Dressing Up (Part 2)

So, after I scrapped the Ebay, custom-made dress idea, I started looking online for vintage dresses. I looked at both vintage wedding dresses and vintage party/special occasion dresses, because I didn't feel like my wedding dress had to be a Wedding Dress for me to love it and feel "bride-y" in it. It was tricky, though, to find enough options. A lot of online vintage stores only have one or two wedding dresses, and maybe three or four other fancy-enough-for-a-wedding dresses. Or their pictures don't give you a good enough sense of the dress. Or they're way too expensive to even consider, since you can't try it on and you (usually) can't return it.

I did find and fall in love with one dress I saw on Etsy. The price was great, the dress was beautiful and the seller advertised that she had a space not too far from my apartment where she conducts private appointments. So, theoretically, I could make a private appointment with her to try on the dress I loved. And -- possible bonus! -- she had a half dozen other dresses that would have made great back-up options. If I tried on my favorite and decided I didn't love it, there was still a good chance I wouldn't leave empty-handed. I sent her a message through Etsy and anxiously waited to hear back from her. Then I sent her a message through her website and waited. Well, it is two weeks later and I am still waiting. I included my phone number and email address, so there's really no reason I shouldn't have heard back from her by now. But, in that two week time span, something else very exciting happened that made me not even care that the Etsy seller fell off the face of the earth. Stay tuned for Part 3!

Dressing Up (Part 1)

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I have known for years that I wanted to wear something vintage or vintage-inspired at my wedding. It's not that I hate modern wedding gowns. On the contrary, I LOVE them on other people. I watch "Say Yes To The Dress" religiously, and have since Season 1. Okay, I watch for the horror as much as the ecstasy, but I still think a majority of the gowns look beautiful on the brides. And I honestly thought that every one of my friends looked positively divine wearing a full-length modern gown on her wedding day. Those dresses, however, are just so not me. I don't know what it is that makes me so averse to even trying one on. There's just something fussy and heavy about them. Heavy with fabric, heavy with cake-topper-Bride-with-a-capital-B symbolism, heavy with ... a feeling of requirement? "This is what you have to wear because this is what people wear." But I still want to look bridal ... just in my own way.

I have always loved vintage clothes and vintage styles and since our wedding is in Las Vegas at the end of summer, when temperatures could be in the 90s, I wanted something short, which almost no newer gowns are. There are a few very cute styles, but none of them really called to me.

My first thought was to have a vintage dress recreated by a talented seamstress (I sew, but not that well). Many years ago as I was trolling the internet for vintage clothes to buy, I found the most amazingly adorable vintage dress. It was a knee-length off-white (like halfway between dove gray and white, but kind of silvery as opposed to dirty-looking) satin dress with a full skirt and adorable beading. The dress was already sold (first problem) and had cost like $800, which was way, way more than I would have spent for a dress at that point in my life, when a wedding was something I wasn't sure I'd ever have. However, there were several very crisp, well-lit images of the dress from every angle. I copied the pics onto my hard drive and never forgot the dress over the years. In the back of my mind I thought that if I ever got married, maybe I'd be able to commission someone to make the dress for me, based on the pictures.

Well, in the intervening years, a booming market of Chinese dressmakers started doing business on ebay and now it's possible to get anything you want made by them, and on the cheap. I sent my pictures to one of the ebayers, they said they could do it, I asked for fabric swatches, they obliged. And that's when the bloom came off the rose a bit. None of the swatches were quite the same as the magical shade of the original dress and they were all awful-feeling acetate, polyester, I don't-know-what, not the silk satin I had inquired about and which I believed the original dress to be. I could have pursued it further, and I still might, but once a little bit of doubt creeped in, the whole plan started to seem less appealing.

Which led me to ... Part Two of this saga! Stay tuned.

Planning a (non)wedding, one six-foot sub sandwich at a time

Our wedding will look a little different than this.

My boyfriend and I got engaged February 12, 2010. After the initial euphoria wore off, we looked at each other and said "Soooo ... I guess we have to plan a wedding now?" With the raised inflection at the end and everything.

It took us about two-point-five seconds to realize that the Typical Wedding in a hotel ballroom with a $125 per plate dinner was not our scene. Also not right for us was the rustic, DIY-chic, wedding-blog-ready, ladyboner-inducing sort of wedding. I love doing crafts and DIY projects in my non-wedding life, but I just couldn't imagine hand-embroidering 100 invitations that would be immediately thrown away, or spending thousands of hours scouring etsy for the perfect handmade cake topper that no one would notice or care about besides me. And I certainly wasn't going to pay someone else thousands of dollars to make my wedding look like I had Done It all mYself. That's the opposite of the point!

So that left us in a weird No-Man's Land of wedding prep. We wanted to plan a celebration for ourselves and our friends that a) wouldn't leave us in debt, b) wouldn't be more about the aesthetic details than about getting married and having fun with those we love the most, and c) would still be memorable for us and our guests.

I wanted to document this experience because I don't see a lot of weddings like the one we're planning out there in blogland and because I expect it to be mildly interesting to at least one or two other people out there. One or two people, I hope you enjoy it.