Living Space

Unlike a lot of couples these days, Dave and I aren't going to be living together until after we're married. Right now, I live in a dorm, and Dave rents from a friend who owns a house, so we're going to have to find a new place just for us before the wedding. Exciting!

A couple of days ago, I was struck with the inspiration to poke around on Craigslist and see what kinds of apartments we might be able to find in Cleveland.

I've lived on my own before, but I wasn't the lease holder for the apartment in that case--I had a financial arrangement with my roommate and even though the managers of our apartment complex knew me, we never ended up getting around to putting my name on the lease (whoops). Anyway, I've never been one of the 100% responsible parties when it came to paying rent.

And other than that, I've only lived in college dorms or with family.

So this whole apartment-hunting, living-out-on-our-own thing is kind of a big deal for me.

I found a listing on Craigslist for a duplex in Euclid that looked pretty much perfect. Not one to let an impulse get away from me, I sent the information to Dave, who agreed that it looked great. He called the number for the listing, and he went yesterday to have a look at the place. He liked it so much that we agreed we'd go ahead and put an application in for it.

Now, here's the problem: someone else got there first. The landlady is going to process that application first, and Dave gets the impression that ours will be processed only if that first applicant changes their mind or the application falls through for some reason.

We really, really want this apartment. It's the upper floor of an older house on the East side of Cleveland. It's a ten-ish minute walk from the lake, it's near some really nice restaurants, a park, and a library. It's spacious (1,100 sq. ft. for a 1-bedroom!), and it's affordable.

So, for those of you who read this that pray, how about throwing in a good word for us with the big Housing Supervisor in the sky? This place looks like it would be pretty ideal.



I mean, come on... look at that kitchen.

Les Fleurs, Deux

I've been continuing to think about wedding flowers. I should be writing a paper, but sometimes I need to take a break and let things percolate, so I don't view this as procrastination... I view it as letting my thoughts settle into something cohesive. It's sort of like sleeping on it, only without the sleep part.

I decided a good way to go about encouraging my history-paper-related thoughts to settle would be to stir up some wedding thoughts instead, so I got on Flickr and started browsing. I collected a mosaic of pictures of most of my favorite flowers and foliage.

As I've mentioned before, my mom is doing my flowers. Sadly, she's also on the other side of the country. This is where this blog can be really handy, because I can collect those pictures and make a mosaic and blog my thinking on wedding flowers as it evolves, and she can probably get a better idea from that than if we were sitting in the same room and I was trying to explain it without pictures or the clarity of thought that comes from actually writing things down.

These are the pictures I found:

(Source: 1. dried wedding bouquet, 2. Peonies Floating in Thin Air!, 3. plumeria "celadine", 4. Tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa), 5. Green Maple Leaves, 6. rosa-lírio, 7. Women... It's for you! I'm in love with you this morning!, 8. Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris), 9. the madonna lily, 10. Turkey Run - Lamb's Ear, 11. Hydrangea, 12. Wild Welsh Poppies, 13. B_W Dusty Miller)

This is resized to fit on the page, but if you click the link here you can see the mosaic full-size.

Top row (L-R): Peonies (one of my all-time favorite flowers), Plumeria, Tuberose, Maple Leaves
2nd Row (L-R): Stargazer Lilies (tied for top-favorite flower with peonies), Roses
3rd Row (L-R): Lady's Mantle, Madonna Lilies
4th Row (L-R): Lamb's Ear, Hydrangea, Poppies, Dusty Miller

In a nutshell, I like lush, large, fragrant blossoms, the smooth, cool green of tree leaves (it isn't just maple leaves; I have similar feelings about oaks and aspens), and the smooth, fuzzy, silver-green of lamb's ear and dusty miller.

