A Disposable Day full of Throwaway Things?

Tags

handmade, linens, napkins, non-disposable, old-fashioned inspiration, philosophizing, planned obsolescence, planning, WIC

“DIY” is becoming quite the buzzword, for weddings as well as for jewelry, fashion accessories, curtains, and roughly 90 bajillion projects involving spray paint. In theory, I am all for this. But in practice, I find that a lot of DIY projects are of a rather thrown together, get-it-done-super-fast approach, with lots of spray paint and hot glue. And if it’s for a wedding, burlap and mason jars are, bizarrely enough, kind of everywhere. (I’m not sure what that indicates, sociologically speaking.) Now, there’s nothing wrong with burlap or mason jars, though I can’t help being suspicious of “ye oldey timey chic” trends. But spray paint and hot glue are materials that don’t generally hold up well over time – they’re best for quick projects that you don’t expect to last too long. To many, this would seem to make them ideal for DIY wedding projects. After all, a wedding is just one day, right? Everything needs to look lovely for one day, and after that it doesn’t really matter anymore.

Frankly, I think that this is entirely the wrong attitude to have about weddings (or, you know, life in general, for that matter). We live in an era of planned obsolescence and disposable practically-everything, and not only is it harming the environment and human health, it is also expensive, wasteful, and aesthetically unfortunate. Sure, you can buy bulk paper napkins and use a stamp and an ink pad to create your own monogrammed wedding napkins. You can spray paint plastic containers and turn them into stylish centerpieces with flower arrangements you’ve made yourself after ordering your flowers from an online wholesaler. You can make your own veil using $20 of craft materials from the bridal aisle at Michael’s.

But why? Sure, it’s great to save money, and it’s fun to do crafts, and there’s something  to be sad for seeing something nifty but way too expensive and figuring out how to do it yourself. But if you’re already thinking outside the box and trying to figure out how to DIY your wedding (or your clothes, or home decor, or cooking, or some other aspect of your life), why not go a little farther and really color outside the lines?

Why not think of your wedding as part of your real life, and truly as the beginning of the rest of your life? Even if you’re already living with your intended, and even if you’re not registering for a set of formal china, your wedding is still the beginning of your marriage, and at least symbolically, it’s the beginning of a new stage in your life. Is that really a day that you want to, well, dispose of? All those charming stamped napkins will be covered in cake and lipstick and crumpled in the trash, all those spray painted centerpieces will be abandoned, and your crafty veil is highly unlikely to make any future appearances. Even if you try to save the centerpieces or the veil, the materials aren’t likely to hold up very well – or look very nice under close scrutiny. But if you approach your wedding as part of your life, albeit a very special and important part, you can start finding ways to have a wedding whose treasures won’t become obsolete as soon as the DJ packs up.

What do you already have, that could become part of your wedding? What could you borrow? What would you like to buy or make for your wedding that you or someone else would still enjoy having and/or using long after the wedding? Even with the increasing popularity of DIY for weddings, the Wedding Industrial Complex is still making the rules. Rules that involve massive consumption and a truly incredible level of planned obsolescence. Your car is designed to die after two hundred thousand miles – and your wedding is supposed to die after only one day. So says the Wedding Industrial Complex. As you can probably tell, I disagree with the dictates of the WIC.

I think that if they want it, every couple deserves to have a beautiful, personal, memorable wedding, a day they and their guests can enjoy and adore. But I don’t think it should be a disposable day full of throwaway things. Brides used to go to their wedding days with dowries, with hope chests full of carefully handmade treasures for their future homes, tablecloths and bed sheets and napkins and towels and blankets that they had made themselves. I’m not suggesting that every newly engaged woman ought to get started hemstitching three dozen linen napkins (unless that’s your thing, in which case go for it), but I think there’s a lot to be said for that kind of attitude. Materials used to be the expensive part, while labor was cheap. Things were made carefully, and saved, and mended, and re-made, and re-purposed – not out of a high-minded concern for the environment, but because it simply made sense. Planned obsolescence is what doesn’t make sense.

