My Something Blue

I taunted fate just now. I busted out the hot glue gun and scissors at midnight and proceeded to create my wedding hair piece. (This is NOT the kind of thing where I left myself room for error. I walk on the wild side. Recognize.) Usually under these circumsances I try...I fail...and I have to re-order my supplies the next day.

There are two reasons why I was suddenly moved to try my luck tonight.

The first was that I recieved a wedding invitation in the mail today from Jessie, a very old and very dear friend. The invitation was embellished by a pretty navy blue strip of fabric with a sky blue floral pattern. The lightbulb was illuminated! Lately I've been pondering what I can use for my "something blue." It didn't seem like it'd be difficult to think of something...after all, our wedding colors are yellow...and TWO shades of blue. (Sky and navy.) But all I could think of was my garter but how b.o.r.i.n.g. is that?...and besides that I'm not totally sold on the idea of wearing a garter with a knee length wedding dress.

The second reason is brought to me by pinterest. My friends Kelly and Chris recently got engaged and, as is now tradition, Kelly has created a terrific pinboard to organize her wedding ideas. I saw that she pinned this beaut:

Ahhhhh. All the beautiful veils. 

Well, I decided that it was time to make mine. I've had the materials for a while, I've just needed a little push in the right direction. This photo was for me that perfect little push. I looked at the original etsy posting (you'll never guess how much that veil costs. It's silly money.) I looked at it from all of the artsy angles and I figured out how it was made because I am a genius and it is easy to make. 

I only spent ten minutes and eight dollars on my veil. I took a headband that I never wear, wrapped it in Jessie's fabric strip and secured it with a dab or two of hot glue. Lefthanded. Could have ended in tears. Then I glued a floral applique to the headband and attatched two paper flowers with wire so that I can adjust or detach them at my leisure. 

...I know what you're thinking. And the answers are yes, I am going to have much cleaner hair on my wedding day, and no, that's not the hairstyle I'm going to wear on my wedding day.

I'm going to pin the netting into place so that I can detach it after the ceremony.

So there it is...a two-fer! My something blue and my veil.

In other wedding news, I cut two books into over 2,000 strips of paper over the weekend for our paper chains and I bought some pretty porcelain birds for our centerpieces that are probably going to break en route to England, but...maybe they won't?? 

Joann Fabric has issued some c.r.a.z.y.y.y.y.y. coupons this month so I'm going to pick up some material for a few table runners (and lovely handbags) tomorrow. Let me tell you this, friends. A bride- and groom-to-be need NEVER pay full price for ANYTHING.

Goodnight!

Laura

Well that was fast!

Last night I during the 5 hour abyss when between bedtime in England and bedtime in the States, I was wasting time watching some TV. I was watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and thinking, Man. Those rings. I've got to start filing those rings. It's going to take F.O.R.E.V.E.R. and I'd better start now. So good old dad went in search of his rat tail file, and ten minutes later he emerged from the basement with file in hand.

I tried for a few minutes to perfect my technique. It was laborious. The ring kept flying out of my hands or I'd file my finger by accident. I just couldn't get a solid grip on it. It was clear that I needed a makeshift vice to hold the ring, so I took two thick catalogues and stuck the ring between them so that just over half was peering out from the between the spines. Then I filed with one hand while I held the catalogues together with the other. For a while I was a bit noncommital because I assumed that this would take me days and days just like it did to smash them into shape. So I look down and realize that I'm getting really close to the outer edge of the quarter. So my attention turned from a ratio of 9:1 It's Always Sunny:filing to 1:9 It's Always Sunny:filing. It took me two episodes to finish my ring and right as The Daily Show was coming on, I ran down to show my dad. And man, I have to say that my arms and hands were feeling weird...it was the strangest sensation. They were tired, weak, throbbing, vibrating, burning, and numb all at the same time.

I sat down for The Daily Show. But who was I kidding? I got up again to get Rich's ring. By the time Colbert was finished I had two wedding rings: his and hers. They. Look. Fantastic. I'm so proud of them!

I also made our ring bearer's pouch out of a TOM's bag. I don't think we're really going to have a ring bearer, the only little boy that we're close to is the Best Man's son Cody, a sweet but unpredictable boy. So it'll probably be Neil, Cody's daddy, wo will hold onto our rings. I think that we're going to buy this stamp from Etsy:

If and when we do, I'll probably stamp the ring pouch to add a little handmade touch.

I also want to quickly show you my veil in progress! These are the pieces of it:

It's going to be a birdcage veil. I'm thinking that I'll probably just bobby pin the loose netting into place, attach the floral piece to a plain headband and stick the headband over the netting. That way I don't have to wear the veil netting all day but I can still have a little bridal flair in my hair for the reception. After all, how many times are you a bride, am I right? I got the netting here for $3, I got the applique here for $4, and my mom bought me the paper flowers from Michaels for my birthday. I think they were about $5. $12 for a veil, and only $7 out of pocket ain't bad when you consider that this $90 is the alternative.

