Weddingbee Blog

My boss in Japan is more excited about the wedding than anyone else, it’s so cute. He has been sending me the fabric and linen tape to help with the wedding, making it easy for me to stick with the zakka theme. Now, I have two packages coming - the tracking says it left Osaka yesterday evening. I am the kind of person who sits and hits refresh on my tracking number waiting for it to show any sign of coming here. One box is full of ink and toothpaste… yes, I ordered 31 different random flavors of toothpaste from Japan because I’m a freak. A box of tubes, some edible, some poisonous.

The other is a gocco printer. I don’t know how to use it, but I’ve read it’s easy - so my graphic designer friend is coming over and we’re going to break open that sucker and try it out. Riso Gocco is a compact machine that does a kind of printing close to silk screening. It’s not the same, but it’s the closest thing to it and the best way to describe it.

I need to make stickers for my cake to-go bags, so I figured this would be a cheap and homemade way to do it. I’m hoping homemade will make up for it being uneven and craptastic. You know, that quaint kind of messed up! I figure I’ll put this drawing on the stickers, only because I want to get some mileage out of it!

Hopefully soon the printer will be here and there will be some fantastic photos of me covered in ink and crying.

I already admitted it. I’m entirely unable to do anything crafty unless it is at a 3rd grade level and doesn’t involve any objects I could accidently poke my eye out with.

So when we decided not to have chairs with seats for the ceremony and go for long, low benches, I needed to decide whether or not I was up to the task of sewing cushions. I could, of course, rent them, but then I’d have plain fabric, and being insane, I wanted cutesty tootsy fabric. I have an army of seamstresses as friends, but they are either also planning weddings or just as insane as I am, so I’d feel bad asking them to help me with my lame project.

In the end, I called my broken mother. I call her broken as she’s recovering from injuring her achille’s tendon and has been milking it for all it’s worth, hobbling and moaning with a smile on her face, knowing we’ll be extra nice as long as she’s “suffering”. She injured it jump-roping at a church picnic, which by itself is funny, but my dad’s response was “I guess you don’t know how much you weigh!” I love my parents. My mother and my grandmother are both fully capable seamstresses, so I drove the long trek to their house and brought my materials. Neither of them are currently really working, and my grandmother who’s usual duty it is to take care of my cousins, is taking a break from it and has free time.

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Mr. Gummibear and I really needed to get some shopping done. We’re feeling a bit behind because until Ikea, we hadn’t bought a single thing for the wedding. Just discussed it. So we made a list of places we had to hit up this week.Our best and most productive shopping moment was at Daiso. It’s a Japanese chain 100 yen store that opened in Daly City last year. Everything in the store is shipped from Japan, $1.50 unless otherwise marked, and for me, tearfully reminiscent. And the stuff that is otherwise marked is a lot rarer than you’d think. Since Zakka is part of our theme, this store was perfect. We found a lot of stuff I wasn’t expecting to find in a store, or for so cheap.

Ignore Mr. GB being a dutiful shopping car returner, he seems to always get into all my photos.

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Yesterday, at 7:30am, I got a phone call from Niwaka. Machiko, the super sweet woman who works there, never did get the hang of calling from NY to CA later than 6-8am PST. She apologized profusely, as she always does in that so sweet way that reminds me of when I lived in Japan, and verified that our order had shipped out the morning before and would be arriving today.

Well, it arrived! And like all things in Japan, it was packaged several times - in one fedex box… within another fedex box.. and then a lot of stuffing and finally this:

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Is anyone else REALLY shy about her engagement ring? I hide it all the time, tucking my hand into my sleeve, making a point to try and keep it out of sight. It makes me nervous, I think I’m paranoid - I feel like people are always looking at it, sizing me up, sizing Mr. Gummi Bear up.

So let this be known, I’m only posting about my ring because I love you all! If asked about it in person, I’d just start sweating and my eyes would slowly cross.

My original ring was cute, Mr. Gummi Bear had it custom made for me…. but it wasn’t really made to have a wedding band next to it. We also felt the jeweler we worked with wasn’t really willing to work with us, just did what he wanted, and it came out so heavy and unfeminine. In the end, we decided that the wedding band remaining a constant in my life is far more important that preserving the current setting of my engagement ring. The only requirements for this new ring was that we incorporated all the current stones and that another ring would be able to sit flush against it.

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We went to IKEA yesterday to buy 8 comforters and 32 large “euro” size pillows. You have no idea the kind of looks you get walking out with two carts stuffed to the brim with pillows and comforters… we did tell people it was for the wedding, but we were tempted to say it’s for the large orgy room we’re putting in the house. No traumatizing scowling 65 year olds going in for their meatballs today, kids.

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I do love our venue, but I must come clean, our first love was… the caterer. This was to be our first, out of two, catering tastings. Remember how I said I was all about clicking with my vendors? (more about the cake, later - I promise!) Well, this is no different. My catering tasting was love at first… bite? conversation? Whatever it was, both of us knew we wanted them.

