Brideswomen

When I started wedding planning, I thought that with my hodgepodge of friends and family, it would be easier to just forgo the wedding party. Over the years I have collected quite a few close friends, but they tend to come in and out of my life depending on where we are living, how busy we all are, and where our current interests lie.

But then one of my younger sisters told me that she WAS going to be my bridesmaid--no question. And my current confidant and best friend seemed interested. And then if I was going to include anyone, I was going to include my best friend since we were in diapers. So that was three.

So then, partially because I didn't care that much, and partially because the mr. insisted that matching bridesmaid dresses look like the military, I told my friends they could wear whatever they wanted in the yellow, brown, or olive green color scheme. This led to weeks of frustration on their part, culminating in a horrible weekend of shopping (horrible! shopping!!!). They were practically in tears by the end of it and basically told me that I needed to just pick something out and they'd wear it. And they wanted to match.

Some of the dresses we considered...


An Antonio Melani dress was deemed cute but too spring-time sundressy.



Everyone loved the pricing for the Jcrew embossed beach dresses, but in person the yellow was way too bright.









In a moment of frustration, I almost had them buy them Jcrew Cotton Cady dress of their choice. I love them. The colors were perfect (a softer yellow or brown are available), but the $250-275 price tag was way out of the range I'd discussed with them and I didn't want to be that person.


We looked at several more dresses, from Macy's (most were too cocktail party) to Forever 21 (too see-through), before finally going the route that many other brides have been going...

The JCrew silk chiffon collection...


Both in the brown color. They are light enough that they will be okay if the wedding day happens to be scorching hot, but substantial enough that they don't look or feel cheap.





And we got them during one of the JCrew sales so they are costing less than $150 a dress (which had been our original dress limit).

DIY in Process

The spare room in our flat has been converted into a wedding workshop. Needless to say, our housemate cannot wait for us to move out in June!

A few projects in process...

Is it a garage sale? Nope. This is one of what will be many mass dish washing operations on our lawn.

The dishes will run through a dish washer once they are up at my parent's for the wedding, but until then, we got all the thrift store stickers off, and got the dishes (mostly) clean, outside.

Our neighbors, in addition to our housemate, think we are insane.

One of my favorites:
My current favorite DIY project is my napkin making sweatshop. I buy old sheets from thrift stores, wash them, and cut them up with pinking sheers. This stack doesn't look like many, but it's actually around 50 napkins! Almost halfway there...

Oak leaf chic

So I think we've narrowed down our "theme" to oak leaf, vintage, chic. Colors focusing on brown, yellow, and olive green, with pink accents.

Something like this board, inspired by the Ariella Chezar bouquet in the middle.

row 1: jcrew.com, sangria from brides.com, ribbons in trees from Oh Happy Day, candles from black*eiffel.
row 2: my parent's yard, bouquet from instyle.com, hair from brides.com
row 3: photo backdrop from lena corwin, cake from Vintage Indie
row 4: menu from theKnot, garlands from etsy, another shot of the yard, and image from Nikki McClure.

inspired

The first month or so of wedding planning seemed like a giant debate about everything (money, size of wedding, formality) but primarily colors. It seems insane to be debating colors with someone. Particularly getting so upset about colors that you actually CRY about them. I'm not that girly, but when I think about weddings I normally think pastel-based flowery magical affairs. P, knowing that I'm not that much of a girly-girl was confused by my sudden insistence that everything be "pretty." He wanted green flowers and didn't understand what wedding colors were used for outside of the bridesmaid dresses. I was sick of explaining accent colors and defending pink bouquets. It wasn't until I discovered a magical little thing called the inspiration board that our bickering ceased.

Snippet & Ink has been our savior. Kathryn creates a new board each day--each a perfect example of how to create a pulled together wedding look--even if that look is gypsy-eclectic. Looking at the boards I realized that I don't want a super-girly pink wedding. P realized that themes and colors aren't something I've invented to make our lives difficult.

After looking around we created our first board:

And later, Katheryn created a board specifically for us:
http://snippetandink.blogspot.com/2007/12/board-94-katies-diy-wedding.html

In response we made our most recent board:

We'll probably add a few more before the wedding actually happens, but for a compilation of pictures they actually serve as a very useful guide in shaping the wedding.

Cheap.

When I first started planning the wedding our budget was $20,000. Twenty grand starts to feel like a drop in the bucket when the average cost of weddings in your area is over $30,000. But having never spent even close to $20,000 on anything in my life (except college), I started to feel kind of crazy with the whole budgeting process.

Since, we've decided to do other things with some of the money we were given (honeymoon, pay off debt, etc). Our new $10,000 budget is actually a lot more enjoyable. Maybe I'm cheap, but digging around the thrift store for the on-sale color-of-the-day tag dishes instead of renting them at 50cents a pop, has been enjoyable.

My dress was found via craigs list in a strange, but amazing story (to be posted later) for less than half of what I would have paid retail. We are doing almost everything ourselves (some of the food food, the cake, flowers, decorations, linens, etc). The location went from a $5000 barn to my parent's pecan orchard/backyard.

And while diy can be challenging and a lot of work, so far it's actually been more relaxing than all the stress of spending.