So, if I may be so bold as to make a suggestion: if you’re thinking about incorporating some DIY into your wedding, go ahead and take it a step farther. Think outside the box, color outside the lines, and consider having a wedding that is a part of your life and a part of your marriage, rather than a disposable day full of throwaway things. DIY is great, but you can think even bigger – think handmade. Think made to last. Think heirloom. Think of how lovely it would be to have traces of your wedding day decorating your home; everyday reminders of that marvelous day.

If this sounds like a good idea to you, stay tuned. I’ll be doing write-ups about our plans to have a non-disposable wedding, including tips and tutorials, and I’ll also be linking to other good ideas around the web. There won’t be much spray painting or hot gluing, because I’m looking to focus on making things well and making them to last, emphasizing natural materials and avoiding plastics (and trying to minimize toxic fumes and environmental damage along the way). I’ll include planning tips (I used to work as a wedding planner), shopping tips (especially for thrifting and off-price stores), and plenty of old-fashioned inspiration, handy whether you’re planning an old-fashioned theme or not. My philosophy is, if you’re going to make things, you might as well make them to last, right?

Specialness is not Contingent on Expense

Tags

Anne of Green Gables, budget, carbon footprint, fairy godmother, handmade, invitations, old-fashioned inspiration, WIC

We haven’t yet set a budget for our wedding plans. In part, this is because we’ve only just started planning and won’t be getting married for a year and a half, but it’s also because we  simply don’t want to spend any more money than is necessary. Well, in a manner of speaking. Obviously, trotting down to the local courthouse in our street clothes would be the cheapest way to get married, but we’re looking for something more than that. So, I’m using the word “necessary” a bit loosely. Bear with me.

We anticipate paying for the wedding, or at least most of it, ourselves, and we don’t anticipate having a lot of savings with which to pay for it. We’re not willing to incur debt for our wedding, so we’re just going to have limited means to work with. But really and truly, limited means isn’t the #1 reason that we’re planning to keep costs way, way down. It’s just a significant motivating factor. But even if a magical fairy godmother dropped in and said, “Guess what! I’m going to give you $10,000 for a lovely wedding!” I wouldn’t want it. I don’t think our wedding needs to cost that, and I wouldn’t want it to cost that. Neither of us would. If we were somehow magically offered a lot of money for the wedding, we’d both be asking “Could we have that for a down payment on a house instead?” We’re sensible like that, I suppose, but it’s not just cold pragmatism – as much as we’re both really excited about having a lovely wedding with friends and family and fancy clothes, well, it’s only one day. We have a whole life together to plan!

Now, we have some advantages straightaway in the budget department, since the biggest expenses tend to be the venue(s), the cost of feeding a large number of guests, and the dress. We’ve already been offered a free venue (my fiance’s beautiful childhood home, where his mom still lives), we don’t expect to have more than 50 or maybe 60 guests and we’ll be managing the food ourselves with the help of various friends rather than paying for catering, and I’ll be making my own dress…..as well as at least two of of three bridesmaids’ dresses. We’re both comfortable with being very hands-on, and we have useful skill sets, as well as various helpful friends who also have useful skill sets. We’re also, helpfully, not perfectionists, and we’ll be fine with things going a little haywire, as is pretty likely to happen, to one degree or another.

