Black Tie DIY

DIY: making a relationship infographic (wedding programs/save-the-dates)

Justin & I are both tech geeks. When it came time to design our wedding programs, I knew I wanted an infographic. There really aren’t any sites out there that we found helpful when we were trying to figure out what data to use for our relationship, so here are our lessons learned…

A hybrid timeline/infographic design works best for quantifying a relationship: Although everything in life has a timestamp, most individual moments just aren’t that momentus. A simple timeline doesn’t necessarily tell your story.  However, trends that emerge from aggregated moments can be very interesting. When you’re summarizing a relationship, especially for the purpose of a wedding-related paper goods, the stand-out individual moments are pretty obvious - first meeting, first date, engagement, etc.  But I felt like the flavor of our relationship was in the stuff that we did often. So we chose a split design: timeline, then summary icons, then more timeline.

What to quantify in the “summary” part? We thought a lot about what defined us as a couple - what did we do together most often, and where.  Some themes were obvious…we met blues dancing, and traveled the country together to go to Lindy exchanges.  Some were less obvious, and surfaced when we started looking at TimeHop and Foursquare and other apps we use regularly…it turns out we play a lot of Big Buck Hunter.

How to gather the data: To create the timeline portion of the infographic, we searched Google Calendar and pulled the dates of a few key milestones (the night we met, our first date, the night we got engaged, etc). 

For the aggregated-moments section, we checked:

• Foursquare
• TripIt
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google Calendar
• Twitter

Foursquare was by far the most useful; if you’re an active user, it’s an excellent source of data on all of the places you’ve been in your day-to-day life. (There’s one particular vegan restaurant in the East Village that I’ve eaten at 67 times over the past year, it turns out). There’s an excellent hack built on top of Foursquare called Intersquares, which can show you all of the places that you & your significant other have checked in together.  Or, if you’re more technical, there’s API; our first visualization attempt was a heatmap made from checkins pulled from that API, but it turned out we very rarely left the 10-block radius around East 9th Street so it just looked like a bulls-eye. 

The other services served more as reminders of the things we’d done together.  There wasn’t any way to pull out the data, so we did a lot of manual tabulating. We looked for trends in restaurants we went to, what we did on “date nights”, where we hung out. TripIt provided us with our travel stats: 34,174 miles traveled between 20 cities over 3 continents.   

Creating an icon set:  We had to find an interesting way to visualize the results, so we created representative icons.  Some of our milestone dates had clear image pairings…Justin asking me out over Twitter = the bird logo, me moving to San Francisco = the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. The cool thing about this was that creating a relationship icon set gave us our placecard/table card design as well.  We made a set of rubbers stamps of our icons, and DIY’d those.

The other side of the program was much simpler to put together - it was just the flow of our ceremony and the names of our bridal party.  After everything was laid out, Justin took the files to a print shop - two programs fit on each sheet, and the printer cut them in half.  Then Justin hand-stamped the top of each with the same rubber stamps we made for our invitations.  

Final results:

If you’re inspired by this DIY and make one, I’d really love to see what metrics you choose.  

DIY: multicolor letterpress wedding invitations hack

Everyone has something they’re kind of willing to skimp on during the wedding-planning process.  Paper was that thing for me - I was totally fine with doing a basic printed invitation.

That was not OK with FDH. He cares a lot about typography and color, so I agreed to turn the paper-goods part of this shindig over to him.  He had his heart set on letterpress, but the price of a 3-color invitation started at ~$5.00/piece. So we came up with a hack to bring the price down…one that actually wound up helping us find a design concept for our whole wedding: the rubber stamp. 

The base invitation: FDH created a simple single-color design in Illustrator with a vertical layout and elegant typography.  (If you aren’t comfortable with doing your own design, there are many Etsy sellers who make templates.)

Then we found a printer: Mercurio Brothers.  They are fantastic and by far the most reasonably priced. You send them a PDF, select paper weight and details, and turnaround time is typically 7-14 days. 

The rubber stamps: Use a vector graphics program to design simple, iconic images, then convert them to PNG to maintain high resolution. If you aren’t an artist, Iconfinder.com or sites like Shutterstock have plenty to choose from…stick with something simple because fine lines will bleed during the stamping process. Your monogram is a great choice. We used lips and a ‘stache, because DFH actually had a mustache for the first few months we were dating. (Not super original, but very “us”)  

After you have your image(s), send the file off to thestampmaker.com, and the stamps arrive ~5 days later.   

Buy some high-quality ink in your wedding colors - check Michael’s or eBay - and practice stamping on some looseleaf first. You’ll make some mistakes with the first few, so order slightly more invitations than you absolutely need. The trick is not to press too hard.

