Wedding Blog

A little bit about our life and our locations before we met:

After high school, Mr. Taffy went to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to study industrial design. After finishing, he came back to Michigan and started working. At first he lived in various northern Detroit suburbs, but then settled in Ann Arbor after taking a new job.

I went to school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I studied photography, life drawing, and design. I loved living in Ann Arbor. Once I was halfway through college, I realized that I wanted to study fashion design. U of M did not have a fashion program, but the assistant dean in the art school allowed me to take several independent study courses with her that helped me explore the subject and build up my portfolio for fashion school. At that time, I taught myself to sew.

After graduating from U of M, I was accepted at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

I left in the fall and went through an intensive study there. I wanted to start working in the industry after finishing, and even found a great apartment in Brooklyn, but ended up coming back to Michigan for family and personal reasons. I started working as a Color and Materials designer at the Ford Motor Company. This was an interesting twist—I never imagined that I would be designing cars… I thought I would be designing dresses and underwear (this explains my cute underwear obsession)! I ended up loving the job, and learned a ton about product design. I met some wonderful ladies during my time at Ford, including Miss K and Miss J, two of my bridesmaids and closest friends. I was at Ford until late spring this year, when they cut out about a third of our department. At that point I had been dating Mr. T for about a year and four months, and had just become engaged!

How Mr. Taffy and I met:

One night in early December 2006, I went by myself to my friend Jamie’s birthday party. About a month before I went to this party, I had my tonsils and adenoids taken out. I was back at work, but this was pretty much the first social event that I had attended since the surgery (this will explain the awkward social conversations later).

I didn’t know too many people at the party, and was feeling kind of shy. At one point Mr. T ( an artist friend of Jamie’s who showed paintings at his gallery) came up and we started what turned into a very long conversation! Right away we realized we had a lot in common—we both studied design in New York, we were both car designers (and rival ones, at that!), and he lived in Ann Arbor, my beloved college town. We were also both non-smokers, allergic to cats, and music lovers! We really hit it off, although I think I grossed him out by describing the details of my recent surgery and recovery (Apparently, I thought that the best way to charm a guy was to talk about coughing up scabs! What in the world was I thinking?).

I really liked him, but freaked out when he asked me for my number (I had never given out my number to guys that I didn’t know well), so I gave him my Myspace instead! I think he was a little discouraged, but he did find me on Myspace and we started planning our first date, which was dinner and a Sloan concert at St. Andrews in Detroit.

Within a few months, Mr. T and I had been on many dates, and Jamie and I moved to Ferndale and became roommates! I started spending a lot of time in Ann Arbor, which made me very happy. Dating Mr. T was wonderful, and we were having a great time getting to know each other.

How did you meet your fiancé?