While searching, I also found a picture on Flickr that immediately became my newest vision for bridesmaid bouquets:

(Credit: Flickr - Epressions Floral)

Hydrangea, stephanotis, dusty miller (according to the picture description... but I think that looks more like lamb's ear than dusty miller). Picture this with a green-tipped or white hydrangea instead of blue-tipped. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

In my imagination, the guys have boutonnieres that probably involve lamb's ear or dusty miller, and maybe a small poppy or mini-cluster of hydrangea blossoms.

Blogs I Read

When I am procrastinating--I mean, when I am thinking about wedding things because those things Need To Be Thought About, what I generally do is browse the Internets and read blogs in which other people write about their weddings and put up pictures of pretty flowers and what have you.

These are some of the things I read:

WeddingBee - The online bible of do-it-yourself wedding stuff. It's a blog! It's a community! It's a DIY paradise! And all this can be yours for free. Sigh. I live vicariously through the Bees.

Offbeat Bride - I wouldn't say we go as far off the beaten track as most of the people on this site, but there are some really great and fun ideas on there, and some really gorgeous photos. Dave likes to read it too, especially when they post recaps and photo galleries from crazy theme weddings (Star Wars wedding anyone? Of course Slave Leia can officiate!)

Vintage Glam Blog - It's pretty and wonderful and I love it and I want it. I want it all.

Also, even though it isn't really wedding related, I read RetroThing, because it has... well.. fun, retro things on it. You never know when inspiration might strike, or where it might come from.

Ceremony

It's very trendy these days to write your own vows.

Well, without offending anybody who did that, it's just not our thing. We're both good writers, but we also have spent years and years in schools where sometimes it seemed that the only objective was to instill in us a sense that compared to the literary greats, we are not so.. well.. great.

Or, as Dave put it, "if a pre-written ceremony was good enough for my favorite writers, it's good enough for me."

Of course, the question still remained as to which pre-written ceremony we'd use, as of course every denomination seems to have one. Even here, though, there wasn't too much digging around. We discussed it once or twice, confirmed that we agreed about this as we do about most things, and that was that--the Book of Common Prayer it is.

Most people would be able to leave it at that, but we are not Most People. Oh no. We are, very proudly, English Majors. Not for us the modern Book of Common Prayer, with its standard spellings and newfangled edits of a word here and there.

Did you know, for instance, that there are slight differences in the Book of Common prayer depending on whether you are Episcopalian (USA), Anglican, Episcopal Church of Scotland, Church of Ireland, Church of Wales, or Anglican Church of Canada? And that's to say nothing about the fact that, like most reference books that have been in print for a while, there have been multiple editions.

So, knowing what sort of thing we had in mind, I asked myself.. to which Book of Common prayer do we wish to refer? Surely nothing so new as the 1956 edition, or even 1900. Something from the 1800's, perhaps? No, not even that.

Illumination came to me one day as I was thinking about the British Literature Survey class in which I first set eyes on my intended. In the first semester of that delightful two-semester course, as part of our coverage of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, we have to read the Book of Common Prayer.

The original Book of Common Prayer, as penned by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, this Book is of course still available, even if it's considered a wee bit archaic by most people now. It's exactly perfect for us, and we intend to use pretty much the whole "forme of solemnizacion of matrimonie", although I still need to find out if we'll be allowed to have a communion service in the chapel, since the written policy is that absolutely no food and drink are allowed. I wonder if the Body and Blood of Christ get an exemption.

I'm very excited about our wedding ceremony. I think it will suit us exactly.

The Booke of Common Prayer - 1549 Edition

Venues: Ceremony

The readers of this blog who have gone to school with me (or visited me at school) are of course already familiar with the chapel on campus.. probably painfully familiar, if you were a student. Given our required chapel attendance, we students get to know the interior of our chapel pretty well over four years.

But there are people who read this who have never been here, so for your benefit (and for my own mental processing of how I want things to look for our wedding), I post the following.

(all pictures by me)

Our chapel was built in 1936. It's fairly simple in design; I hesitate to describe it as "gothic revival," but it definitely has some gothic elements to it, especially in the smaller details and the indoors.

