to see my dance. You can see what’s happening, right? Oh, shame.
Shame aside, I loved dancing in my wedding dress. The swishy skirt was really fun. It was warm, though. I went outside several times to twirl for some cool air.
Kid B was enjoying the totally decent beer selection. He’s recently of legal age, so the novelty of drinking in front of Mom hasn’t quite worn off yet.
I was convinced that everyone wanted to dance with me. I menaced Kid B, who did not want to dance. I pointed out that he was drinking my beer.
So he danced with me.
Kid A did too. (Kid A is somewhat healthier, for those of you who’ve asked. Nothing much has changed, but there’s more hope. Plus he now outweighs me by four pounds, which is awesome for both of us.)
DJ and his dad really like tequila toasts, so we stashed a bottle behind the bar. Apparently DJ’s mom wasn’t in on the plan…
But, oh, okay! I’m told that even my cookie-baking friend Jules had a sip or two, and she doesn’t drink. She hates the taste of alcohol. How are we friends, again?
Katie and I are about the same height, and she’s thinner. This photo is a trick of perspective, but look at that twirl! Swish.
I always wanted friends like these. Thank you for being my friends, Lady Squad.
I’d asked our DJ to play a last slow-ish song at the end of the night, Wilco’s California Stars. It was a narrow miss for our first dance – we belt out the odd lyric at home all the time – but the lagging beat is irresistible for a tipsy stagger around the dance floor. So DJ and I did just that. Our lastlast dance was the Traveling Wilburys’ End of the Line.
Our friends gathered into a circle, swaying a few steps left and back a few right. It wasn’t very coordinated, there was a lot of near-falling. Kim did her best to capture it, but there was a whole lot of movement that was nowhere close to on beat. I couldn’t have scripted that moment, belting out slightly cynical lyrics arm in arm with our friends, married to the football player I met in the library. It’s one of the many I’ve tried to fasten tightly in my memory against age or distance. Then it was over. The party, that is. The marriage is the shine on my apple every day.
So that’s how DJ and Julia met, fell in love, got engaged, broke up, lost track of each other for five years, found each other by chance, talked on the phone for five hours, tried to be friends, fell in love again, told their unsurprised parents, negotiated bookshelf space, got a dog, parented Julia’s brother, got engaged (again), planned a wedding, and lived happily ever after.
Kim from Bow Tie Photography knows about the good angles.
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 3×3x2” 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!
Before we take a last spin around the dance floor, let’s obsess over some details. Oh, details. Wedding magazines and blogs love them, they make great editorial illustration and - they really don’t matter. Well, they do. As much as anything else that’s entertaining or pleasant. But the cocktail napkins, collected silverplate, boutonnieres, cheeky water bottle labels, effing chair covers…. they were all appreciated, but none of those things really made the party. (Of course they didn’t matter to the marriage. The quality of your marriage and the planned-ness of your party are two different goals. Right now we’re talking party. Obviously, right?)
So what did matter to the party? Lights. The biggest impact for my money came from lights, both for ambiance and in pictures.
Lights mattered, especially after dark. If you flip back through the photos so far, you’ll find a lot of lights. If I had it to do again and had to make cuts, I’d definitely keep DJ, Kim and Elizabeth – and I’d keep the lights.
So how many lights? We had 24 dozen votive candles (on the tables and around the barn beams), 48 luminaria on the path to the barn, 48 hanging jars with LED votives, seven strings of globe lights, and sixteen pillar candles in the bar/silo. A whole lot of lights.
Everyone tells you to plan for music and flowers. I disagree. For the party and the pictures, you want music and lights. Trust me. Lots of little lights infuse a little magic, which can’t hurt when you’re throwing a party about love.
Photos by Kim from Bow Tie Photography, who probably agrees with me about the lights.
On Sunday my mom and Katie and I went to the Art Institute to see the new Modern Wing.
It’s pretty. Lots of bright light and white paint and pale wood. The 1945-1960 galleries are delicious.
I may not be modern enough, though. I found the post-1960 galleries overstimulating. Shock art isn’t really my thing. Although what they have isn’t the most shocking, not by far. I didn’t see any bodily fluids, defaced religious figures, or celeb statement pieces. But I couldn’t stop being shocked long enough to feel anything else. Until later, when I felt bad about my hangups, but that isn’t how I want to feel about art either.