So with my veil and our rings alone, our wedding is already about $400-600 cheaper than it ought to be. This budget wedding is going to be a cake walk!

Okay it is WAY past breakfast time. 

I hope anyone reading this has the most amazing day!

Over the hump! And a wedding present to myself.

Just a short one today, mostly to puff out my chest and say I DID IT! I REALLY DID IT! 

What did I do? I only drilled great bloody holes into bloody George Washington's face! Twice!
I've had our wedding rings-cum-1964 quarter dollars sized for ages, but they've been sitting inactive ever since because I've been gathering the nerve to drill the holes into them. I guess I was waiting for a day when Sam (my oldest brother) was out of the house because he suggested that I should use some really elaborate method that involved a blowtorch and ice water. Like that was going to happen. I'm sorry, but I could barely get over having to use an electric drill. I found that intimidating. A blowtorch is most definitely where I draw a very bold and discernible line. So I had to drill the quarters at a time when I knew he wouldn't mosey in and ask why I wasn't using his genius method. (I'm not saying it wasn't genius, it was, it was just also a little bit too death-defying in my eyes.)

I've been pondering and pondering how in the world I should create my negative space, but when the time came I just went for it, no hesitation. I knew that if I hesitated I would purposely distract myself and put it off again. So I viced those babies up and just started drilling. I used a small drill bit to get it started so that a guidance way was made for the larger drill bit which actually made all of the progress. It was slow going, but steady...I believe that I'll be sneezing silver shards for days, but I did manage not to get any into my eyeballs. It took about 30 minutes for each ring and I only had a quarter fly off the vice once. It was mine. It got a little bit scratched when it ricocheted off of the floor, but it's barely noticeable. So I got the intimidating part out of the way! They even sort of resemble rings now. Just a few more hours of filing them down and ta da! we'll have handmade, 25 cent wedding rings!

After I was done I made myself an early wedding present, an apron! I've been wanting to try my hand at  aprons for a while, and it's just easy as can be. I have all of this great material that I think would be great for aprons and now that I know how to do it, I can start posting some to etsy... I made mine out of vintage bedsheets. The design needs a little tweaking, but overall I'm happy with my little apron. I can't wait to get back to England so that I can resume my domestic responsibilities. Yeah, I said it. Chew on that, women's suffrage.

There are still some threads loose in that photo because I really couldn't be bothered to fix it up at the time. Must remember make that amendment. 

Goodnight!

Laura

Love notes, fear, bunting, and programs.

Hello! 


It's a dreary, rainy Sunday here in the Atlanta metropolitan area; I've been cooped up for the better part of the day, but it's given me an opportunity to work a bit more on my visa application pack. Today's task has been to print off the messages between Rich and me that have been passed through facebook over the years. It's a B-I-G job, there were over 13,000 messages, can you believe it? It hasn't been very exciting because it's a lot of ctrl+c and ctrl+v and ctrl+s. I've also been reformatting every line it so that it takes up less space, and deleting some of the conversations that go something like, "I'm making a grocery list, do you need anything?" It's repetitive and tedious, but it's made my heart so light to re-read all of our messages and letters. In my mind, it has been the best way to spend a rainy Sunday. 


I keep thinking that when we have babies, and they are old eough to be interested, it'll be really nice to have a great deal of our love affair documented and organized in a nice little package. The development of our friendship and then our relationship was so warm and lovely--I'm actually tearing up because our letters and notes are so touching. We tell eachother that everything is going to be okay...a LOT. It's a recurring theme. I even bought him a book called "Everything is going to be okay". 


It hasn't only been heart warming to go through our messages today, it's also been encouraging. There are times when I am nearly crippled with fear and doubt about this visa. I find my mind wandering into this horrifying territory...what will happen if I'm not granted my visa? What if our wedding is stopped? What will we do? What on earth COULD we do? I look at every chink in our armor, I especially worry about being judged for not having enough money. We might not have much money, but we are very resourceful--we don't need much money, and we certainly don't spend more money than we make. But what if we can't project that in our application? I have this unhealthy and unshakeable thought about how unfair it is that some couples our age get married with lots of debt, when we haven't got any at all, but those couples don't have anyone asking for their bank details or employment records like we do. I go in search of reassurance almost everyday, praying for peace of mind, and asking for the heart of whomever reviews our application to be softened. It was nice to find some peace today through our own once-spoken words. 