But in the end, that’s really what we’re looking for. Not a Wedding Industrial Complex style wedding done DIY to save money, but a lovely little wedding that we put together ourselves, with the people we love. I suspect that I feel especially strongly about this, because I have been to a lot of weddings. Quite a few as a guest, and dozens upon dozens as event staff. And for all the charming decorations and carefully selected cake flavors and tuxedo rental options, most weddings end up being a whole lot alike. They’re very expensive, even when they’re “low budget,” they’re very wasteful of resources, they have a substantial carbon footprint, and they support the whole crazy Wedding Industrial Complex and its consumerism run rampant. Yeah, I know. I am a bit of a crazy hippie. But seriously – that is not the kind of wedding I want to have. So we’re having something else. Instead of letting ourselves be locked into “traditions” that mostly don’t date back much farther than when our parents were getting married, we’re looking back to the 19th century and the first half or so of the 20th century, to see how people used to go about having weddings. There are some great ideas there! And lots of punch. I enjoy punch.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about invitations: they’re expensive, even if you do them yourself. Plus stamps are expensive, especially for odd-size invitations, and add even more expensive if you send stamped RSVP cards with your invitations. Yikes. E-vites are another option, but since we’re going the fancy party route, and since I’m so inclined toward old-fashioned things and love mail, it’s really important to me to send out paper invitations. But it’s also really important to Zachary to minimize our carbon footprint, and neither of us wants to spend more than we reasonably need to, so we’re compromising – we’ll mail out paper invitations, but they’ll be a traditional size so they won’t incur extra postage costs, and we won’t include RSVP cards. Instead, we’ll set up online RSVPs, and also include our mailing address if people want to write back. I looked around at invitations online, especially recycled paper invitations, but nothing really struck my fancy. I want something quite classic and traditional, really, since we’re doing an old-fashioned theme/feel, and that isn’t actually all that easy to find, especially in eco-friendly papers.

And somehow, the thought of doing DIY invitations turned into the thought of hand-writing all of the invitations. Full disclosure: I have been an aficionado of all things 19th century and old-fashioned since I was little, and I write in lovely, old-fashioned cursive and can do a bit of calligraphy. I used to do a lot of writing with a dip pen and inkwell, just for fun. I know, I’m strange. Doing handwritten, calligraphy invitations would be both formal and theme-appropriate. And because handwritten invitations are so very uncommon in this day and age, I think they’ll be a fun touch that will help to set the tone for our handmade, old-fashioned event.

I’m planning to do folded cards for the invitations, and upon initial examination they’ll look very traditional, with the formal, third-person, calligraphy invitation written out on the face, maybe with some sort of pretty border. But then when you open the card, instead of it being blank (as it would be on one of those very traditional formal invitation cards), it would have a little note written in, somewhat less formally. Then I can say a little hello and give them info on the wedding website for RSVPs, directions, etc. It will be a LOT of writing but I plan to start early and go slowly, just a few at a time, so I don’t go too crazy. I think it will be a nice touch! And then, keeping things somewhat sane, we’ll do digital save-the-dates, since I don’t have any need to try to make those formal.

Obviously, the willingness to write out all of one’s invitations by hand is not likely to be terribly common, and we’re definitely looking at a pretty epic level of DIY all around, but I think that looking at “how would someone have done this 60 or 100 or 150 years ago?” is really helpful in re-evaluating how to go about planning and budgeting a wedding, and thinking about alternatives to conventional wedding choices. To me, the biggest take-home message when I look back in time for inspiration is simple: specialness is not contingent on expense. I get teary-eyed every time I read through one of the weddings that happen in the Anne of Green Gables series, because so much love and enthusiasm goes into each and every one, with people planning which precious handmade housewares to give to the new bride, and which delicious cake the best baker around should make, and what lovely flowers they can pick from the garden for the bouquet. That’s the kind of wedding I want.

And it’s the kind of wedding that we would be trying to have, even if we could spare the cash for something Wedding-Industrial-Complex-approved. It’s just a motivating factor.

The Blog Banner and Avatar

Tags

ceramics, color scheme, Grandma Bobbie, jewelry, rock rocks, silk, theming, vintage textiles

If anyone is wondering about the images set as the blog’s banner and avatar…

I put together a little still life of sorts using objects from around the house in appropriate colors and textures for our wedding. None of these things were acquired for the purpose of the wedding, but I think they give the right idea of the color scheme and feel of the event.

I put aside the curtains in my sewing room and laid down a piece of cream-colored cotton jacquard, then I put my design drawing for my wedding dress down on it. I covered most of the drawing with fabric, a piece of crinkly soft-white silk dupioni like what I want to make the main body of my dress out of, and a length of silk charmeuse in a hue very similar to the turquoise we want to use as our anchor color, including for bridesmaids’ dresses. At the left, there is a ceramic bowl that Zachary threw, made of Anasazi red clay, with hand-mixed glazes and a wax-relief design. In and around the bowl are stones and shells that we collected from along the Rio Grande while on a walk nearby his mother’s house (where we will be having the wedding). Draped onto the bowl is a skein of cotton embroidery floss in one of my favorite hues of red, a saturated poppy color with just a hint of pink and orange, quite probably the red that I would like to use for the accents on my dress and accent decorations around the event. Trailing along the floss and across the picture is a piece of vintage lace which my grandmother (my mother’s mother, Bobbie) gave to me from her old sewing supplies when I was a child. On the right are my fancy pearl necklace from Japan, and a vintage rhinestone bracelet I bought at a thrift store.