Here are our finished invitations: 

This project really was a lot of fun. I loved how our invitations were formal but still personalized and fun.  And as I said above, we ultimately took our stamping a bit further and created an entire relationship icon set that we used in our programs and placecards.  I’ll get a blog post up about that sometime soon…

Don’t make bouquets the morning of your wedding.

I obviously didn’t post this on the morning of my wedding, but I had a last minute, morning-of-wedding DIY project and I figured I’d share “lessons learned” from my bridesmaid bouquet disaster.  Pro tip: do not use Amaryllis if you’re DIY-ing a bouquet. It is a flower for florists, not amateurs.  My girls and I had planned on just wrapping it in satin ribbon with pussywillows and some greenery.  Turns out there is a giant wooden dowel that runs up the center of those stems, and they fall to pieces when you remove it.   

One of my amazing bridesmaids and my maid-of-honor (sister) saved the day by doing an emergency run for peonies, and we whipped up four bouquets in an hour, five hours before the wedding.  I’ll update with better pictures and a how-to when I get our wedding photos.

So. Much. Fun.

November 12th = best night I’ve ever had. Madly in love with new husband. 

Everything was perfect, except for the fact that Batman made a lot of our guests late.

Seriously. Batman was filming, and traffic was horrible. Whole avenues, and the Queensboro bridge, were closed.  But everyone got there eventually.  

Our amazing photographer posted these two sneak peeks. :)  

DIY: super-easy birdcage veil

I’ve talked a bit about my ceremony veil in other posts - it’s a killer handmade all-lace mantilla, but it won’t work at all for our swing dance reception.  For the dance, I’m planning on changing into a tea-length grey dress.  To still look “bride-y,” I decided to DIY a birdcage veil. I might wear it at my rehearsal dinner, too. It’s super-simple and quick to make one, and the materials cost less than $10.

What you need: 

• an applique (or fascinator - though that will raise the cost a bit)
• a 9” wide piece of Russian netting (use a wider piece if you want it to cover your whole face; 9” comes to just below the eyes)
• a pack of bobby pins
• a needle and thread.  

How to:

1. Cut the Russian netting into a trapezoid shape. Mine was 21” long on the bottom edge.  
2. On each diagonal side of the trapezoid, sew in and out of the square openings, anchoring each stitch into the thick areas of the netting.  As you pull the thread tighter, the material will bunch. Stop when you get to the flat top part of the trapezoid, and knot off the thread (again, into the thick area of the netting).  

I realize that instruction may sound unclear; it did to me, too. I spent quite a lot of time looking for help on this, and used this tutorial - it has a few great graphics showing the trapezoid shape you’re going for.  Honestly, though, don’t worry about getting it perfect, because what is really going to make this veil look good is how you pin it on.  A lot of sites will tell you to sew it onto a comb, but I found that was unnecessary.

Assuming you don’t go the comb route, you’re going to pin the veil itself to your hair - use a lot of bobby pins to get it to sit just how you want it.  Birdcage veils have a tendency to puff up.  After it’s situated, attach the fascinator or applique to your hair as well, using it to cover up the spot where the veil is gathered.  My applique had a million threads criss-crossing the underside, so I just stuck some bobby pins through and then had a friend work them into my hair.  If you’d like to be more thorough, buy an alligator clip and glue it using E6000 or something similar. 

An applique will sit flat on your head, so if you want something more decadent, buy a fascinator clip.  There are many amazing ones on Etsy.

I know this tutorial needs a lot more photos, especially of the finished product. I’ll update it with pictures of me wearing it once I have my wedding pictures. :)

Update: this is the birdcage veil from the back, worn with the applique. 

And then today, the florist quit.

Eesh. Oh well. I didn’t really like her anyway. One of our month-of wedding coordinators from Bellafare says she knows an alternate florist.  So it looks like now we’ll be going with Verde Flowers for my bouquet and the centerpieces and boutonnieres, and then DIYing the rest of it.  

The coordinator came up with a great table design involving mercury glass to fill out the rest of the table (we went with long banquet tables). I’ll own quite a bit of mercury glass when this is all done, but the pieces look great. I love these hurricanes:

I’m totally impressed by how awesome the planners have been.  Absolute pros.  I’ve been able to focus on work and not worry too much about planning, and I completely trust them to make everything run smoothly and look awesome.  I wish I could find someone who could make the same kind of magic happen with my new apartment…I’m still living out of boxes!

