20 Days and Counting

It's a big weekend for me - I finished the flowers for the wedding.  Roxanne's on the Strip has been great.  I've been able to pick up bundles of dry lavender in bulk for $10 per large bundle.  Also, they led me to dried larkspur for my flower girl.  Once I pulled off the blossoms, I saw that they will be absolutely perfect.

Larkspur Petals:

The finished bouquets:

For the tables, I ordered brown Kraft paper and plan to scatter around small glass jars with crayons so people can color or leave messages on the paper.  I was originally going to use mason jars, but they proved almost impossible to find off-season.  So, when some friends were getting rid of an old spice rack, I realized the spice jars would be the perfect solution. 

And finally, we now have the all-important license documentation - it wouldn't be a wedding without that!  For those who don't know, we've opted for a self-uniting marriage license, which is a little-known option in Pennsylvania.  Because religious traditions, such as the Quakers, believe that no higher authority can bind two souls in marriage, the Commonwealth allows citizens to unite themselves in marriage without the requirement of an officiant or religious authority.  Along with this, Wil and I have crafted the ceremony ourselves - piecing together elements that we like and writing from scratch many other areas.  We will have a Celebrant (our friend Nick) to be our spokesperson, but he will only guide the ceremony.  Wil and I will approach each other as equals to unite our lives and bind our hearts ourselves. 

On a slightly more mundane note, the programs are ready, but I think we're going to wait a while longer to print them.  I found a template online and then customized everything from there, including adding in our wedding symbol.  We bought acid-free linen paper which is standing waiting for the final print.

Believe it or not, there is still a lot more to do, so I'm off to have another (hopefully) productive day.  However, I'm happy to have gotten a lot done so far.

Crafty DIY Wedding (or what I've been doing with myself)

Hi all!  So, I realize I've pretty much dropped off the face of the blogosphere.  It happens when you're planning a wedding.  So, I thought I'd share what I've been up to. 

We decided early on that a formal wedding wasn't really our style.  We wanted to be out in nature and we wanted it to be relaxed and fun for our friends and family.  We also wanted it to be simple and, since we are after all planning a wedding during a recession, we wanted to do as much ourselves as we could.

We were lucky.  Friends of ours, Nate and Steph, had just gotten married.  They contributed the three tiered wedding cake cardholder and the two baskets pictured above.  Of course, all of these items were in the autumn colors of their wedding theme.  All it took was a trip to Pat Catan's for some flowers and ribbon, as well as my new favorite tool: my glue gun, and PRESTO.  Also very helpful was some old seam tape I found - I used it to transform the basket handle into shimmery purple.

The candlesticks on either side were donated from a friend of my mother's - she had planned to get rid of these. I pulled out the ribbon and once I put the candles on, they'll be ready to go:

We LOVE the sales racks.  We've been haunting them for well over a year now.  One day at Michael's, we found our invitations.  They were DIY kits on sale for $40 total.  It was quite a bit of work, but we both pitched in and finished them assembly-line style.  

The best part?  We could customize.  We made our own wedding symbol - we took the chakra symbol from India that represents the heart:

We photoshopped it from green to our blue and purple wedding colors, and added a flower blossom in the center to symbolize the blossoming and growing of our relationship: 

Since we printed our own invitations and are printing our own programs, we have been able to customize everything with our wedding symbol while still saving money.

We also made the decision to cut out the florist.  Our Plan A was to grow our own flowers.  This is working out quite well for the centerpieces of forget-me-nots, but the lavender for the bouquets just never took off.  The tins for the forget-me-nots were just a buck each at Target:

And as of today, the forget-me-nots are flourishing.  I'm so anxious for the little blue flowers to show - I just bought fertilizer to help them along.

Plan B is working wonderfully for the other flowers (to the great relief of my Matron of Honor).  We went to Roxanne's Flowers in the strip and found some beautiful dried lavender.  Last night, I made the boutonnieres:

and the corsages:

Finally, a major element of the wedding is a handfasting.  Many don't know about this tradition which is Celtic in origin.  Wil and I were handfasted at our engagement - bound for a year and a day.  At the wedding, we will be handfasted with 6 cords binding 6 promises "for as long as love shall last".  The bindings are made with ribbon.  The colored ribbons and dangling charms were personalized with symbols that are important to us: dragonflies, turtles, Asian coins, abalone, amethyst...

After the wedding, the cords will stay bound and kept as a reminder of the promises they seal.



Things are coming together.  I still have the bouquets to wrap, but my tasklist finally seems to be getting smaller.  Hopefully you'll see more of me again in another month or so.