Weddingbee Blog

Dear hive, I have missed you! I promise I have not fallen off the face of the Earth. I finally got my paws on our pro photos last week and I am starting to write recaps after I stop coveting my photos like Gollum and a certain ring.

In the meantime… hope you had a happy Mardi Gras!!

Mr. Funnel Cake had been bugging me for awhile if I would make him some funnel cake because he has never had this American delicacy. He claimed that it is unfair to hold the title “Mr. Funnel Cake” without actually knowing what his moniker tastes like.

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Like many brides, I had a few nightmares here and there about the impending wedding. Mostly things like the wedding arriving a lot earlier than I had planned or Mr. Funnel Cake seeing me in my dress before the wedding. Just small stuff. And when the big day finally came and everything was just perfect, I really thought my nightmares would be over.

Wrong.

They started on the honeymoon. Post-wedding nightmares. I would wake in gorgeous Hawaii, turn to Mr. Funnel Cake and tell him with wide eyes “I just dreamt XYZ happened at the wedding!!!” and he would look at me like I was nuts. Who stresses about an event that is already over?? Apparently lots of hive members have post-wedding nightmares as well though. (Thank God I’m not alone!)

For the most part I keep dreaming that I am late and I need to get dressed already. I don’t have all my preparation items with me and I have to improvise on hair and makeup. Everything is rush, rush, rush. Why, just last night I dreamt I was in my parents’ front yard sewing flowers on to my wedding skirt the morning of the big day and Mama Funnel Cake was yelling at me about having dirt all over myself. We were running short on time, of course. I kept saying, “Just one more flower and it’s done, just one more flower!”

I think my favourite post-wedding nightmare so far was the one where Mama Funnel Cake informed me that President John F. Kennedy would be attending the wedding as a guest and that I needed to give him a VIP tour of our house before the wedding started.
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We may not have splurged on videography at the wedding, but on the honeymoon we had all the time in the world to make a video ourselves. Mr. Funnel Cake planned on taking his new GoPro on the honeymoon to document the trip and try out some underwater filming when we went scuba diving. His filming captured perhaps the most amazing thing I have witnessed in my life—watching manta rays feeding underwater at night. I’m no videographer, but I’ve put together a quick cut of our trip to try and give you a taste of what our honeymoon was like while we basked in the warm glow of newlywed bliss.

Tech specs: Footage was shot on the HD Helmet HERO (Mr. FC bought it right before the new version came out… like a week later. You can imagine how annoyed he was!) in 960p = 1280×960 pixels (4:3), 30 fps, 12 Mbit/s data rate because Mr. FC’s computer doesn’t handle the 1080p HD footage very well. Edited to 640×360 (16:9) in iMovie ’11 because I’m a film newbie!

Of course, aside from the GoPro filming, we both had our cameras with us because we love travel photography. Hawaii had me waking up like a kid at Christmas every morning to race out and soak in the amazing scenery.
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Long ago, I revealed our Hawaiian rental treasures to the hive. I was pretty excited about staying at all three rental places, but I wasn’t expecting the awful amount of rain that we encountered during our stay in Hawaii. We made the best of the weather though, and here I am to report back about the quality of the rental homes in case you happen to be planning a honeymoon (or vacation) to the islands.

My Hawaii Dream

Nightly Rate: $98-110

When we arrived at the first house, the sun was setting and Mr. Funnel Cake raced out excitedly to see the ocean from the property.

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Weddings sure can be expensive sometimes. The Funnel Cake wedding, as you might be able to tell from our planning, was not easy on the bank either. So what did that mean for *my* personal budget?

Well… just the act of getting married civilly in Switzerland changed my financial situation for the worse. In 2010 I lost 11% of my annual income when I switched to my new married tax status. 11%! The change was less of a shock for Mr. Funnel Cake, who as a Swiss citizen already “enjoyed” a much higher tax rate than foreigners here. (Don’t even try to make sense of that.)

With the loss of my income to the tax man, I also was disturbed to learn at the beginning of 2011 that as a citizen-level taxpayer you are supposed to pay your Swiss taxes for the year before you earn that money. So as this year began, I scrambled to gather my funds together to pay the upcoming taxes I would owe on money that I would be earning this year. Instantly I missed my monthly taxes I’d enjoyed as a single foreigner! Mr. Funnel Cake was used to this method, so of course he was all set to pay his part of the taxes. Hmmph.

It was this awful tax change that stopped my savings dead in its tracks.
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OK hive, I’ve gone on long enough about the lengthy search for my wedding ring. You are probably wondering what the heck I ended up choosing, so I present to you my shiny treasure!

After weeks of revisiting the jewelry store to recheck if this was reeeaaaaally the ring I wanted, Mr. Funnel Cake purchased it last Christmas and shortly after New Year I was bringing my precious home to wait for ten months until our wedding would arrive. I may or may not have tried the ring on several thousand times before the wedding. But only to make sure it still fit, you know?

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After I had maxed out my online searching, it was time to look at some physical rings. But even with our ring drama out of the way, I wondered if searching for wedding rings with Mr. Funnel Cake would be just as awkward as when we looked for engagement rings. Visiting the jewelry stores in Switzerland had been more tense than enjoyable.