Some of it was downright pretty. This strand of lights caught our attention. As the bulbs burn out they become part of the statement of the piece. I like that. I have some lights like that left from the wedding. Maybe I’ll make an installation and call the burned bulbs art.
One of my coworkers and his wife are expecting their second child in a few months. It’s become a frequent topic of conversation. Another coworker is out on maternity leave, due back in February. I inadvertently caused some confusion at the lunch table when I oh-so-smoothly transitioned from coworker #1 to #2 by saying “Speaking of babies…” Whoops. Gotta be more careful about that when you’re a newlywed. Everyone was very disappointed.
The new job, by the way, is yet to be determined but may involve many of the same people. If you keep the same desk and lunch buddies is it really a new job at all?
Speaking of babies* It’s time for a nearly-white quilt update. I’ve been working diligently, quilting square after square in the evenings when I should have been updating my resume. I made a chart to keep me motivated, but it’s looking a little slim so far.
I do enjoy the process - covered in quilt, half-watching television alongside DJ, our dog positioned exactly between us. Good thing, this could take a while.
*Of course not. Although I probably shouldn’t do that too often, especially while playing Whack-A-Mole with my job.
Last week I bought brown leather boots. They’re up there on the left, in all their once-worn newness. They’re replacements for the pair on the right, worn through several Chicago winters. They were well-loved. Maybe too loved. I didn’t realize they were so worn out until the new pair arrived, all buttery leather and unscuffed soles. I ought to get rid of the old pair, but I get attached to things. The heels were just the right height, not too tall for work or comfort. It’s hard to let go when you think of the good times you had together. Or maybe that’s just me.
My job has been changing, and suddenly it’s all worn out. It will be interesting to see what the new one will be. I hope the heels aren’t too high.
After our first dance, the floor filled with couples. I like this picture a lot, because the people in it are all important in our lives. One of the benefits of having a not-huge wedding, I suppose.
Shortly after our first dance, we played a “first dance” for my sister and her husband. They were married in Las Vegas in 2005. It was a fairly traditional ceremony with a big white dress and fifty-some guests, followed by a restaurant reception. In conversations with my sister since then, she’s said her only regret was not having had a first dance. So we played their song (Jimmy Buffett’s Now and Then), and cleared the dance floor for the two of them.
My sister and I have very, very different musical taste. DJ and I had a good laugh about it while making our lists for the DJ – you could almost quantify the space between us by drawing a line between Jimmy Buffett and Vance Gilbert.
The dance floor filled again with couples after that. This is the point in a wedding where I feel bad. There’s no good way to be single when this is happening. (Hey, it’s the newlyweds!)
DJ’s aunt and uncle. They are one of those couples that seems to still be madly in love after several decades and two children.
MOH Katie’s parents – also apparently crazy about each other after years and years and three daughters, and who knows how many trying life events. Katie’s mom calls me “girlie,” and has always treated me like a surprise extra daughter.
DJ’s parents, being cute. Something about weddings brings out the cute in couples.
We only had a couple of people who were either single or without their partner for the night, but that almost made it worse. I wouldn’t have been happy watching the slow dancing as a single guest, but I didn’t know what to do to fix that. Sorry, single guests. At least we didn’t do a bouquet/garter toss, and the dance floor did get more lively fairly quickly.
Kim from Bow Tie Photography takes great pictures.
We didn’t take dance lessons, or really prepare at all for our first dance. My mom offered to buy us lessons, but we really didn’t want to put on a show. We wanted to have a few minutes just to the two of us, to soak it all in. So Vance Gilbert crooned High Rise while we did the stand and sway, talking all the while. Sappy song? Yes! We were just married, after all.
Last night I had a dream
I dreamt about my love
And my love was a highrise
And the highrise was on fire
As the flames were licking higher
Asking do you jump or burn
As if it was to matter
Either way this is forever
And it brought me to an altar
Where the despots are forgiven
And the charlatans come clean
And it shook my very soul
And from the outrage and the mercy
Came a simple observation
That loving you forever
Is easier than breathing
And I love you just like thunder
I love you like Christmas morning
And I want you to hold me
Like I’m going off to war
And I need you like fresh water
I need you like scotch whiskey needs
A man who is addicted
I love you just like thunder
And as time goes rushing by
Just like water for the ocean
And my body grows diseased
My mind is sure to follow
Will you look into these eyes
And recall a finer time
For both of us?
Photos by Kim from Bow Tie Photography, of course.