It's a very popular location for weddings, and it's actually really hard to reserve it. We were fortunate enough that when we realized we'd have to move our wedding from New York to Pennsylvania, someone else had just canceled and we got the last available slot for the summer. It meant changing our wedding date, but all that means is that we get to get married a month sooner than we originally planned, and I'm not about to complain about that.

Because the interior of the chapel is so beautiful, I don't feel a need to gussy it up with a huge amount of flowers, especially since the vast majority of our wedding day is going to be spent elsewhere.

What we will have are candles on every other pew (a setup provided by the college). I'd like to have some kind of small floral decoration on the pews that have candles, and a pretty altar arrangement.

View from the front of the chapel

Sorry this photo's so dark. All I had was natural light, and it was fairly late in the afternoon. Also, wow, that is a lot of pews.. I'm going to be walking forever! Please note the beautiful stone floor I will be walking on.

The college recommends an aisle runner, but I will be barefoot, and I love walking on that stone barefoot, and it's so beautiful.

As you can see in the photo mosaic, the front of the chapel has fairly dark wood paneling, so I'm thinking some light flowers--probably white, to balance out that darkish wood color. I think they'll stand out beautifully.

Luckily, our chapel is so beautiful that it doesn't need a lot of extra adornment. This is good, because we only get access to it starting at 5pm, and the ceremony is scheduled to start at 6... and we have to have everything out again by 8, which includes using the space for any photos. We're on a tight time budget.

The Giving Away

So, we are doing one or two slightly--just slightly--unusual things at our wedding.

For instance, someone is giving me away. That isn't unusual, although it goes against a lot of recent trends. What's unusual is that, even though my dad will be at the wedding, he won't be giving me away.

A lot of years ago, before I even met Dave, I decided that whenever I got married (if I got married), I wanted my dad to officiate. This, of course, created a problem, because it would look silly for him to walk me down the aisle, ask who was giving me away, and then give me away, and the do the ceremony. I always get this sort of mental image of him hopping back and forth from standing at my side to standing up in front of everyone and then hopping back down to my side to answer his own questions.

The problem wasn't really a problem for long, though. I happen to have two very awesome godparents, who have always been a very big and very special part of my life. In fact, I was even the flower girl at their wedding when I was very little. So it only made sense that if my dad wasn't going to walk me down the aisle, my godfather should.

I agonized for a while about whether or not it would hurt my dad's feelings or anything if I asked my godfather (who is also my uncle on my mom's side) to walk me down the aisle. It made sense to me--after all, in the long run it means more to me for my dad to marry us than to give me away--but would it make sense to him? Do dads dream about giving away their daughters the same way that daughters dream about their dads giving them away? Hmm..

I shouldn't have worried, though, because my dad is awesome, so of course he understood and is cool with the plan.

I've thought about exactly what will happen when we get to the "who brings this woman to be married to this man?" line. I think it makes the most sense for my godfather to say something like "her parents and I," or "her family," but I don't know. There's still time to ponder on that one. What do you do when you're being given away by someone who isn't your parent, but your parents are there? Does the Book of Common Prayer have an instance for that one? How about Emily Post?


(my godfather with one of my bridesmaids)


I'm really happy with this plan. That walk down the aisle is going to involve three of the most important men in my life--my dad, my godfather, and my future husband.

Woah!

I have a wedding-day countdown on my facebook page. Oh yes, there is a program out there that saves me the trouble of having to actually use my brain to keep track of these things.. better living through the Internet, I tell you.

Well, as of yesterday, our countdown hit the double digits.

That's right. We're getting married in 98 days.

I'm having a minor freakout. This is not a bad freakout, per se. It's just that whenever we pass one of these milestones (the last one was 6 months, and it feels like yesterday. How are we already so close to the 3-month mark?) I seem to reach a new level of intense realization of the reality of the whole thing. It's easy to get engaged in August when your wedding is 11 months away (back when we were still planning to get married in July). You have plenty of time to plan, to adjust, to get ready.. and then suddenly you're 6 months away, or 3 months away, or 3 weeks away.