I’m very pleased with how my little photographic still life represents the colors and textures and theming of our wedding quite well, and represents pieces of both of our lives and an anchoring in place. I feel rather inspired!

Blessings and Privileges

Tags

ceremony, LGBTQ, secular, spirituality, toasts & speeches

The ceremony is likely to be a complicated thing for us to figure out. We have no idea who we would want to officiate, and we really only have vague ideas about the ceremony itself. Zachary has more distinct ideas than I do – for me, the biggest priority is that it not be uncomfortably religious. I am a very secular, non-religious person; I’m not a atheist per se but I read a lot of atheist blogs, I’ve never been religious, and well, to be frank, I don’t really want any Jesus in my wedding.

Meanwhile, Zachary is of a much more spiritual persuasion than I am. His family background encompasses multiple religious traditions, and he has a strong spiritual grounding although I don’t think either of us would describe him as religious. He would like for us to write our own vows, and he would like for there to be a spiritual component to the ceremony. That’s about as much as we have in mind, currently, for the ceremony.

But what we do know is that, during the thank-yous and toasts and speeches, we want to stand up and speak very clearly about how lucky and blessed we feel to have our families and friends with us to celebrate our love and our devotion to one another, and how we are fortunate to have found each other and persevered through the miscommunications to build a relationship and then have an engagement grow into our wedding day. At a time when loving and committed couples in this country are denied the right to marry based on their gender or sexual orientation, we recognize how fortunate and privileged we are to have the legal backing of marriage to support our relationship. We both hope and pray that soon, every loving and committed couple will have the same legal right to the joy, and the chaos, of getting married.

Yes, it’s political, but it’s also very important, and it’s relevant to both our families, albeit in very different ways. We really do feel strongly that we are privileged - in the liberal arts college sense of the word and the more general sense – to be getting married. We’ll have a marriage certificate and we’ll file taxes together; we’ll be able to make medical decisions for one another and we will have all the rights and protections of marriage should we have have children. We are lucky. There are too many people who are denied those rights.

In fact, it was not until I became involved in LGBTQ issues and started learning about all of the rights associated with marriage which are denied to LGBTQ couples that I realized that marriage really is still a relevant, meaningful, and practical cultural institution. And if we, as a society, are going to give those rights and protections to two consenting adults, then we should give them to any two consenting adults. That’s not changing the definition of marriage; it’s just looking at matters reasonably. Disallowing polygamy and giving women the right to marry without parental consent – those historical doings changed the definition of marriage. Allowing same sex marriage? That’s just good sense, and a logical outpouring of the 19th and 20th century idea that marriage was about love, as much as or more than it was about property rights, legitimate inheritance, or making sure that the father of one’s children was legally obligated to feed and clothe them.

I know that some people we’ll be inviting to the wedding are likely to be offended by our public declaration of these sentiments. I intend to speak to them ahead of time and make our position clear; they can then choose whether or not they would like to attend. I’m not particularly keen on randomly offending people, but this is something that we both feel needs to be said. And honestly, since we started talking about it the other night, I’ve been thinking about it a great deal. I hate that we only have the right to get married because I happened to fall in love with a man instead of a woman. I am more-or-less-openly bisexual. I never make a secret of it, but people generally assume that I am straight, and the fact that I tend to date men certainly encourages that assumption. But it doesn’t matter that I’m marrying a man – I’m still bisexual. And under different circumstances, I wouldn’t be in the privileged crowd of people-who-conveniently-manage-to-fall-in-love-with-persons-whose-bits-are-different-from-their-bits.

