Wedding Planning

DIY Storage for the Long Haul

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

One of the benefits of a long engagement is the ability to spread out some of those diy projects that, otherwise, have the potential to stress a bride out.

When deciding to do paper flowers, etc. I did run into one potential snag: how to store the bounty of blossoms so that they won’t take up inordinate amounts of space but remain crush-free until it’s time to bundle them up into their final forms?

Enter my not-so-elegant but oh-so-economical solution:

crush-proof storage for delicate diy | personal photo

crush-proof storage for delicate diy | personal photo

Egg cartons.

What better to hold precious cargo? They stack easily, come in various configurations, and are something most of us have around. When I realized they’d be perfect for this sort of thing I started saving them up and one holiday’s baking netted several large and regular cartons to fit my storage needs.

A normal-sized bloom will take up a single well, while buds and smaller accents can  cozy up together, up to 6 in 1, depending on their size. As you can see by my samples, above, this works well for both paper and ribbon roses. Break down a couple of the dividers between the wells and you could also store completed corsages and boutonnieres in them, too.

As for the rest of your decorations:

  • If you’re collecting glass bottles, jars, vases, or other cylindrical objects, glass-pack kits from the moving center of your choice make storing, stacking, and transporting them nearly break-proof.
  • If you’re collecting plates or other dishware, felt plate spacers are inexpensive as-is, and even more so if you buy a few yards of felt from the craft store and cut them up yourself. Bonus: no ink transfer like with newsprint.
  • If you have standing decorations in mind, design them component-wise (think IKEA flat-pack heaven) so that you can store them stacked or standing someplace out of the way but quickly assemble them the week or day of the wedding.

What’s your storage solution for DIY projects look like?

Searching for Inspiration

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

So last week I hopped onto the no-fresh-flowers train, but that doesn’t mean I’m anti-floral in general. I’m pretty adept at making pretty paper flowers already (and ribbon ones, too), now I just need to figure out what kinds, colors, and configurations to put them into!

Screenshot of my Floral Alternatives Board

Some of the many floral alternatives I’ve pinned while planning.

The up-side to non-fresh-flowers is you can come up with pretty much any color and shape combinations you can dream up. But that also means there’s a LOT of options to choose from, and that can be kind of a down-side at the same time.

While I like browsing wedding magazines for dresses and other ideas, the Internet is the best for floral inspiration. And add in a tool like Pinterest and you’ve got it made.

my wedding flowers pin-board

My Wedding Flowers Board

Unfortunately, when it comes to bouquet ideas, I’m not liking much of what I’m seeing. I’m even wondering if I want to carry a bouquet or anything else down the aisle. The sheaf design in the upper right corner is, so far, my favorite, but it’s still not a sure thing yet.

Moving on to other spots ripe for decorating, we’ve got aisle decorations and centerpieces. As to the former, hanging mason jars seem to be the most photographed, shared, and general thing going around and I couldn’t care less. Mason jars are great for many things, I’ve even used them in party decorations before, but I don’t see them making an appearance at our wedding.

Instead I’ve got something cooking in my head using lattice and wine bottles (of course) with paper flowers. The centerpieces are stumping me, too. Everything is either too tall, too round, too sparse, or too boring.

While I know there’s still plenty of places to look for a spark of inspiration, everything just looks like so much of the same these days, and nothing that I’m really dying to diy.

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

Anyone else having a Goldilocks moment trying to envision their decorations–floral or otherwise?

Flowers… Or Not

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

I’m a girl who loves getting flowers. They don’t have to be big or showy (a fact my first husband never seemed to grasp–he believed that excess is best, how else could he impress those around me if he did send ginormous, obviously expensive arrangements studded with stargazer lilies that perfume the room in less than an hour and give you a headache after that?), but I do love a pretty rose or 3 to sit on my desk or the dining room table.

