Weddingbee

As you can probably tell by now, we tend to do things our own way. And that way tends to be the cheapskate way. So, instead of hiring someone to pose us on the Monongahela Overlook, we decided to take advantage of one of our favorite places in Pittsburgh, the Mattress Factory Art Museum and do it ourselves.

The art museum was built out of (as you might have guessed) a defunct mattress factory. It’s a highly interactive museum for one geared towards adults; most of the exhibits are ‘experienced’ rather than viewed. One of the permanent installations is a set of two rooms with polka dot floors and mirrors on all the walls and the ceiling.

We spent a Saturday morning last December laying on the floor of one of the exhibits trying to get something we could send out with our Christmas cards. Since we weren’t planning on sending our photos to the newspaper for an announcement, we decided that we could afford to be a little unconventional. I made the dress in the photo myself, adapting a shirt pattern into a full length shirt dress.

We sent a few different versions to friends and family:

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I confess that I love sparkly things, and I especially love pretty, sparkly things from nature.

In high school I was a chemistry and geology nerd. I loved how the molecular components of each crystal dictated the structure for the whole thing. The hexagonal shape of apatite, the little squares of salt crystals, it all makes sense and it’s something that can be held in your hand!

Plus, it’s amazing to look at gems and minerals. They come from the ground! They might have been cut and polished by humans, but the sparkle, the color and the tone mostly come from nature. I still love pacing around the mineral exhibits in the Pittsburgh Carnegie Museums. It’s almost like shopping. “Yes! I shall have you, Tourmalinated quartz!”

Some of my stash of pearl strands, double drilled garnets, amber strands, and loose opal, white topaz and garnet stones:

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In college, I started measuring tasks based on the number of movies I can watch while doing them. When I worked as a lab instructor, I would watch the Godfather movies while grading papers. The worst weeks would get me most of the way through Godfather Part III. Wedding tasks are pretty tedious, so they are ideal for simultaneous movie viewing. Plus, now that we have a DVR I have no shortage of cheesy movies waiting for my perusal. Here are a few wedding tasks and their movie lengths:

Task: Sorting 2000 marbles into bags of 80 for use with the centerpieces
Time: 90% of the Original Planet of the Apes
Pain: Minimal, PotA is a classic, and Charlton Heston’s scenery chewing acting style is always amusing. My fingers were dusty after sorting all of those marbles.

Task: Cutting 250 8″ paper circles out of green paper for use as table decorations
Time: Part 1 & 2 of Empire Falls
Pain: Moderate, four hours of townsfolk with so much earnestness that my retinas almost detached from eye rolling. Also, four hours! I can’t take bitter town life for that long. On the physical pain front, my arm was a little sore from using the circle cutter.

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• Invitations: Do we have to address all of these things by hand?
• What did you say to your significant other when you asked for their hand in marriage? Or, on the flip side, what was said to you?
• Three ceremonies in three countries or just elope and send everyone a MOV file?
• We’ve been invited to a Buddhist wedding. How can we stay faux-pas-free?
• What happens when two people with hyphenated last-names marry?
• We’re frantically searching (our minds, the intraweb) for pre-ceremony songs.
• My fiancee and I aren’t sure if we should do pre-marriage counseling or not.
• Which species of ducks mate for life?

I have hair that does as it pleases, which is usually to lie as straight and flat as possible. My mother fought valiantly against this during the 1980’s and gave me several disastrous home perms, but my hair always resisted and managed to have itself straightened out less than four days later each time.

I know I am messing with fate by wanting to have my hair curled for my wedding day. I have no doubt that my hair will thwart all sprays and curling irons and be back to itself by the time we eat dinner. So, in light of this I have decided to be flexible and change my hair as the night goes on. Happily, that gives me another opportunity to make pretty things for my hair

I made citrine flower hairpins (please excuse the hair in this photo):

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My “getaway” dress was once supposed to be my wedding dress. On a trip to Thailand two years ago, one year before my engagement, I had the top secretly made at a tailor’s shop while attending a Machine Translation conference alone. I had been with my (now) fiance for about five years. At the time, I’d imagined a much more casual wedding, possibly with a bowling alley reception. So, I went to the shop, gave them a sketch and it was in my hands three days later.

My wedding has changed to a much more formal affair and my simple bowling-ready dress has been replaced by a beaded number with a train. However, it would be a shame to let such a pretty silk top go to waste. Now, it will be what I change into when my wedding dress gets to be too cumbersome at the reception.

I purchased matching silk and made a knee-length circle skirt to complete the outfit. Just to add some character, I drew a picture of a vine a few days later and silk screened it around the hem.

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Mr. Lollipop’s favorite animal is the duck. For his birthday one year ago I rented two ducks from a nearby farm and he spent the evening following them around the yard and smiling.

Lots of work went into our invitations, so I wanted to try and draw some creativity of our guests in return. Other than real ducks, what could be better for the water fowl obsessed man than armfuls of paper ducks from our loved ones? Plus, the paper kind don’t poop everywhere or gorge themselves on our our garden herbs like the real thing.

Thus, our RSVP cards were born:

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When I was a little girl I was obsessed with the Funk and Wagnalls science encyclopedias available in our supermarket. The first volume covering A-Aq sold for only 9 cents so it was easy to talk my mother into buying a copy. For months, it was my most prized possession and I read from ‘aardvark’ to ‘aquarium’ savoring each entry. By far, my favorite entry was ‘animal’. It contained a massive taxonomy tree covering two pages. I studied the chart like it was for a grade.

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Some more Ask Metafilter wedding threads:

• Is it acceptable to ask the bride not to seat me next to someone in particular?
• Do you regret having spent all that money and energy on your big, splash-out wedding?
• How do I make my destination wedding enviro-friendly?
• Help my girlfriend and I gracefully decline a request to work the reception table. Again. And forevermore.
• Snappy comebacks, please, for the question: so, when are you going to have children?
• What needs to be done to get married in a church?
• Can anyone suggest interesting science-flavored demonstrations, experiments, or spectacles to be performed at a wedding?
• Entertainment alternatives to dancing at wedding party?

Argh…I’m kicking myself a little for not doing better research on our photographer. I hired his company after going to a bridal show and hating every photography booth except for his. I really liked the style of his photography and decided that it was worth the significant expense. However, since then I found two online reviews, both negative. I decided that we could avoid most of the pitfalls mentioned in the reviews by having a clear list of the photos we wanted and being up front about our priorities.

Well, we had our last meeting with our photographer before the wedding and it didn’t go so smoothly. We have had two prior meetings, and each went amicably. In the meantime, I’ve had a chance to look at photographs from other weddings and decide what I want for mine. Going in to this meeting, I knew that in addition to traditional ceremony posed shots and candid reception shots, I wanted photographs of the reception venue and its set-up before the guests arrive and the tables get trashed. With this in mind, I signed up for two photographers so we could get the coverage we need.

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