I offered again to help pay for the rings because I was worried that money would still be an issue, but Mr. FC was still adamant about wanting to give the rings as a gift. I thought about insisting on helping to pay, but as I dealt with my new tax debts from our civil marriage on my lower income, I conceded that Mr. FC really was in a much better financial position to make jewelry purchases than I was. I decided it would be better to respect Mr. FC’s traditional stance and be grateful that he wanted to cover this cost. I made a mental note that I would try and do something really special for him later on as a thank you. (Which I’ll share later!)

To my surprise, ring shopping was actually very different the second time around!

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Part of what sparked the whole ring drama with Mr. Funnel Cake was that after I chose my beautiful engagement ring, I went online to search for wedding band ideas and had NO idea what would match with it. I just knew that I really didn’t care to have a band like this on my finger:

Do you recognise my original engagement ring up there? (It’s the one Mr. Funnel Cake proposed with the first time.) I thought it would be really sweet if I decided to use the silver band FC proposed with as my actual wedding ring, but I still did not like the ring that much.

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Mr. Funnel Cake presented my (personally picked out) engagement ring to me in late June, 2010, and the next week I was flying to the US for my brother’s wedding where I excitedly showed off my new status symbol to my family and friends. My parents commended me for choosing such a modest ring and I was told several times what a great choice my dainty ring was.

MOH checking out the ring at SIL FC’s wedding!

(Personal photo)

I loved my ring, and still do, but when I started looking for wedding band ideas on Weddingbee later that summer, I couldn’t help but notice everyone’s very large engagement rings paired with their wedding bands.

I began to have a little ring regret.

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Hello hive! Mr. Funnel Cake and I are finally back from our fabulous Hawaiian honeymoon. (OK, it wasn’t super fabulous, but it was still a pretty good trip. It may or may not have had to do with the tropical storms circling the islands while we were there…)

(Image from my iPhone on our first day in Hawaii)

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(’Ferien’ is ’holiday’ in German!)

Hello hive! I have missed you guys so much, but we’re only on day five of our nineteen day honeymoon so it’ll be awhile before I can get back to blogging regularly. Mr. Funnel Cake’s Swiss keyboard on his netbook is not really helping out the situation either as I keep switching ’y’ with ’z’ and pressing random buttons. But I really wanted to share the sneak peek our photographer gave us on our wedding day! I think it paid off scheduling some down time for the photographer between our wedding and evening shoot because he had time to edit a photo and whip it up on the web already!

(Photo by Timwill Photography)

Our wedding was the best wedding ever.
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Surprisingly… everything is ready.

I have wrapped up every project I thought up, save for a printed guest album idea which I threw away around the one month mark. I have packed my delicate wedding apparel in my carry on, padded our cake topper for the flight, carefully boxed up 140 wedding programs, gathered my bridesmaids’ gifts and stuffed as many kilos of chocolate and cheese into my checked luggage as possible.

I am carrying a lot of weight with me on this flight. Literally and figuratively.

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Alternative Title #1: To Hell and Back Again

Alternative Title #2: #whitegirlproblems

Last week I realised I had a big first world problem. You see hive, I had been growing my hair out for two weeks in preparation for my first salon waxing experience. Previously limited to home waxing experiences, I had only had the courage to wax my arms and armpits. But I wanted silky smooth legs for the wedding (and so does Mr. FC) so I was planning to have someone wax them. You guys are also concerned about body hair on your big day too, right??

It seems most waxing brides seem to go on Tuesday or Wednesday before a Saturday wedding so that their “sensitive” areas have time to readjust. But I didn’t want to pay the usual exorbitant Swiss prices on Tuesday or chance flying all day on Wednesday with an unhappy hoohah, so I was planning on finding a nice affordable Columbus salon to wax at this Thursday. Maybe it would be cutting it a bit close, but I wasn’t even sure I really wanted to do those “sensitive” parts…

So what’s the problem FC?

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For months I sewed fabric flowers at work every day and my colleagues had started asking, “When’s the wedding again?” or “Do you think you’ll get them done in time?” or the ever-popular, “How many flowers left now?” which I never had an answer for.

I was never stressed about getting this project done, though. I started in June and our wedding is in October. (Cough… next week…) So I took my sweet time sewing those flowers as slowly as I wanted to. I sewed them while talking to friends at lunch and did not worry about working on them in the evening or on weekends if I had better things to do. It took so long to get them done because I did this project about as slow as one possibly can.

But you can bet I was happy when I finished these babies and marched them to the post office!
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After finding a few flower tutorials on Google, I was playing with  my newly purchased (extremely expensive) Swiss fabric. Before I knew it, I had crafted this little beauty:

Ohh bees, I fell for this adorable little flower and wanted to make more. My fingers craved the tactile comfort found in sewing and I opened up to a craft I haven’t been able to undertake since I moved to Switzerland. The most sewing I’ve done in the last three years was when I made curtains for our flat on an old secondhand sewing machine. (And that was mainly done to avoid buying expensive Swiss curtains!)
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