After the aforementioned first ex, I managed to date a string of men who, more often than not, didn’t believe in giving flowers. One claimed it was rude to cut a flower for private enjoyment instead of letting everyone see it in nature. One thought that giving flowers was a sign of uber-serious commitment along the lines of moving in together.  o_O

The first flowers Mr. RT ever sent me | personal photo

The first flowers Mr. RT ever sent me | personal photo

Mr. Road Trip prefers to send flowers on occasion but it’s not his default gift–I’ve got no reason to complain–but usually, if I want flowers, I go buy ’em myself. And I’m okay with that.

It may surprise you, then, to learn that I am jumping onto the no-flowers bandwagon as far as the wedding is concerned. Actually, I made this decision before I knew there was a bandwagon to be on.

See, it’s one thing about buying a $9.99 bouquet at the grocery store to dress up the dinner table and another thing entirely to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars on decorations that are so fragile they have to be done at the very last minute, may not be available at all due to the whims of Mother Nature, and will barely last a day past the event. In my mind it is, to put it bluntly, a waste.

But to go straight to silk flowers (which, often, can be just as expensive as fresh blooms) just doesn’t fill me with joy, either.

Ribbon and Paper roses I've made | personal photo

Ribbon and Paper roses I’ve made–not the ones I’ll be using in my bouquet | personal photo

Instead, I’ll be focusing on paper blooms and non-floral alternatives. I’ve been experimenting with different papers and other materials to decide exactly what I want to construct our simple non-florals with. We’ve got boxes of wine bottles just waiting to be turned into something pretty, accumulated over the last few years by my tendency to save any potential craft supplies. And, thankfully, I’ve already got a pretty broad skill-set to work from between paper, beads, knitting/crochet, and wire-work. I’m really looking forward to the end-result, which will be mixed-media decorations throughout the ceremony and reception.

Would you consider going flowerless if it meant saving your budget?

Inspiration Everywhere

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

My re-introduction to the “modern” online-inspired wedding came several months before Todd and I got engaged.

Hell, I hadn’t even decided that I wanted to get married again, yet!

But I was looking for diy outdoor lighting options that wouldn’t break the bank when I search brought up the concept of LED throwies on a site called Weddingbee. I ended up not going the way of the throwies, but I did remember the ‘bee and would check back from time to time as I started to think more and more about the prospect of having another wedding, myself.

It was a bit of an eye-opener, all the things that were popping up in wedding-world compared to what I knew of weddings in the pre-Internet planning era (aka the Dark Ages).

And, of course, as soon as we’d talked it over and decided that marriage was back on the table, I started picking up all and sundry bridal magazines I could find. I also added a wedding folder to Google Reader and subscribed to some of the major wedding blogs around.

Easily obsessed? A bit. But I think it’s okay to go through that you-mean-I-get-another-shot-at-this-party phase, especially when it’s not your first time down the aisle and you might have some tiny detail-oriented regrets about the first (or second) walk.

But it doesn’t take long, really, to start noticing patterns. Like certain sites have a penchant for the “vintage-rustic” vibe, others love the washed out photography and Anthropology-inspired compositions. Others corner the market on non-traditional with pride. And each have their place, but they pretty much cover the same bases just in different ways.

Overload sets in, and you think you’ve “seen it all.”

At this point it’s good to do two things:

  1. Step away from the wedding media
  2. Look for your inspiration elsewhere

The first one is simple: set the magazines aside, don’t open the blogs or reader folders, and don’t watch those DVR’d episodes of Say Yes to the Dress.

The second? Well, where else do you look for wedding inspiration if not in the wedding-centric magazines, blogs and shows?!

This is where having a theme can really help. If your theme is circus or carnival, rent movies on those subject, do some research into circus history, or visit one if you have the opportunity. Soak in the details and let that guide some of your decisions. Find a hobbyist-level blog or magazine to subscribe to on your theme.

If you’re working with a color scheme but no other theme, do some mind-mapping or free association of items and ideas that those colors inspire, and find the threads that you want to tug and add to the event.

For Todd and I, with wine as our theme, a subscription to Food & Wine might be a smidgen more useful than one to Brides. I picked up a wine course book when Borders was liquidating (a moment of silence, please…) and have gotten a lot of design inspiration for our invitations from the scads of wine labels throughout the book.

