Once upon a DIY wedding

A month back my favorite wedding dress designer spoke with my favorite wedding blogger and I got a lovely note (on my birthday of all days!) from Emily of Once Wed asking to feature our wedding on oncewed.com. Having poured hours and days and weeks into the collecting and planning and creating of our sweet little wedding, this was a pretty warm thrill in the middle of chilly February.

Here is our celebration, parts one & two. I can't thank Emily enough, not just for contacting me, but for creating such a well spring of inspired wedding celebrations. I was under-whelmed with the majority of wedding related magazines & websites. Then I stumbled on websites like oncewed (more of my favorites on the right side bar) and a new world of unique wedding aesthetics opened. And from them, tons of links to talented women designing their own unique celebrations. Blogging can be a little vacuum, and it's been fun to hear from friends and fellow readers (of the hidden, but increasingly main stream alternative wedding blogs). I can and can't wait to explore your blogs from the links you're sending.

Anyone who has tried to craft & design their own wedding knows that there's nothing quite like it. Especially if you're inclined to make things yourself. (Sidenote: This guest blogger on 100layercake created a fantastic spreadsheet for how to determine if a DIY project is worth it, I wish I'd had it). This blog gathers my inspiration and projects. Capturing some of the wedding projects was a natural addition.

Cheers to all for the collective dopamine and inspiration that new, found & created images bring!

(photo, my favorite from our photographer).

Revisited

...or, "how I'm finally realizing the benefits of spending months pouring through antique stores in search of the perfect blue and clear bottles."

I rewarded my spring cleaning efforts with a bouquet of spray roses - the perfect fillers to a handful of the glass bottles I collected for the wedding.

I bough two or three antique glass bottles at a time throughout the fall, falling in love with the subtle differences in glass color, shape and the antique advertising of different potions and remedies in raised letters and decorations along the glass.

Not only do these make the sweetest mini-vases, it's an excuse to spring-clean the generic vases we have lying around. 

Wouldn't it be great if wedding rental businesses had vintage sections? (pssst, hi Grace!)

(hand drawn) hitches, (typed) knots, (quilted) balls & (letterpressed) chains

Sometime this spring --after summer clothes had been pulled from hidden closets, before all of the rain, after my speeding ticket-- Drew sat me down for an inauspicious conversation. I've tried to remember what he said, but all I remember is that it was a warm slow Sunday afternoon and the curtains looked really nice in the wind. I overheard him later telling my dad he just wanted to "make sure [she] wasn't going anywhere." It was sweeter than that, but I don't think anyone ever really wants to hear other people's sentimental moments. Suffice it to say, we decided we might just get hitched and thus began a vague few months of trying to decide what kind of celebration this kind of thing might call for.

Concurrently, a world of craft projects has been unlocked (handmade invitations, wedding favors, warm quilts for babies to lie on during the ceremony?). I love the man, but my craft heart fluttered just as loud.

So the Valentine's might have to take their first hiatus in 8 years & my sewing machine has had to share space with my typewriter. Stay tuned...