Wedding Blog

We woke up to the alarm clock at 7:30 on September 9, 2009. Everything felt the same… our bed, our house, our routine. But today was definitely no ordinary day. It was our wedding day!

Mr. Mary Jane showered and got dressed in his usual clothes, while I selected sweats and an old Grateful Dead t-shirt. I didn’t shower… yet: the wedding wasn’t until 4:30 and I wanted to be fresh and clean at that time!

Mr. Mary Jane made me some coffee in my travel mug and we hopped in his car at about 9 AM. He planned to attend his class (at 10), but we had one little matter to attend to first:

The cake!

The cake was delivered to MIL’s house, 20 miles away, and since the family would be traveling directly to Hillsboro for the ceremony, she had no way to get it to Grand Forks for our evening celebration. Across the rural countryside we tore, in excess of 90 mph. We found out cake in a large Rubbermaid container in MIL’s front room (”Hi FMIL, I’m greasy, smelly and not wearing a bra!“), loaded it in the car, and gingerly drove back to the city (now painfully wary of every bump and crack in the road). Thankfully, the cake survived the trip. We plopped it on the dining room table and Mr. Mary Jane was off to class.

I bet you want to see it.

Here it is, sitting on my dining room table.

Nice, huh? Looks exactly how I pictured. (Compare to my drawing!) Awesome. You’ll see it more later (before we EAT it!).

And see those flowers in the background of that shot above? Those are THE flowers! Even though I had no specific bouquet plan, I do admit that these flowers were lot brighter than I’d originally pictured my bouquet being. I’m kind of a monotone/neutral gal, and these were some seriously festive blooms. Gorgeous though, aren’t they?

Aside from the white roses, peachy/orange roses, orange lilies, and pink gerbera daisies, I am not sure what the rest of the flowers were. They were dark pink, yellow and light green flowers, though.

Now, remember how I said my flower trial took forty minutes? Well, this one took considerably longer. I won’t lie: I was a little distracted. One problem with a weekday wedding is that life does not stop moving. See, on the morning of our wedding, some calls were being made regarding a job one of us had applied for. These were some requests for more information regarding some of the logistics discussed in the interview. Fun stuff to handle on your wedding morning. Sorry if I’m being cryptic, but blogging in a public forum is kind of a tough spot. Anyway, I was very preoccupied with thoughts revolving around that.

Aside from that stress, there were a lot of different flowers! Many of the stems were much more delicate than the rose stems. I broke several trying to cut off their leaves. And some of the stems contained multiple flowers - this was fun to figure out. The orange roses each had dozens of very large, sharp thorns on them. My white ones? More like 3 or 4 thorns each. Oh, and this new white rose bouquet was not as good as my trial bouquet. Many more of the petals were brown, and the blooms were smaller/very tightly closed. I was pretty disappointed in those roses, and even contemplated running out to the store to try to find some better ones. In the end, it took me over an hour just to remove the leaves and thorns and brown petals of all of the flowers.

Then it was time to arrange them. By now it was 11:30 and Mr. Mary Jane had come home from his class. He pointed out that I had neither eaten or drank anything (aside from coffee) all day long, so I allowed him to microwave me a quick lunch. Yes, ladies, my last meal as a single gal was a Philly Cheesesteak Lean Pocket, which I stuffed in my face in between stem-tapings.

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No strawberries and champagne for this DIY-bride!

My strategy for wrapping this bouquet was simple: try to put flowers of different colors next to each other. Two white roses in one spot? Better add an orange lily, and how about a pink daisy? Throughout the day, I got tons of compliments on how awesome my bouquet looked, but this was honestly my whole strategy.

One thing I did do that made me feel like a pro: I wired a stem! When I’d finished my bouquet, there was a daisy on the outer edge. Daisies have kind of flimsy stems and I was a little scared that it would snap off or flop over. So I wrapped a little bit of floral tape around the top of the stem (so that wire wouldn’t cut through it), then used some wire I yanked out of the wired ribbon to attach that daisy to some of the stems in the middle.

Next came the ribbon. I wrapped it up successfully, but couldn’t figure out how to “just tuck the end underneath” like most of the tutorials suggested. It didn’t help that my ribbon was 2.5″ wide, I suppose. I ended up improvising by folding under the edge and pinning it in place with corsage pins. Then, I made a line of more pins up the front.

I also, at the last minute, decided to make a bout’ for Mr. Mary Jane. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but a lily snapped off of my bouquet and I thought “Hey, that’d work for a bout!”. I grabbed a rose, the lily, and a piece of greenery and taped them together, then wrapped them with some thinner green ribbon I had lying around. And then, I did the ultimate ’cheat’: I glued it all together with superglue. That ribbon was not going to be coming off. No sir.

And voila.

You can see my ’tuck it under and pin it’ job clearly in the photo above. Now here they are with our cake:

And a close up of Mr. Mary Jane’s ’last minute’ boutonniere.

I was worried about how the lily would hold up throughout the day, but it did great! This photo below was actually taken by my dad at the end of the night:

Here are a few ’sneak peeks’ at the flowers in action. (These three pics that follow are credited to Shawna Noel Photography.)

This last shot (below) was taken after the festivities: The bouquet isn’t too much worse for the wear (though a few of the weaker-stemmed flowers and/or petals did fall off throughout the day!).

Finally, at 12:45… it was time for me to take a shower. We were to leave for Hillsboro in 2 hours, and I was not yet looking or feeling very bridal!

Previously…
1. Leading up to the Big Day