So that was my day, spent in front of a computer screen and collating 69 single spaced, double columned pages of love notes. Rich has ben working hard in front of a computer screen, too! He's finished our wedding website and it looks i.n.c.r.e.d.i.b.l.e., he did a great job, you should go see.


I finished cutting, sewing, turning, and pressing our yellow and blue bunting...we've got enough now to decorate the marquee, but Rich suggested that we also make some to string between two trees or something of the like. All that's left to do is sew them into some bias tape so that we can hang them up.

A lot of the material I already had, the blue floral is a flat sheet that I've had covering my closet door since I was a teeneager, the plain blue is cut from pillowcases with no matching sheets, and the yellow gingham is from a set of curtains that were in various babies rooms as we were growing up. (I was in a little bit of trouble for destroying/appropriating those.) The other material was all 30-40% off during various Christmas sales--apparently the time to buy fabric is Thanksgiving through New Years. I don't think I paid more than about $15 for the material to make these, and it'll make 150 feet of bunting. Insane!

I also cut out two thirds of our program covers last night. 

I went to lunch with my dear friend Faith yesterday and we swung by a few places--one of those places was Michael's. I've been shopping around for decent rubber stamps--one bird and one repeated geometric pattern--and also some yellow paper for a third of our seventy two programs. I was really looking for yellow chevrons (I'm obsessed with chevrons right now) but I fell in love with the yellow paper above. Faith purchased one sheet for me, bless her! I started with just one to make sure it was the right size, I'm the world's worst estimator. My father took me back last night to buy five more sheets. (I get four pieces out of one sheet, so I have twenty four pieces now.) Thanks to Faith and dad's generosity, I still haven't paid a dime for our programs, though I'm still on the prowl for the final paper design.

...I guess technically that's not true, I did buy the blue paper, but I bought it from Old Navy before I even graduated highschool. It's decorated my walls for years, and now it's being repurposed to give me twenty four (basically) free program covers! 

To whomever has read this, thank you, and I hope you checked out Rich's handcrafted website. I'm so proud of him! Please give a shout if you have any bright ideas for us.

Goodnight,

Laura

Wedding rings that cost a quarter of a dollar.

One very common thread for our wedding is that most of the materials that we use are repurposed or recycled. For instance, I've cut up sheets to make bunting, we're rinsing out jam jars for vases, that sort of thing. But to me the most interesting, resourceful, and intensely cheap repurposization is our rings.

...I don't think that's a word, "repurposization."

I mentioned these rings in last night's lengthy post, but I wanted to expand on them a little bit and show you how they're coming along.

So I told you about the soldiers, how they'd hammer silver coins with the butts of their spoons and send them home to their sweeties. Leave it to the boys of the forties to come up with a brilliant, heartfelt idea like this, and leave it to them to also make sure it's dirt cheap.

I think I've got Rich's down to the right size and I've bashed mine for a lot of hours this afternoon. (My poor brothers and their poor ears.) Mine is about half way done. I'm a little bit nervous about the sizes...not so much mine, (maybe a little,) I have my engagement ring with which to compare, but I've had to go to rather ghetto lengths to figure out Rich's size. Before I left England, I wrapped a skinny, ring-sized slip of paper tightly around his knuckle and taped it... I've got his ring to where that paper JUST fits inside the beveled rim. I'm pretty sure that I can get it resized by a jeweler once it's all done, if need be.

Anyway, the way it seems to work is this: as the circumference of the quarter gets smaller the edge bevels and becomes thicker, and the inside of the ring is what was once the surface of quarter. Obviously, the smaller the ring size, the thicker the band, so because my finger is thinner than his, my ring will be fatter.

The ring I'm holding here is Rich's. The band is as it will be when it's finished...all I need to do for his is hollow it out which I am avoiding for as long as possible. My nerve are racked about it. The one on the spoon is my half-finished ring. I've still got a good few hours of hammering ahead of me and my knuckles are already bruised from repeatedly missing the quarter and smashing the daylights out of my thumb.

In this photo you can kind of see that the edges have beveled so that you can see the writing:

I've made a little more progress on the bottom ring, mine, since I took the photo this afternoon. I'm so excited to marry that boy! I'm glad that our wedding rings are going to be so personal and they will just speak volumes about us as a couple. We've worked hard to be together and we've worked hard on these rings. See the connection?

Tomorrow I'll be bashing US currency again. And I'm going to finish my bunting, and I'm going to get back into bag making for etsy. I'm actually going to try out an apron or two...I think I'll figure out a pattern on the fly, they can't be that hard to make, right?

Goodnight,
Laura

A few examples from our genius handcrafted $2,000 wedding.

Yo dudes!