It shouldn’t work like that. Finding the right person is tricky enough; making the commitment to spend the rest of your life with someone (fingers crossed), in a socially and legally recognized way – every pair of consenting adults should have that right.

And that’s not something that we want to lose track of. Especially not if it might change even one mind, even one vote. Because every couple should have this right. If marriage is something that our society deems important, every loving and committed couple should have the right to take part in it.

Engaged!

Tags

engagement, philosophizing, pinterest, planning, ring, traditions and conventions, WIC

On Christmas, Zachary proposed. I wasn’t expecting it, not in the least, though we’ve been together for two years, and we’ve been living together since the end of July. I was overjoyed that he asked – I hadn’t expected it, but I’d wanted it – and my response, rather than “Yes,” was “Obviously!”

(When I repeated this anecdote to Lindsey, my best friend since we were 13, she laughed and declared that it was a very me response; I am exceedingly fond of adverbs [I didn't even do that on purpose].)

We bought the ring together the next day. It was a serendipitous little adventure involving a couple of vintagey indoor flea markets and Zachary having to try very hard to coax me over to a particular display case (I was trying to be systematic so as to avoid missing any), and when he finally persuaded me to come look, we found just the right ring.

To put this in context, I should say that we both finished our bachelor’s degrees last May (though, being 26, I was slightly behind schedule with mine!) and we’re struggling to make ends meet having both us of moved to a new town (and me to a new state), with me in graduate school doing my master’s in public history and Zachary once again looking for steady work (and trying to figure out whether or not he wants to dive back in and go to medical school). We’re watching our pennies. Plus, we’re both rather of the “marching to the beat of our own drummer” type, and I really have no interest in big sparkly diamond solitaires anyway. I don’t much care for diamonds at all (wars, monopolies, rampant consumerism, etc.), and I’m more partial to white gold or silver than I am to platinum. Thinking we might be able to find something vintage and pretty with a stone of an appealing color, and planning to spend no more than $100, we’d gone poking around indoor flea markets full of random furniture, sports memorabilia, and Depression glass.

I’m sure that I’ll encounter some raised eyebrows and perhaps outright contempt for my engagement ring, but I adore it. I adore it and intend to keep it, even though we’d initially bought it thinking to have it as a temporary ring for a few months, until we could find something more ideal. Within days, I couldn’t imagine replacing it with another ring. I suppose I’m sentimental like that, but also, it really is a lovely ring. It’s just that it only cost fifteen dollars. And who has an engagement ring that only cost fifteen dollars?! Well, I do, that’s who. The band is stamped sterling silver and textured, with a fine rope design laid along a flat silver band, and there’s a diagonally set square stone encased in silver, with a a small ball of silver at either side. The stone is presumably glass, in a deep garnet red – and if we are ever feeling extravagant, replacing it with a sturdier real garnet ought not to be very expensive, because the enclosed setting wouldn’t necessitate an-anywhere-near-flawless gem. But quite apart from the possibility of replacement, I love my ring. I love the story of my ring. And I love that I’ve fallen in love with an engagement ring that cost less than lunch for two. That serendipity and that focus on what really matters to us – it’s exactly what I want for my whole engagement, my whole wedding, and my whole marriage.

So I’ve created this blog to help document the process. Interested family and friends can look in on our planning, while disinterested family and friends won’t be quite as bombarded with wedding details on facebook as they might otherwise be. And by sharing my/our process and progress, I’m hoping to put a bit more information out into the internet universe about having a small-scale, handmade, inexpensive, and altogether personal wedding. We’re keeping things local and eco-friendly, avoiding disposables and unnecessary shipping. We’re making a lot of things ourselves, and bringing in family and friends to add their personal touches. We want to have a fancy party, but we don’t want to pretend to be people we’re not, or let things get impersonally formal.

I grew up reading Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, and I always had a notion that it would be lovely to be married “at home,” without too many people or too much pretension. So when Zachary’s mother offered the use of her home as soon as we told her the news, I loved the idea. Zachary adores the house where he grew up, especially the view of the mountains and the Bosque from the back patio, where we would hold the ceremony. Adding to the serendipity of our engagement – the house is also where he proposed to me. Many of the pieces of our wedding planning have simply fallen effortlessly into place. The wedding will most likely be in June of 2013, giving us a year and a half to plan and save and create, and giving us relatively stable weather, before the summer gets too hot, but after school semesters end so that we don’t risk schedule conflicts.

