It’s been a year and a half since I became a bee. I’ve shared the story of us, our engagement, our Zivilstand, Catholic wedding and not one but two trash the dress shoots. After a year of being 100% fully married, it’s time to turn in my bee badge.
Weddingbee was priceless during our planning. With very few girlfriends in Switzerland, I had a place in the hive to share the overwhelming excitement of planning. I will honestly miss sharing our stories with you, reading about your experiences and listening to your advice.
The hive inspired many details for our wedding, but it also inspired me personally. You see, I never really received a lot of beauty tips from my mother. She has nine kids, a short haircut and no time for or interest in makeup. She was busy doing a great job taking care of us instead of worrying about beauty matters!
At a family dinner in Brazil a few weeks before getting engaged in 2010
It feels a bit strange writing about our first anniversary, because in August we celebrated two years on paper. Part of me feels “sooo married” and the other part still feels like a newlywed.
We are not quite as adventurous as Mrs. Socks. We only visited five countries this year, three of which were new to me, but we still face intermittent long distance with Mr. FC’s work travel and military service. In fact…Mr. FC is traveling for work today, so he’s not even here to celebrate our first anniversary!! But somehow, long distance does seem easier now that we are married.
When cleaning your wedding dress, it is important to know what kind of fabric the dress is made out of and to take the dress details into consideration. Depending on the fabric and embellishments, wedding dresses can be washed in a washer, a dryer, or by hand.
To recap, this is my seven-month-old dirty dress:
If your dress is fairly simple and the fabric can take it, you can put your dress in a garment bag or duvet and stick it in your washer on a gentle cycle. My dress had a bit too much beading for this, and there was no way it would fit in my eco-sized washer, so this option wouldn’t work for me.
If you saw any of the photos of me romping around botanical gardens in Columbus, lava beaches in Hawaii or Swiss alps in Switzerland, you might guess that my dress would be a tad dirty afterward…
You would be right!
I did not bother having the dress cleaned in America before we came home from the wedding because I figured that it would just get dirty again during our trash the dress in Switzerland.
I didn’t have the most typical high school career, but if I had not made the decisions I did then, I am certain I would have never met Mr. Funnel Cake.
THEN:
In high school I was a shy, geeky dork who was never asked out on any dates. I used to cry that nobody would ever “like me” in that way. Instead of focusing on my nonexistent love life, I took as many advanced courses as I could, but at 14 I considered myself “too dumb” to learn a foreign language.
Oh yeah…I was totally into anime and video games and cosplay!
Hi hive. Although I’ve been a little absent lately, I am still alive and riding the newlywed wave until it crashes. Before I say “auf wiedersehen,” I wanted to contribute to a few of the ongoing series. (Because I just can’t get enough Weddingbee!)
My history with blogs:
I started my first online journal through my Deviantart account nine years ago and wrote there fairly often while sharing artwork. Mostly really emo stuff that you’d expect from a teenager. I had a few blogs off and on during university, but it wasn’t until I left for my Swiss study abroad trip that I started writing daily. (I had a lot of time on my hands.)
I enjoy expressing myself through writing and I’ve always liked the sharing nature of blogs. I may not have time to blog daily anymore, but I still want to share my perspective with the world and I appreciate all the positive interactions within the blog community.
How did I find Weddingbee?
A while before we got married, I asked Mr. Funnel Cake if he would get dressed up again and do a trash-the-dress shoot with me in the Swiss Alps. I had this image of us + mountains that I couldn’t get out of my head.
You remember my photographer friend who shot our engagement? He was kind enough to drive us to a mountain one day and ride the gondola up to take some photos. Warning: I may or may not have been slightly very hungover…
Originally I wanted to do the photos right when we got back from our honeymoon in December 2011, but it was getting too close to Christmas and my friend wasn’t available.
I’ve been putting off the budget post because it’s complicated.
We spent money in three different currencies during the 17 months we planned our wedding. There were huge differences in the currency exchange during the year until the Swiss National Bank pegged the CHF to the dollar and euro amidst an international financial crisis.