I’ll start this by saying that the food was simply amazing!!! They’re 100% organic and use local produce, which I’m all about - but good. And they have the same idea about food as we do, food is meant to be eaten and enjoyed, not just looked at and appreciated. Not to say their presentation isn’t good, it is! It’s appetizing, beautiful and clean, but it’s not “art”. Instead, it looks like something you immediately want to smash your face into, foregoing stupid utensils that would slow you down.

However, it wasn’t just the yummy food that won us over. Several courses into the meal, we were both happily eating our entrees, discussing the wedding and foods we love, how I happen to have a lot of vegan friends, and through that - my friend’s vegan dog. I repeat, we were still eating at this point, when she decided to take a chance on us.

- THIS IS NOT FOR THE WEAK OF HEART -

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Three cake tastings down, one to go.

I’d like to say they were all wonderful and everyone was fabulous, but it’d be a horrid lie. Our first tasting had a wonderful vendor, really a sweet woman and she was so accommodating! All of our questions were answered and our fears quelled. It was unfortunate that the cake wasn’t impressive. Mr. Gummi Bear and I are both very easily swayed by how much we like the vendor as a person, so we felt bad that we weren’t sold on her cake.

The next tasting, which we were very excited to go to, turned out to be the opposite experience. We sat, looked at books, ate cake and were impressed… only to wait an extra half hour to be greeted (or not really, she didn’t say hello or introduce herself) by a woman with a calculator and a scowl. She was rude, unaccommodating, condescending, and was flat out making up numbers out of thin air. She claimed that what the first cake vendor said was possible, was impossible, and made sure to tell us that on a good day, without traffic, in a normal car, it would take over 2 hours to go to our venue. It takes 50 minutes with normal driving as it’s on the way to my parents’ home, so I’ve driven the distance numerous times. I let it go, I wasn’t going to argue how ridiculous that time estimate was, she was just flat out mean to us. I politely tried to leave several times, only to be bashed about how I couldn’t have what I want (so, I should give in and go with her). We left thinking we’d rather not have a cake than have one by her.

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I’m not tattooed all over my body and hanging myself from hooks, but I’ve got a little bit of color on my skin and a whole lot of mini holes. I’ve managed to keep the worst of it a secret from my family, mostly thanks to their own denial that they have a freakish daughter, and partially out of my paranoia that my EXTREMELY conservative family would flip out.

I’m now having a few problems with this side of my life in regards to the wedding:

1. I managed to hide my.. er.. body piercings from my mother when I was trying on gowns for the first time. There was a point where she peeked in and I had to scramble to cover them, but I think in combination with her denial, the complete lack of knowledge that you can pierce/tattoo parts like that, and the quickness of the coverage, they didn’t register. So, now at the fittings and at the actual wedding, how will I cover it? I can’t wear a bra because my gown is backless, in fact, I can’t wear much of anything when I’m crawling into the dress… is it better to tell them now in warning, or forego that moment when my mother is helping me get into a dress and grab the dress and run into the bathroom to put it on? Read more…

So we went over to our invitation designer’s home and picked up our STDs. It’s so nice to be able to go over to her house and chat over these things, it makes it feel like we’re really getting to know each other and less like a business transaction. We immediately went to work buying a few supplies at Paper Source and Blick: paper, envelope liner templates, exacto knife, self healing mat, and some double stick glue.. tape… thing. It’s nifty. I found the people at our local Paper Source to be… really pretentious and unpleasant. They had a very bad attitude and made me feel like I was wasting their time for not being nearly as craft-knowledgable as them. I went to art school, so having people talk down to me about glue is really off-putting, so we got only what we needed at Paper Source and went to Blick for the rest.

Anyway, we sat down and got to work:

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I hadn’t wanted a wedding, I know what kind of person I can be - detail oriented, focused, and easily frazzled. I saw the eventual downhill roll into insanity that would ensue if I agreed to plan an event. Mr. Gummi Bear wanted a wedding desperately, and so after agreeing that he would take a major roll in planning, we bought our first wedding magazine and started. This was in April 2006, and we immediately began making appointments to view venues that we’d be booking for Fall of 2007. We knew we wanted outdoors, natural beauty, to have our pick of caterers, and just to feel it was - the one.

We traveled all over wine country, the coast, within San Francisco city limits and just beyond, only to be broken down in not finding the right place. We stopped looking for months, got sidetracked with buying our home and it wasn’t until this February that we looked at each other and thought, “oh yea, we’re getting married…” and jumped back on the horse. We hadn’t considered leaving the bay area, but we took a chance and drove an hour from our home to visit a small organic farm directly between our two home towns.

lavender field facing the cottage:

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Hi Everyone!

I’m really excited to be joining the sweet ranks of my fellow candy-bees! It seems so fitting for me because I have a ridiculous sweet tooth and am notorious for having candy with me at all times!

Mr. Gummi Bear and I met in college, and he said at first look with my crazy pink hair and weird Japanese punk clothing that I was crazy, then spoke to me and decided I was “normal”. He has since learned his first impression was right! I’m a Japanese importer, animator by degree, and he’s a video game programmer - so we’re both complete geeks. We spend a whole lot of time on our computers, going to Japan, decorating our home with vintage furniture and high tech toys… but mostly raising our two puppies, a papillon and a long coat chihuahua.

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