Weddingbee Blog

We’re a couple of simple tastes, really. We grow our own vegetables, bake our own bread. We recycle like it’s a mandate, and I DIY like it’s going out of style.

When it came to rings, we were pretty sure that we wanted plain, traditional gold bands. The symbolism would be heavy, and our wallets wouldn’t become as light. Easy peasy.

Witness Mr. Shortcake’s 6mm yellow gold “comfort fit” band:

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I told you I can’t make up my mind!

(image from here)

I won’t go into the gory details, but ever since I discovered my father’s copy of Panati’s Extraordinary Endings at the tender age of nine, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen and I have had a ‘thing.’
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I had my first dress fitting yesterday. It was so wonderful to see my gown, all lovely and new (and wrinkled, bah), and intact.

I had my bustle pinned into three French points:

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Because of the long nature of our engagement (over a year), my mind has developed the unpleasant propensity for flip-flopping like a flap-jack over any and every decision.

Besides causing an inordinate amount of stress, my unflinchingly flakey mind has been responsible for some of the biggest wedding changes. Happily, many of these changes are for the better:

Example A: Deciding that a pastel palette would be inappropriate for an autumn affair

RESULT: New retro colour scheme!

Example B: Deciding that a dress bought off of eBay in a pique of post-engagement budgeting excitement probably wasn’t the one, if only because it, to quote youngest sister shortcake, “screamed 1980s”

RESULT: blowing the budget and buying a dress I loved.
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So far, my pre-wedding exercise regime has consisted of speed walking to and from work everyday. I walk at a brisk pace to my job, in order to get there early (or at least as the clock strikes), and I sprint home in order to avoid the clouds of Winnipeg-brand mosquitoes in the evening. I originally started walking to work (which is over 2 km away) so as to save money on bus passes, and have continued since then, as daily walking proved not only to be a wallet-saver, but a really, really good way of slimming down. To date, walking at least 4 km per day (with 8 km on double shifts days not being rare), has helped me to lose over ten pounds! This is such a welcome benefit, as working full-time has ‘prevented’ me from seriously sticking to any sort of fitness program. Walking so far everyday has also increased my endurance, and has decreased the number of tachycardiac episodes I experience every week. Hooray!
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Sometimes, when it’s almost midnight, and you still have twelve more hand sewn felted birds to make, dark little niggling thoughts can creep into your brain. Thoughts like,

“are these birds really and truly cute? are people just trying to humour me? will placing these birds in our twig and flower centrepieces be way over-the-top…are my little feathered friends…TACKY?”

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(Mommy and me, circa 1985, on a trolley in San Francisco.)

….spent restoring old baby pictures for our Blurb guest book.

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Thank you everyone for your kind comments on yesterday’s post! After going through the flames of one certain very hot place in order to get them finished, it meant a lot to have so many people love them as much as I did!

However, I totally did not finish that post, because I forgot one of my very favourite components of the invitation suite…
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Well, we pooled our collective pocket change, emptied our emergency fund and bought a new printer. In the end, Mr. Shortcake wouldn’t let me drop his old printer out of the window, or even give it a few gentle taps with a baseball bat a la Office Space, claiming that he wanted to keep it for sentimental reasons. What those reasons are, I’m not so sure of, but I think it involves framing the beast and hanging it on the office wall like a mounted deer head.

Thanks to our new Epson RX595 (which works like a dream, thankyouverymuch), our invitations are printed and ready to go. I must admit that I was shocked speechless when I pressed “print 20 copies”…and the Epson printed twenty copies - twenty copies that were the same size, colour, font, species, etc. Hallelujah!

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Dear Mr. Shortcake’s Printer,

This is a letter to inform you that you are now officially the most reviled inanimate object on the face of the earth. The fact that no one else has even met you makes no difference, as I hate you enough for six-point-something billion people combined.

I don’t care if you’re old. I don’t care if you can print Mr. Shortcake’s thesis paper with ease. I want you to print our gee-darned invitations with ease! I have gone through eight different designs just to try to appease you and your un-reliably-inking ways. I am now preparing to hand calligraph seventy six invitations, reception cards, rsvp cards, and map inserts because YOU CAN’T GET YOUR EFFING CARTRIDGES TOGETHER. I can’t even get you to print thequickbrownfoxjumpedoverthegeedarnedmummyhuggingfence the same way twice!
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So they told us we couldn’t have peonies (unless, of course, we wanted them imported from South America for $1000 a case), and I was sad. I gave up and gave in to the inevitability of a peony-free wedding.

And then I had my first face-to-face meeting with our floral designer - and what she suggested was pure brilliance.

Dahlias.

I would have never, ever considered these beauties, because for the longest time I was under the misguided impression that all dahlias were brown bedraggled creatures, like the forlorn specimens in a neighbour’s yard.

Luckily for me, dahlias ac-tually come in many beautiful shades of red, orange, yellow, pink, and white. Considering that three of our wedding colours just happened to be yellow, pink, and white, it was a blessing indeed.
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If you look at any 1950s wedding pictures, you’ll notice immediately a difference between the bridal attire then and bridal attire now. That difference was the inclusion of sleeves. Any sleeves really - capped, short, 3/4 length, wrist length - as long as they provided the bride with that look of modesty.

Although sleeves and interesting neckline treatments are slowly re-entering the scene, for a very long time strapless wedding gowns have exclusively dominated the marital market.

Which is sad really, considering how beautiful a well-placed piece of lace can look. Witness Grace Kelly at her 1952 wedding to Prince Ranier of Monaco:

…simply breathtaking.

When I first started wedding planning, there was a definite dearth of bridal cover-up options. Now that sleeves, cover-ups, and boleros are hitting the cyber streets of etsy, my thoughts have returned to finding something to jazz up my ensemble.
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I was smitten when first I saw Miss Cookie blog about the beautiful clutches made by Red Ruby Rose on Etsy. I was drowning in lust when I saw Miss Candy Corn blog about her new clutch from Red Ruby Rose. Then I got a full-time job, and almost simultaneously, Red Ruby Rose launched some new patterns…

Hello, Lover.

Behold my wedding clutch.
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Like many brides, I believe that the key to a smoothly-run wedding is found in meticulous planning and coordination before the event. Of course, not everything can be controlled (witness Mrs. Bubblegum’s power outage or Mrs. Hummingbird’s mudfest 2008), and that’s where a sense of purpose (hello, you’re getting married!) and a willingness to grin and bear it comes in handy.

I’ve told as much to my mother, much to her poorly-concealed delight. Apparently, she has little faith that I have within me the physiological and emotional resources to be a “Zen bride” on our wedding day, should anything go wrong. Hopefully, neither one of us will have to occasion to say “I told you so,” but just in case, I have created an emergency pocket to hide inside my hoop skirt!

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The journey to our cake topper has been a long one, a long road strewn with sparkles and satin.

Originally if you remember, I lusted over Ann Wood’s birds, then decided to make deer cake toppers. However, as cute as my deer cake toppers were, there weren’t any deer anywhere else in our wedding, and Mr. Shortcake and I had little inclination to redesign our wedding around them. So, ix-nay on the ambi-bays, and back to the forest they went.

Back at my (very pink) drawing board, surrounded by the usual flying birds and chattering chipmunks, I got to work on what has turned out to be the most satisfying DIY projects OF MY ENTIRE LIFE. Read more…