It's scary, because it's such a big, big thing. Marriage is a for-life proposition, after all, and we both take that really seriously.

I can't imagine anyone I'd rather spend the rest of my life with.

Dear Dave:

I know you aren't a huge fan of this picture, because you were not having a very photogenic day, and we have both lost weight since it was taken (and by "we" I mean "mostly you"). But you know what? I'm putting it here anyway, because every time I look at it, I think we look so happy together, and it makes me happy all over again, to think about being that happy with you. I feel so happy that I almost want to cry.

So there.



We are getting married in 98 days, and that is totally rad.

Hair trial

I have one local bridesmaid. In fact, she's so local that she lives just up the hallway from me, which is really pretty great, because planning a wedding while in college and far away from everyone else involved sometimes leaves me feeling pretty despondent and isolated. She helps keep me from feeling that way.

Yesterday at lunch with a friend, I was mentioning my ideas for hairstyles on the bridesmaids. She offered to let me experiment with her hair. The idea struck me as an excellent one, so I emailed O'Molly (my local bridesmaid, who is Irish, and so I will make jokes about her name) and invited her over to my room for a hair trial. The aforementioned friend actually wasn't able to make it until after I'd got ready for bed, so we decided to reschedule.

What I find particularly satisfying about last night's hair trial was that she showed up with clean, dry (very slippery) hair, and none of the styles we tried took more than a few spritzes of styling wax, a brush, and a handful of bobby pins. Also, none of them took me more than ten minutes at most, including deliberation about what to try.

I didn't document each step of styling, but I did document most of the results, so I can try and recreate things again later. I did not reference any guides while doing the styling, but before she stopped by, I spent about an hour reading the Bobby Pin Blog, and looking at hairstyling instructional videos on YouTube.

All pictures are by me, with awful quality because it was nighttime in a basement dorm room, and my camera is old, and I hate using the flash.

So, first we tried some very traditional-looking victory rolls. I loved these, but O'Molly was less than impressed. Also, they could have been a lot higher, but her hair, as I mentioned before, is slippery, and it took me a while to get used to working with it/get enough wax in it to make it do what I wanted. Please note that awesome red lipstick. It, along with some sort of vintage hairstyle, will probably be a requirement.


O'Molly decided that red lipstick and the awesome swing music we were listening to still weren't quite enough to set the mood, so she went and changed into a fancy-schmancy dress. She thought it would be fun. I agree. It was.


We tried the victory rolls in front with the rest of the hair down. Can we say bombshell? This might be my favorite of everything we attempted.

Next we tried what is actually a modification of the way my mom styles her hair. I love the way this looked in back, although we had to use a hair band to hold the front in place. For the actual wedding, I think I would use a clip.



Just for fun, I tried out a pompadour with a scarf, which is more rockabilly than our wedding will be, but still hilarious. I thought she looked super cute like this, but I think she thought it was a little ridiculous.


And last, but not least, we tried a made-up style that combined elements of the rest, and then completed the look with a hair flower. I made that thing myself, y'all! I plan to make several more--one for each bridesmaid, with a different flower for each girl. That one took me about 15 minutes, which is an amount of work totally out of proportion to how great it looks.



We were big, big fans of the flower.

After that, O'Molly had to go to work, so I had to resort to playing with my own hair. I post this partly so O'Molly won't feel totally singled out with this entry, and partly because Dave suggested that he wouldn't mind if I started wearing my hair and makeup like this every day.



What do you think? Is the rockabilly/1950's/Rosie the Riveter look for me? And which of O'Molly's hairstyles did you like the best?

Stylings

So, I never thought I would be enough of a control freak to dictate how my bridesmaids wore their hair. I've been a bridesmaid twice, and neither time was I even given any guidance about hair.

But, there's a very specific vintage look I have in mind, and a great vintage hairstyle is only going to help it shine through. So, I've been poking around the internet looking for ideas. One of my bridesmaids has very short hair. Another has quite long hair. The rest are somewhere in between. So it isn't that I want them all to have the same hair--I just want each girl to have some sort of retro flair to her hairstyle.


