bad advice

Presented for your edification and enjoyment, in no particular order, here is the worst wedding advice I have come across during my brief foray into this insane world.

1. Six months before the wedding, start having regular facials administered by a beautician. That way, when you get a pimple three days before the wedding, it will feel like a major disaster instead of a minor inconvenience.

2. Work out what is most important to you, and spend the major portion of your budget on that. If music is important to you, you may not use an iPod full of your favourite songs. If your dress is important to you, you may not wear a $20 dress from an op-shop. Don't you understand that the importance of a thing is measured by how much it cost?

3. If you're wearing a sleeveless dress (i.e. 99% of all wedding gowns) you must tone your arms. It's such a beautiful moment in a wedding when your grandmother leans over to your aunt, tears in her eyes, and says, "Check out those guns! This wedding is awesome."

4. It is important to supply out-of-town guests with a bag filled with maps, chocolate bars and cute reminders of your relationship. You don't want them wandering around town, lost, starving and without a magnet to remind them of your initials, do you?

5. If you see the perfect pair of adorable Louboutins and you just absolutely need them for your wedding day, go ahead and splurge! You deserve it and if you don't you will always regret it. You are a sparkly princess and everything revolves around you and there will never ever ever be any consequences to your actions.

6. Your invitations must match your decor. All your guests will bring their invitations, hold them up against the table decorations, and check that they are the exact same shade of lilac. If they are not, you will be PUNISHED.

7. Put your initials and/or the date of your wedding on everything. As we have seen in many films, people often have sex in laundry rooms and bathrooms at weddings, and your bridesmaid might need to check the date of the wedding against the date of her last period.

8. If you can't dance in your wedding dress, you might want to consider getting a second dress for the reception. This is the only way to solve this problem. Oh, wait-- you could wear rollerskates and just get the other people on the dance floor to push you around, maybe?

9. Find room in your budget for a videographer; it's an important keepsake you won't want to pass up. Especially if you can edit in cool effects later, like a dinosaur biting you on the butt or something.

10. Your wedding should perfectly express not only your taste, but who you are. Because the best (perhaps the only) way to express yourself is through conspicuous consumption, and the decision to have poppies instead of roses in your bouquet is the most effective way to communicate your innner self to the world.

aw jeez

I'm getting married in three days and I don't have my shoes. Just about everything else is taken care of, though.

I had a big fat freakout the other night. I stopped the car in a parking lot and cried hysterically while Robert patted my hair and soothed me (possibly while wondering if it was too late to escape). It was over something completely unimportant, which just acted as a trigger for all my stress and anxiety and worry about this whole thing to come pouring out, and I found myself making reasonable points like "WHAT IF NOBODY THINKS OUR MARRIAGE IS REAL BECAUSE IT'S NOT A SIT-DOWN DINNER" and "I SHOULD HAVE STARTED MAKING TISSUE-PAPER POMPOMS MONTHS AGOOOO-HOH-HOH!"

Deep breaths.

ring-a-ding ding

Handscape rings by Zlda

Yesterday was the 18th of March, and it was exactly one month from the wedding. Today it is one day less. Holy frijoles, Batman.

We have been Getting Things Done. We have signed and lodged the papers. We have met with the celebrant to discuss our ceremony. And we have our wedding rings, which ended up being surprisingly painless.

Robert wanted a plain silver band. The first silver jewellery shop we went into showed us a bunch of rings, and he chose one. It was $50. The whole process took about five minutes. WIN.

My ring was a little more work. I decided that since my engagement ring has a gold band, only a gold ring would look right. I had my grandmother's wedding ring, the one which goes with the engagement ring, but it was too small. I wanted to look around and see if it would be cheaper to buy a ring or have this one melted down and remade.

Here is my advice for buying a wedding ring:

• Know what you want. This may mean sitting down and trying on a bunch of rings until you find the material you want (white gold? yellow? platinum? silver?), the style (plain? engraved? with stones?) and the width. Oh, and find out your ring size while you're at it.
  