It's been nine whole months since my last post, but I suppose no one was counting. I hope everyone's had a great New Years/Christmas/Winter/Autumn/Summer! Rich and I had a lot of fun together over the summer months, we both agree that it was our best ever! We were together in England from May until November, and I've been in the states for the holidays. It's been hard to be away from eachother, but we're putting on our bravest faces and remembering that next Christmas, we'll be Mr & Mrs Fuller.

We've made a lot of headway with wedding plans, (one would hope so after nine months,) but it's been a crazy long process. Some couples plan weddings in just a few months, but I don't know how they do it! I guess that most couples have the advantage of being in the same country for the entirety of their engagements, but we spent an awful lot of months just deciding basic things like color schemes and wedding themes. It even took us half a year to decide when we'd get hitched! Back in October we set the date! It's the 16th of June, which is also the second anniversary of the day we met at the train station in Rome, Italy so it's a really meaningful day to us. We've got a little over five months left, and I think we're down to brass tacks with the planning. Now we're onto the doing! Hopefully we'll get everything together in plenty of time, but it's a little daunting--we're literally creating our wedding with our bare hands. We've made everything so far, except my dress and shoes! Want some examples?

I typed out all of our invitations and RSVP cards on an old manual typewriter--over fifty of them! Those were a bit of a headache...I can see why people spend a stupid amount of money on invitations. But we made ours for $30 and a little bit of elbow grease. We're really pleased with them, they're exactly what we wanted! They were so worth the effort.

I've also got the supplies to make my veil and hair piece. I'm making a vintage inspired birdcage veil with a detatchable hairpiece so that I can still feel pretty at the reception. The supplies cost me less than $8 (even with shipping!) and it's going to be so pretty and simple. I can't put it together until I'm back in the UK since it'd surely be crushed en route. Hopefully I won't mess it up. I believe there's room for error...but if not...and if I do wind up screwing it up, hey I'll think of something! I'm just thankful that I've got enough sense not to blow 5% or more of our budget on a veil.

We're even making our own wedding rings! I'm SUPER nervous about those. It's pretty cool, though...I heard that in the World Wars some U.S. soldiers would spend their free time smashing quarters with spoons to make rings they'd send home to their sweethearts. You see, before the mid 1960's they were made from solid silver, not just plated in silver like they are now. My dad gave me two quarters from '62 and I've been smashing them with a spoon for the past couple of weeks, and they're looking pretty good. I've got Rich's sized and mine's getting pretty close...but I have to drill holes in the middle of them and that notion terrifies me.

OH! And Richie is making a GREAT website for us. It's his first ever website and it looks amazing. He's been tweaking it for a couple of days and is not 100% satisfied with it yet...and I know my future husband well enough to know that until he says it's DONE, he doesn't want anyone to see it. But he knows ME well enough to know that I'm chomping at the bit to show off his creation so he's working really hard to get it done soon. Once it's done, I'm totes dropping links. All. Over. The internet.

Anyway, that's the end of the update for now, but I solemnly swear that I won't wait nine months for another update. Cuz I know how desparate you are to read about my life. Cuz it's crazy interesting, right? Hey, at the very least I'll be back in FIVE months to tell you how amazing our wedding was and how great married life is. (Ooh. I just ended my final sentence with a preposition. That's pretty bad.)

I'll try really hard to be back soon, for my own benefit if nothing else. Goodnight!

Laura

The Lovebirds Project

This is just an update on our wedding progress...


So instead of getting married in August of '11, we've decided to get married in June of '12. (Which makes me kinda happy, because I can now sing this song and mean it from the bottom of my heart:

Yesssssssss.

Anyway. This is our plan: I'm going over there on the 24th of May, and staying about six months. I'll come back to the states for about 2 months (November-January-ish.) When I get back, I'll apply for a fiance visa, which takes up to about 8 weeks. Then we'll have 6 months to get married after I go back to the UK, so June it is! Still no set date, but we're pretty certain about this now. 

Rich and I are going to be trying to raise money for my visa and our wedding by selling handmade goodies  on etsy! We're having a LOT of fun brainstorming. I knitted a scarf yesterday! It's really pretty, if I do say so myself. I know I've asked a lot of you for ideas already, and I've gotten a lot of good feedback already! 

It'll be really nice for me to have something to do, too, while I'm in England and can't work.

In other news, I ordered a GREAT dress from J.Crew--$80 wedding dress? Heck yeah! I just hope it fits. 

Rich and I want a bird themed wedding. We've been scouring the internets for birdy things.

Well. More later.

Time for bed. Every night I think to myself...it's been _____ number of days since I've seen Rich, and it'll be _____ number of days until I'll see him. Today those numbers are 103 and 32. Gosh, those numbers are looking so good right now. One more month! 

Goodnight,

Laura