At the very least, every girl is getting a hair flower. I am planning to make these, in fact--have already made one. I'll post about doing that soon. The picture there on the left is really a little too elaborate--there won't be multiple flowers, just one--but it does give a basic idea.

I have been spending the last hour browsing The Bobby Pin Blog. Honestly, if I had the time or the patience, I would wear my hair like that every single day.

So, I'm not saying that I want to dictate everything. I'm giving people a lot of freedom. My bridesmaids are picking their own shoes, they're picking the cardigans they wear over their dresses... they each get individual jewelry and their own hair. It's just that I want them to choose that hair from a list of pre-selected options. Maybe spit curls to go with the hair flower for the girl with very short hair. I have at least one bridesmaid who I think would look spectacular with pin curls.

Still, part of me cringes at the idea of dictating things even that much. I'm torn between the age-old cry of the bridezilla ("it's my wedding! it's my day! I want it to look right!") and my constant reluctance to dictate anything to anyone.

Les Fleurs

So, I will admit, I haven't been thinking very hard about flowers yet.

"What??" you exclaim. "Beth, you're getting married in 101 days! How can you not have planned your flowers yet? Do you even have a florist booked? Do you know how hard they are to find??"

Well, yes, I am getting married in 101 days (hee hee, let's see how many times I work that into one post). No, I don't have a florist booked, exactly. Yes, I do know how hard they are to find.

But...

I have something awesome.

See, this wedding is a labor of love, and not just for me. Dave and I agreed very early on in the planning that it would be more meaningful to us (and not just for financial reasons) if our families and friends pitched in wherever possible. Thus my request that one of my oldest friends do videography. Thus the fact that my dad is marrying us.

And thus, my mother is doing our wedding flowers.

Now, the Internet is full if imprecations against DIY wedding flowers, but this is a special case. She's done them before. She's great at it. It's just an excellent combination of things--my mom, someone who is good at doing flowers, and flower arrangements for nothing more than the cost of wholesale flowers and materials.

The thing about it is, though, I'm having trouble putting my thoughts together about what exactly I want, because that intense and worrying sensation of impending doom--er, deadline--isn't really there. Yet. I'm sure it will be when the wedding gets even closer.

Anyway, I know I want a lot of green in the flowers, especially since the bridesmaids and groomsmen are going to be sporting what is essentially an entire palette of tans and browns. I also know I want flowers in my bouquet that are flowers I like. And I don't want orchids. They are (1) too trendy, (2) too expensive, and (3) just not a flower I have any particular feelings for.

Now, peonies? Peonies make me swoon with delight. Roses? I could bury my face in them all day. Lilies? Well, I don't care much for calla lilies, but give me some stargazers and I will gaze at them (with my nose) for hours.

Also, I love the look of hydrangeas in a bouquet, especially green hydrangeas. Maybe for the bridesmaids.


I just think green flowers would stand out so beautifully against dark brown dresses, and of course it would incorporate green back into the wedding party's look. Plus, it's just my favorite. Mmm, green.

Programs/Guestbook

I had a brilliant idea for a wedding guestbook, and I am thinking about working the idea so that it ties in with the programs as well.

As I've mentioned, the theme of our wedding is an academic one. I take this in a fairly vague sense, and largely go by feel for what will and will not work. We quoted Dante on our wedding website (and on the save-the-date that I designed but never sent out because we changed the date). We're getting married at college for crying out loud.

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like our invitations and programs to resemble books. I even designed our very own ex libris/bookplate design to go inside of them. Theoretically, it could also go inside of our massive book collection after the wedding.

Then one day I said to myself, "Self," I said, "how awesome would it be if we got old-fashioned library loan cards and a date stamp, and had each of our guests stamp and sign a card instead of a traditional guestbook? They could put the signed cards in a card catalog drawer, and after the wedding, the cards could go into a scrapbook."