One example of how this skews my storytelling is my wedding dress: It costs 3,300 CHF new in Switzerland. I bought it used for $900 in the States. At one point that meant it would cost $5,600 if I bought it new in Switzerland…and a mere 531 CHF if I bought it used in the States. Deceiving, no?
Right now, the dollar is almost equal to one Swiss franc again, but this certainly wasn’t the case while we were sending money over to the States to pay for things. In fact a big reason why I was able to buy Mr. FC’s wedding present was because every 1 CHF I had was equal to around $1.30. (Score!)
The other complication is how do you distinguish between wedding, honeymoon, and “things purchased for later use”? You wouldn’t be going on a honeymoon if it weren’t for the wedding, and in our case we were flying from Europe to the wedding anyway, so the flight costs were all mixed together. And lots of hive members justify buying things for the wedding because they will “use it again later”, so where do you draw the line?
I admit that I never joined Pinterest before our wedding was over and I never compiled a general wedding inspiration board (only crazy dress boards to send to my bridesmaids…), but there were definitely images that I saved or blogged about that I would look at over and over during the planning while we were making decisions.
(1. Coloured Crinoline Project via The Brass Paperclip Project 2. Photo by Kimberly Potterf Photography 3. Earrings by LuluSplendor 4. Dress by Maggie Sottero 5. Bouquet photographed by Flory Photo 6. Cake Toppers from peanutbutterbandit 7. Discontinued Lace Jacket by San Patrick 8. Photo by Kelly Brown Weddings via The Last Detail9. Photo by Enrico Mocci via Italian Lakes Wedding
Well, after the last post you didn’t think that all the weddings were the same, did you? 
Here are just a few of the things I’ve noticed are not regularly done outside of America, as well as some fun ideas I’ve spotted at Swiss weddings that I haven’t seen back home.
(YMMV: This is not the final word on what you can and cannot do at a wedding anywhere in the world, just my personal experience.)
Things that might not happen at a wedding abroad:
Getting ready pictures:
Apparently this is sort of an American thing. Maybe parts of Canada too, but my friend from Montreal said this was very, very strange and she thought it was “very American” of me to want to get dressed in front of my photographer, so maybe only parts of Canada take preparation photos? Canadians, want to straighten this one out? (If only so I can say “I told you so!” to my friend.) 
(Photo by Timwill Photography)
When I first started dating my Swiss-Brazilian man I was pretty unfamiliar with any of the customs in Switzerland or Brazil, let alone what goes on at weddings.
I am still constantly learning more about the two cultures, but now that we’ve been together for four years, I’ve had the privilege and honour to attend several weddings between the two countries. Particularly, as the number of Swiss weddings increases, I feel like I can draw some expected and some surprising similarities to American weddings, aside from the whole “getting married” aspect of weddings.
Slideshows:
If you thought that only American families made PowerPoint slideshows to display the entire life in photos of their son or daughter at their wedding, you were wrong. People ALL over the world do this.
What parent wouldn’t love the opportunity to get all those baby photos out again? Well, admittedly…Mama and Papa Funnel Cake are not into slideshows, but Papi Funnel Cake totally prepared a 30-minute movie about Mr. Funnel Cake for our wedding.
(Fair warning: Moderately preachy post ahead…)
I’ve mentioned it before, but in this post I’d like to go over some of the implications of tax and marriage in Switzerland and why we have ultimately decided that joint accounts are absolutely not a good idea for us because of my American citizenship.
Our tax status changed in Switzerland as soon as we were legally married in August 2010, but we would only start our mandatory joint filing in 2011. We do not have the option to file separately here.
In January 2011, we were figuring out how to pay a big lump of tax money together. I figured we were married now, and all the money we have is “our money.” It only made sense that if we have to pay and file taxes together, we should both have access to Mr. Funnel Cake’s tax account to make things easier.