June is a bit tediously conventional for weddings but…what of it? It’s conventional because June generally has lovely, suitable weather, and there’s nothing wrong with the pursuit of lovely, suitable weather when planning a wedding. I realized that I don’t have a problem with doing conventional things – I have a problem with doing things simply because they are conventional. By the same token, I don’t have much patience with doing things for the opposite reason, simply because they are unconventional. I used to work in the wedding industry, and I know how fixated people can be on trying to have an event that is unique, different, special, and unconventional – even if they are simultaneously determined not to risk offending anyone, which almost invariably results in doing things in a deliberately conventional way. Considering both of our personalities and interests and priorities, there isn’t much risk of us accidentally having a conventional wedding – so if we wed in June and I wear a white dress, what of it? I feel confident that we don’t need to try to have a wedding that will be a little different, and very us.

There are some conventions that I like, or simply don’t mind. What I can’t stand is that so much is held up as “traditional,” when many of those “traditions” are no more than a few decades old, and even the “traditions” with a more venerable lineage are primarily just for high society and social climbers. I’m a historian, and I love to study culture and tradition and embedded social meaning, so I quite enjoy learning about different traditions, but let’s call a spade a spade. If it’s the usual thing currently, and it’s been the usual thing since the 1990s, 1980s, or 1970s, but before that it was unusual or unheard of? I don’t know if I’m willing to call that a tradition. Even the 1960s is pushing it. I’m more inclined to call practices of such a recent lineage conventions. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with conventions – but standard American wedding conventions have become absurdly expensive, environmentally destructive, soulless, and driven by rampant consumerism and the “Wedding Industrial Complex.” And we’re not interested in going down that particular path; not in our daily life and not for our wedding.

So ours will be an old-fashioned wedding, full of pretty and ever-so-slightly mismatched things, handmade creations, and the contributions of family and friends. I designed my own wedding dress, and I will sew it myself, along with at least two out of three bridesmaid dresses (one of my bridesmaids may sew her own). I will most likely make some tablecloths to go along with vintage and thrifted tablecloths. Instead of renting dishes, we’ll collect color-coordinating china and silver flatware at thrift stores. We’ll keep our favorites, give away any other pieces of interest to our guests, and donate the rest back to the thrift stores. Instead of hiring a caterer, we’ll have a cooking party with a few dedicated friends and make a buffet dinner and tasty hors d’oeuvres. The cake will be Zachary’s favorite, a death-by-chocolate sort of creation – I suggested that he choose, because he has strong feelings about cake, but I’m not particularly keen on it. I want to do a little array of desserts to go with the cake, which will include custom-made bride and groom gelato flavors made by Lindsey, who is a professional gelato chef, so we can do a couple of very different flavors representing each of our favorites. Any flowers will be local and in-season, and we’ll avoid cut flowers for decorations, using live plants or other pretty things (like river rocks from the nearby Rio Grande) for centerpieces. We’ll incorporate Zachary’s ceramic work and my sewing, and we’ll try to keep things local, natural, and non-disposable.

There are still a lot of decisions to be made, and heaps of planning to do, and an astonishing amount of sheer making stuff, but we’re enjoying the brainstorming and looking forward to the whole process. I’ll document our plans here, and share any useful resources that I come across, as well as my various odd and obscure notions. Like how I keenly desire to have half a dozen braided rugs, just like Marilla gave Anne. I’m quite partial to braided rugs, and I think I may endeavor to make some myself, in colors that will work with our wedding decor and home decor. I seriously doubt that anyone would catch the reference, but it would delight me, and since I would happily continue to use those rugs in our home, it might just be worth it.

In the meantime, I leave you with my main wedding-related Pinterest board, full of inspirational pretty things and a great deal of turquoise china!

And a picture taken of us two days after we got engaged, at our favorite retro kitsch diner up in Albuquerque:

December 27th at the Route 66 Diner