Weddingbee

Photo from Faye and Greer: I shake my fist at you for making me love
wedding fluff Matha Stewart! Everything looks so clean and pretty!

For the most part, I blame Martha*. I didn’t used to think about what kind of glasses our guests would drink out of or what our favours would look like or what kind of earrings I would wear with my dress. Then I made the mistake of buying Martha Stewart Weddings and before I knew it, I became completely obsessed with all the little wedding details. The beribboned mason jar glasses. The tiny little shortbread cookies stacked to look like little wedding cakes. The miniature aquamarine dropped studs made to resemble tiny moonbeams. I started keeping a folder with all of these little inspirations, pulling it up on my computer once in a while to pore over it in delight. This would be my wedding, I thought to myself as I calculated out how long it would take to grow, cut, arrange, hand-wire and tie my very own bouquet of purple hybrid delphiniums**.

I was merrily chugging along with all of my tiny, precious little plans when I began talking to Mr. Hummingbird about them. As an environmental artist on a videogame, Mr. Hummingbird has, in the last few months, become an expert on how to turn a creative idea into a feasible idea, so I figured that, with the wedding being now less than six months away, he would know how to turn my Martha-riffic wedding dreams into a reality. However, the more we talked about things and the more he asked questions, the more I began to realize:

1) I actually didn’t know how to do many of the things I dreamed of,
2) I didn’t have the money to pay a professional to do them for me.

In fact, when I finally sat back and surveyed things, the more I realized how impractical it was to take on this many projects and while the cute little ideas were still cute, I would be significant less cute if I ended up tearing out all of my hair because I couldn’t figure out how to perfectly cut the 480 pieces I would need to assemble the intricate programs I was imagining.

So, to keep my hair (however temperamental it might be) and to keep from being dragged from my apartment in a straight-jacket yelling “Those fans! Those (expletive deleted) segmented fans!” I’m making a point of scaling back and picking fewer things to focus on. In fact, Mr. Hummingbird is even getting into the act, looking at my original plans and helping me work out easier and more cost effective alternatives that still definitely qualify as cute little ideas (but less time consuming and no longer requiring a staff of 50 to assemble).

In this wedding world of personal touches and minute detail, it’s incredibly easy to get swept up in the fantasy of things and to focus too heavily on tiny little details, so I was curious - has anyone else become obsessed with cute little ideas? Did you pull them off or did you realize they were too much work and nix them? What did you do instead?

*= On the off-chance Martha Stewart employs a team of smartly dressed and deadly efficient assassins, I do realize that my obsession is not actually Martha Stewart’s fault, but more stemming from my own love and attention to detail.
**= I’ve exaggerated my obsession for comic effect, but sadly not as much as you’d think.

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