I kept a secret from the hive…
When I left Columbus and packed up my wedding dress, I just couldn’t leave her alone on the honeymoon. Before we left our Hilo rental, I made Mr. Funnel Cake lace me up and take a “few” pictures of me out in the backyard because I really wanted some photos of my Sabelle in Hawaii.
Mr. Funnel Cake did his best to shoot in raw so I could edit later, and here are the results. Some of Mr. FC’s shots were pretty over or underexposed, but with some a lot of editing I think we salvaged a few good ones.
Read more…
When we finished our final wedding shoot with Tim, we dropped him back at his hotel and headed to our own hotel for the night. We rented a nice room at the Hyatt for Mr. Funnel Cake to use the night before the wedding and for us to share the next day, because everyone deserves a little privacy on their wedding night!
It was sort of funny driving…do you remember Mama Funnel Cake insisting we drive in her gianormous full-size van to the church so that my wedding dress wouldn’t get ruined? Well, she lent us her very small Ford Escort after the reception to drive Tim around and get to and from our hotel by ourselves. Needless to say, it was a bit tight cramming my fluffy dress, hoop skirt and extra petticoat in and out of the two-door car without closing the door on some fabric.
The brothers who were late to their usher duties also had a secret; Brother C was actually laughing while he scraped the car because he had just broken the handle off the car window, with the window still partly rolled down! So the whole time driving around in the cold Columbus weather, we had an open window in the car. Brrrr.
At the hotel, Mr. Funnel Cake helped me out of my corseted cupcake dress after wearing it for an incredible twelve hours, and wouldn’t you know it, it was like a vacuum on my stomach was released. Suddenly I was STARVING.
I gave Mr. Funnel Cake some incredible puppy dog eyes and he asked me the question I was dying to hear: “Do you want to go to Wendy’s?” he sighed.
YES!!!!
Mr. Funnel Cake had refused to take me to Wendy’s in my wedding dress during our break earlier that day, but all this girl wanted to do was go enjoy her favorite American fast food! We headed to Wendy’s and I ordered a small fry, five piece chicken nuggets, small chili and frosty (which only comes in “chocolate” if you ask this Wendy’s purist!).
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After we finished our afternoon session with Tim at the conservatory, we dropped him off at his hotel for a rest and decided to go to my mother’s to hang out and wait for our evening session. We planned this break so that we could go back to Franklin Park Conservatory after sunset and catch some images with the Light Raiment II lit up.
When we got back to my parents’ house, we had snacks and I went to the bathroom for the first time in 12 hours. Using Mrs. Cola’s tutorial, I went all by myself and was very proud of it.
We enjoyed a relaxing couple hours talking with my parents about how well the wedding went (all the food left!), and Mama Funnel Cake got her Dryel stain pen out and made that big purple splotch on my dress disappear in seconds. Whew!
Before heading out the door to pick Tim back up, I finally took my veil off and changed my earrings to the smaller pearls that matched the glittery necklace that I decided to wear for the evening session. I wasn’t sure how close Tim would get, but I figured it was a good opportunity to change my look! I also put my lace jacket back on.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure how well Tim would do during the evening session because night photography is not really his thing. I had thought about this before I decided to go with him for photography, but decided that this was such a small part of the day that I really wanted to focus on what kind of images we’d get from the daytime. Anything extra was a bonus.
Mrs. Funnel Cake, Zürich, Switzerland/Columbus, Ohio Age and Occupation: 24, Visual Communication Designer Fiance's Age and Occupation: 28, Application Engineer Engagement Date: May 30, 2010 Wedding Date: October 2011 Venue: Catholic church followed by a botanical conservatory About Me: I'm an American designer who moved to Switzerland for love after a fairytale beginning at the top of the Eiffel Tower. I love travel, photography, museums, learning German so I can speak with my mother-in-law, cooking (eating), cuddling, and I'm not afraid to try something new even if it terrifies me. My Swiss/Brazilian man and I are both down to earth people planning a traditional Catholic wedding in my hometown with some quirky cultural exceptions to reflect our different backgrounds. We look forward to celebrating with friends and family from all over the world in a classic, sophisticated fusion of heritage and love.
