Weddingbee

A few useful wedding-related Ask Metafilter posts:

• How to make a wedding toast when you only know one half of the couple?
• Event Liability Insurance Recommendations
• Good sites for affordable bridesmaid dresses?
• How many camels is my girlfriend worth?(Ha ha.)
• Vanity Filter: Becoming an iconic bride
• How do you refer to a divorced couple attending a formal function together?
• Can an Episcopal Priest marry me in a Catholic Church?
• Should we serve hard liquor at our wedding reception or just wine/beer?
• Tipping at one’s wedding–to whom, how much, and based on what?
• What should we expect from a “day of” wedding planner?
• I know the traditional one year anniversary gift is paper, what are some creative interpretations of that?
• What should I do for a bachelorette party?

As a follow-up to this entry, I wanted to add instructions for stenciling figures onto lanterns. Today’s figure came courtesy of our Maid of Honor, who did a superhero pose using a chair in her kitchen.

You will need:

Printer
1 Sheet of Cardstock
1 Craft knife with a sharp blade
Double sided tape
1 Lantern (I use the 12 inch size)
1 Pencil
1 Permanent marker
1 Silhouette figure using the instructions from the above mentioned entry

Step 1:
Print your Silhouette figure onto the sheet of cardstock.

Step 2:
Cut the figure out using the craft knife. Scissors can be substituted for the knife, but they won’t capture as much detail or cut as cleanly.

Read more…

I [heart] Martha Stewart Weddings. I can’t stand most wedding magazines, but MSW just has the right combination of DIY and impeccable taste to make me anticipate each new issue. I call it my “wedding crack”. I love flipping through it for inspiration, but seeing some of my own ideas, the ones I thought were completely original, on the pages of MSW will ruin my day*. Despite this, I devour issue after issue.

Most of my friends managed to get married without magazines. I have failed to live up to their modern frugal woman ways. I try to read one issue of a news magazine (usually the Economist) to balance out my vapid reading habits, but now, thanks to an impulse buy, I have seven back issues of MSW on their way to me.

Read more…

I really, really like fresh flowers, but we didn’t have money in the budget to pay for baskets of flowers for 20+ tables or the time to assemble them. My fiance liked the idea of using fresh fruit in the arrangements, so we experimented and found something that we both liked that would cost about $16 per table.

Read more…

When it comes to clothing or hair accessories, I usually know what I want. When I go shopping I search for the things that match the picture in my head. If I can’t find what I want or the closest match is too expensive, I’ll make whatever I need myself. Usually, I’m able to make what I want with acceptable results, but it often takes a considerable amount of time.

I knew exactly what I wanted for my wedding hair accessories: I wanted them to be in gold tones to match my dress, I wanted something botanical with leaves, and I wanted two hair combs instead of a tiara. Not that there is anything wrong with wearing a tiara; they just aren’t my style.

After shopping with grim determination, I couldn’t find anything approaching my ideal combs. Even distant matches carried a $100+ price tag for rhinestones and brass. Instead, I resolved to make my own.

Read more…

I like to think that our wedding has special effects shots. We have been using a green screen to capture silhouettes of us and the members of our bridal party. It’s been really fun getting everyone to pose, and I like the idea of our decorations as more about the people close to us rather than just about me and my fiance.

We’ll be screen printing the resulting images on our invitations, stenciling them onto lanterns and incorporating them into our other decorations. The silhouettes are simple enough to lend them well to a variety of media. The other advantage is that with the right pose, silhouette figures can make anyone look good, even if they are making a funny face or wearing a stained shirt.

We used the following improvised green screen method to get our shots. First, we bought a roll of green paper from Staples (~$7 if I recall correctly) and temporarily attached it to our dining room wall with masking tape. We left a little on the floor to stand on so our entire figures, from head to toe, would be surrounded with an easy to remove color.

Read more…

Exactly one year out from our wedding date, I decided to do a test run of our bouquets and centerpieces so I could get an idea of what was in season for September. I really wanted to do the flower arrangements myself to save money, but I had no experience at all. I figured that if I screwed up I could always just have the female bridal party carry books or lanterns down the aisle.

To save even more money, we decided to use fruits and vegetables to cut down on flower costs. Plus, I was having a tough time finding flowers in anything other than weak, pale green shades. So, I decided to do a test run of the bridesmaid bouquets using green bell peppers, broccoli and asparagus. The pepper and asparagus bouquets turned out horribly because, as I said before, I didn’t know what I was doing. They were asymmetrical and lumpy.

However, when I tried a third time using broccoli, I managed to get results I could live with. I used alstroemeria, white chrysanthemums, mini white roses and an outside layer of bells of Ireland to surround a head of broccoli in the middle.

Read more…

Mr. Lollipop and I have an agreement about food: all of our eating expenses are covered by our joint account. We split the bill for groceries, restaurants, and whatever else right down the middle. However, there are two exceptions to this rule. First, he pays for his own beer, and second, I pay for my own candy.

This arrangement keeps my fiance from going bug-eyed when I bring home an entire bucket of bubble gum, or purchase and then eat an entire box of dark chocolate turtles over the course of a week. I love candy. Love it. Love it. Health-wise, I am lucky that the fillings I got in Japan (my first and only!) were not of the highest quality. The ringing in my teeth from sugary things keeps me from going overboard. I dropped soda from my diet, but I can’t help the occasional sweet, sweet (*drool*) candy indulgence.

It should come as no surprise that I needed a candy buffet at our reception. We will have six kinds of candy, and they will be combined with our cookie table to form a heavenly display of things that will cause my early death.

I bought all of our candy in bulk from Metrocandy. We be serving caramels, spearmint leaves, gummy sour apples, chocolate rocks (they look like real pebbles!), jelly beans, and rock candy. I even bought extra rock candy to be used as stirrers at the coffee table, and flavored rock candy for swizzle sticks in mixed drinks.

I set out a mock-up last weekend. In addition to these six jars, we will have several jars for cookies.

Read more…

When one of my bridesmaids and I were in our senior year of high school, we were both sick of filling out college applications. To kill the monotony, we each wrote a marriage application for ourselves. Applicants would have to provide personal information and answer essay questions in order to date or marry us. My application required a credit check and recommendations from at least two non-ex-girlfriend female friends. Hers had a clause that read “Is your name Will Smith? If so, congratulations! You have already been accepted!” Yes, the 90’s were awesome.

So, I was amused to fill out a marriage application at the Allegheny County Register of Wills last week. The page-long form asked basic background information about ourselves and our parents. Other than that, we were required only to show our driver’s licenses and swear (twice!) that we weren’t lying on our application. The whole process took five minutes and now we only need to wait for our marriage license to arrive in the mail.

It’s scary! The government knows that we’re getting married!

Read more…

I never imagined that it would take so long to letterpress our invitations. Back in June, I spent two days in a letterpress studio setting type for our invitation wording and directions. If you’ve never set type before, just imagine setting tiny metal dominoes.

I was able to use the studio for free as a favor from our friend Nick. It is located in a garage in Squirrel Hill with no running water or toilet facilities. After my hands got too dirty from the type I couldn’t rub my eyes. Happily, it rained later that afternoon and I was able to hold my hands out in the downpour to clean them off. The next day I brought a bottle of water and a towel.

A few days later Nick helped me to get the type ready for printing. We spent from 8:00 pm until 4:00 am just setting up the press and adding pieces of onion skin paper so that the type would hit just right. We spent six hours the following day printing and resetting for the next page. Once we finished adjusting the press it took less than an hour for the whole 200+ print run. The same amount would have taken four hours with a silk screen and would have suffered a much higher error rate.

Read more…