"What an amazing idea, self!" I responded. (Note: this is only partially true. The conversation took place, but I didn't say it out loud.)

Then I had an even more amazing idea. What if, inside each book-like wedding program, glued to the inside of the back cover, there was one of those old, familiar manila envelopes, with a library card inside of it? Each guest could remove the card from their program and sign/stamp it and file as I mentioned above!

Of course, there would be extra library cards on hand for the people who didn't get the joke that they had to remove the card from the back of the program in order to sign the "guestbook"... but I'm sure a little typewritten note in the back of the program would help point people the right way.


So, I found someone on Etsy who sells the necessary library cards, and eBay is full of date stamps to be had on the cheap. I plan to make the programs along the lines of this tutorial, and buy a simple, antique-y looking leather album to put the library cards in after the wedding.

Dolled up

I like to say I have at least one bridesmaid for every major epoch of my life. I have my two cousins, who I grew up with--one of whom is my maid of honor, and was the first best friend I ever had. I have my two college roommates. I have Dave's awesome sister. And I have a girl who lives on my hall now and connects to my college v.2.0 endeavor.

They are all great girls, with their own sense of style and their own unique and beautiful appearance. Trying to find something that looks equally good on all of them has been a little bit of a headache, especially because it's taken me a long time to decide what I was even trying to look for.

I originally thought bridesmaids in green with brown cardigans. Now I'm thinking dark brown dresses with cream or gold cardigans. It echoes the brown and khaki of the men's outfits, and the lighter colored cardigan will keep them from blending into the woodwork in the chapel.

Some inspiration:



How. gorgeous. are. those. shoes? I want a pair of them with a desire too intense for words.

Groomsfellows

One of the more difficult aspects of wedding planning, for me, has been figuring out clothes for our wedding party. This was made worse by changing our venue and wedding date, which necessitated a slight change in my overall vision for the wedding theme and style itself.

We're getting married in a beautiful 1930's-era chapel at the college where we met. We're both major bibliophiles and really into all things vintage and literary, so a "vintage academia/ivy-league" theme in greens and browns seemed like a good choice for us.

There were a few more things to factor in. Dave doesn't like asking people to spend a lot of money on clothes, and I don't like for things to be too matchy-matchy. So, it took some time to come up with an idea for The Lads that I felt like was reflective of us and the style we want, while still being somewhat dressy.

I learn, through the wonders of google, that a term has been coined to explain my general idea here--it's called aesthetic traditionalism. I like it.

Here is the general idea for The Lads at this point:




I suppose we could also sum it up by saying that if Bertie Wooster would wear it (and it isn't a white dinner jacket or plus fours--I do want the colors to go, and we aren't golfing at the wedding), I wouldn't object to The Lads showing up in it.

First things first

Well, a number of people have suggested/requested that I start a wedding blog. I guess that only makes sense--my future mom-in-law is in Ohio, my mom is in Washington, my maid of honor is in New York, and my bridesmaids are scattered in various states between San Diego and Philadelphia. Add into that the fact that there are plenty of friends who won't be able to make it to the wedding but still want to hear about all the details, and it just makes sense.

So I guess we can consider this, for the time being, a digital wedding notebook.. an easy way to share wedding plans and ideas with our widely-scattered bridal party, family, and friends.

I didn't choose a wedding-centric name for the blog, because if I keep it up I imagine I'll still have things to write about after the wedding is done. The quotation in the title is from Charlemagne. In full, it goes, "We are born to die. We die to live better. This life is a road to our own country." In a lot of ways, it sums up the philosophy that Dave and I have about life, the universe, and everything.

Our wedding is another step on the road to our own country--a journey havenward. Nope, it's not a typo or deliberate misspelling of "heavenward." Married life is part of the journey too, so "havenward" seemed like a very apropos title for a blog that will begin with our wedding but will hopefully also consider things like setting up our first home together, learning about married life, and starting a family.