And, then, once you’ve had time to take a tulle-free breath, you can wade back into the wedding industry buzz, feeling a little more in control, a little less frantic, and more sure of what does and doesn’t fit your idea for your wedding.

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

 

Do you ever feel the need to step away from the wedding magazines? 

The Saga of the Ring

Third Time Wife, Wedding Planning

I am walking around sans engagement ring. Again.

It’s in for repairs. Again.

This is, in fact, the third time in 8 months that I’ve had to take the ring in, and every time it’s been because of the setting. The first time (with only a month of wear under it’s band) the setting was loose, the stone was rocking in the setting and it was rattling.

Within 2 days of getting it back it was rattling again but I just chose to live with it. Turns out, they never actually sent it to the jeweler that time (which I suspected when they called me to come get it the next day when they’d originally told me it’d be a week), a fact I found out when I brought it in this time.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

The second time, this past January, I reached into the fridge with my left hand and one of the prongs caught on the shelf, snapping it clean off. My bad, totally, and since I’m right-handed not something I’d normally do. A fluke. I brought it in, dropped it off on a weekend (because they send out the repairs on Mondays), and got it back within a week. Unfortunately, I could clearly see which prong had been replaced–it was not a seamless job by any means. Kinda shoddy, honestly, but the repair was covered under the Care Plan so I didn’t want to cause a scene.

Here it is, the end of May, and the stone was so loose in it’s setting it was rotating like 30º. It looked like MC Esher had designed the ring. And not in a good way.

So I decided to take it in and talk with them about shoring it up a bit better. Fact is, I don’t think those 4 measly little corner prongs can handle the stone. It’s just not enough. My plan was to explain that this was the 3rd repair in 8 months and that the setting being loose was a constant problem. As a solution, I suggested making the 4 corner prongs double prongs, couching in each corner of the cushion cut stone better, or adding 4 prongs, 1 on each side of the stone at the mid-points. This would make the stone more secure and ensure that I wouldn’t need to constantly bring in the ring for tightening. A win-win for both parties, right?

Wrong.

First I was told that it would be $45 per prong to change the setting. I get that the price of gold has gone up since the last time I had a ring worked on (about 6 years ago, or so, I had an antique ring–WWII era–repaired, all 12 prongs retipped and several re-seated, for around $50), but $180 for 4 prongs? Really?

But that turned out to be a moot point as another associate (I’m guessing the manager from the I’ve-been-doing-this-26-years speech he gave me*) told me that they couldn’t add prongs to this ring. That no jeweler, anywhere, would do it (which, you know, sounds like a dare to me!), and it’d be like creating a whole new ring.

I get that I’m not a jeweler. But I’m not your average consumer, either. I can look at the side of the ring, especially when the stone is cock-eyed, and see there’s a rim running just under the top of the ring, a rim that the stone partially sits on, a rim that runs the entire inner circumference of that setting. You’re seriously telling me that prongs could not be attached to that to secure the primary stone?

Not to mention that there are 26 stones in the halo and band that would not have to be reset, so spare me the “create a whole new ring” crap.

They even asked me if I just wanted to get a different ring.

Uh, no. It’s my engagement ring, it’s the one Todd officially asked me to marry him with, no I do not want a different ring. I want this ring to be sturdy enough to wear every day without rattling around like a bird in a cage!

But, again, we have the “Care Plan,” so I left the ring there. Supposedly Mr. Manager is going to chat with the jeweler, once said jeweler has had a chance to evaluate the situation, and will be calling me to let me know what my options are. Supposedly they’re going to bulk up the prongs that are already there, to handle the sturdiness issues, but we shall see.

I’m not exactly holding my breath.

*He also did the hold-up-one-finger-mid-sentence (my sentence) so he could go back to another client. I get that he was helping someone else, but you finish with them before you come help the chippy out whose not helping me, rather than adopt a supercilious air. I’m willing to bet he works on commission. At this point I doubt I will support buying anything from this store again.

Pretty Book and Flower Icon

Have you had any problems with your engagement ring?
How did the store handle it? Were they willing to work with you
or did they blow you off?