• Once you find out what you want, you aren't obliged to buy it. Make a note of what it is and how much that shop is charging, and get some more quotes. (Letting the store know you are getting quotes is also a good way to see if they will be flexible with their prices.) This way, you can go around to different stores or even phone around, and you can quickly find out if they have what you want and what they're charging.
  

• No, seriously, go and get some quotes. I was looking for a very modest ring: a 2 mm width plain 18-carat yellow gold band. One of the shops, which was beautifully fitted out and staffed with exquisite people who had been extensively trained in the art of eyebrow-raising, showed me a ring in this style for $360. The next shop, a less impressive place, showed me the exact same ring for $250.
  

• If you have gold, use it instead of buying something new. This not only saves you a whole bunch of money, it is better for the environment: the mining has already been done. A wedding ring is a thing that doesn't really get thrown away; chances are that your parents (or your partner's parents) have old rings lying around from grandparents, or even jewellery such as bracelets that they never wear. After getting quotes from shops, I went to a jeweller and asked how much it would be to melt down and remake my grandmother's ring; he quoted me $180.

In the end, when I tried on my grandmother's wedding ring, it was only a few sizes too small. Not all old rings can be upsized, as they may have structural defects, but this one was in good shape. It was also exactly what I'd been looking for: a 2 mm width plain 18-carat yellow gold band.

The jeweller changed the size for $32.

WIN.

it's a nice day for it

White Wedding: Literal Video Version - watch more funny videos

Some wedding inspiration: a literal version of Billy Idol's 'White Wedding.' Please, someone tell me they are using this song for their first dance!

I just dropped into a St Vincent de Paul's op shop on my lunch hour, and bought a veil for $8.

I haven't quite worked out what I'm doing with my hair, but I thought it might be nice to work a veil in there somewhere. Since I'm not wearing a wedding dress per se, I thought it would be fun to go for a crazy head-dress to bride it up a bit. And really, when am I ever going to wear a veil again?

oh yeah, the wedding

I recently read a post in a wedding blog in which the writer apologized for writing so little over the past few weeks. She maintained that she had been so busy with actual wedding planning that she hadn’t had time to write about it. I considered using that excuse here but I didn’t think you would believe me. So here is the real reason: I pretty much forgot about the whole wedding thing for ages. Then I remembered but I couldn’t be bothered talking about it.

You see, first there was Christmas and holidays and it was 2008 and my wedding was in April 2009 and that was like a zillion months away, and I got a wonderful new job and I was drawing and seeing people and planning and being happy. Planning a wedding seemed a lot less interesting than having a life.

But then suddenly it was January and the wedding was magically much, much closer. April, as it turns out, is the fourth month of the year, which is really rather sneaky. My airy declarations of “All the important stuff’s booked, the rest will take care of itself” sounded a little hollow. Apparently we are supposed to send out our invitations 8 weeks ahead of the date? Ridiculous! Anyway, I have been doing Wedding Things and the whole thing is moving along. Wedding invitations have been designed and are almost ready to go to the printer (more on that later) and a dress has been bought.

Yes, you heard me, I bought a dress. I’m not sure if it’s The Dress, though. I went shopping with my mum and found a lovely dress with a lot of the features I wanted: sleeves (or at least covered shoulders), bright colour, flattering cut. But I did have a particular type of dress in mind, and this one had some differences: It wasn’t any of the colours I had in mind, and it’s a bit low-cut for my liking (although I could pin a bit of lace there to save my blushes, like a character from a Victorian novel).

Anyway, I like this dress very much. If I find another, more perfect dress, I’ll get that and this will be a pretty party dress; if I don’t, this will do very nicely, and I can stop worrying about it. (In case you think I’m being extravagant, this dress was on sale for $70, and will do for almost any occasion.)

I’m getting pretty excited about this whole wedding thing. That reminds me: I must remember to get the licence.

princesses don't need oxygen

From one of my all-time favourite Blogs, Photoshop Disasters, comes this insane image originally found at dreadful wedding site The Knot. Maybe the bride was a member of the Long Island Staylace Association? Suck it in, ladies!