Thwarted DIY: All-lace waltz-length mantilla veil

This is a thwarted DIY project with a happy ending. :) Starting in late July, I went looking for an all-lace waltz-length mantilla veil.  Aside from the shoulder-length Catholic mass veils or traditional Spanish mantillas (usually black), they’re impossible to find.

That’s probably because a piece of lace this big would clash horribly with most modern wedding dresses, but in the late 19th century it was actually pretty common to have a simple dress and elaborate veil.  Belgian lace heirloom veils occasionally come up for auction, but they’re incredibly expensive and delicate.  This was one of my favorites:

Most of them are hand-embroidered.  The one above is a Russian family’s coat of arms. 

So I tried to DIY one, by finding patterned lace myself. I considered buying a heavy Venice lace, pictured below, and cutting along the motif. It turns out that it sits poorly on the head, and is incredibly heavy. Failure.  

I realized sewing would be required - I’m not that great at sewing - and tried to sign up for private lessons with a local SF seamstress, where the project would be the veil.  How hard could it be?  A circle of lace edged with other lace!  Unfortunately, my teacher didn’t quite get what I was going for, so sewing lessons were a bust.  

The site that always comes through: Etsy!  I looked around for weeks until I found a black lace veil similar to what I wanted, then contacted the seller, Honeycomb Veils.  She is amazing.  She understood “the vision” right away, told me what would work and what wouldn’t, and started sending me snippets of laces in different colors.  We decided to go with a thin ivory lace that would fall lightly on the head, and I found a warm silver edge lace at Britex Fabrics of San Francisco.  (It was vintage deadstock from an Italian factory!)  

Today I got the photos of the finished product, and I’m so thrilled with how it looks.  It’s not really like the embroidered Belgian lace veils, but it has a style all its own and it’s my absolute favorite part of what I’ll be wearing during our ceremony.

Vintage silver wedding decorations

The past two weeks of planning have been super fun…I’ve started looking for vintage silver & silverplate serving pieces, and it’s like a little treasure hunt.  There are so many beautiful things out there.  I love all of the intricate details in these old pieces.  

I’ve been looking for 1930s-40s holloware and serving pieces. A lot of it is surprisingly inexpensive, especially on eBay and Etsy, and I’m excited by the idea of having gorgeous keepsakes to entertain with long after the wedding is over. :)

This is what I’ve found so far…

A Wallace Silver pierced bread basket (for programs)

A decadent little basket, stamped “Made in Occupied Japan” (for flower girl)

An International Silver basket (for confetti)

I know it doesn’t match, but finding a matching set turns out to be pretty much impossible. 

DIY: paper hydrangea pomander balls

These little flower balls are awesome, easy to make, inexpensive decor for any wedding.  

One of the reasons my fiancé and I picked our venue is because it’s so gorgeously opulent in its natural state. So our ceremony decor is going to be very simple…just two large floral arrangements with us standing between them. To make the room a little bit more festive, I decided to make some of these pomander balls to hang on the chairs and doorknobs. 

It’s really simple. I was inspired by this baby-shower pomander tutorial by Paula of Frog Prince Paperie, which is posted here. Her instructions are great and have way better photos than my post, so you should check them out. 

What you need:

• flower paper punch - hydrangeas or daisies are particularly lovely.
• cardstock
• 150 pearl-head corsage pins (eBay had the best price by a lot)
• 1” wide ribbon
• Krylon H2o Latex Spray Paint (optional, but please use this brand)
• styrofoam balls - for a wedding, you want at least 5” diameter. (see the photos of mine on the chair; they’re still a little small, and they were 5”)

The reason for that very specific spray paint is this: your flowers will shift around a bit after you make them, and some of the white styrofoam underneath will show. If you’re aiming to make very dark pomanders, you can either really pack in the paper flowers, or you can start by spray-painting the balls. But!! Regular spray paint dissolves styrofoam, so please use Krylon H2o or make sure that yours works with acrylic. 

Another option is to wrap the entire styrofoam ball with ribbon. The tutorial below assumes that your styrofoam ball is already painted/wrapped if you want it to be.

How to:

1. Punch approximately 200 flowers out of 2-3 pieces of cardstock. That will cover a 5” ball if you’re using one of the Martha Stewart punches.
2. Cut a piece of the ribbon - the length should be approx 3x the diameter of the styrofoam ball you’re using, plus however much extra you need to create a loop for hanging.  
3. Wrap the ribbon around the ball once and pin it in place with some of the corsage pins. Create a loop, and tuck the end back under the ribbon on the styrofoam ball. Pin that into place as well.
4. Take two of your punched flower shapes, and place them one on top of the other, offset, so that they look fuller. Push a single corsage pin through the center of the two pieces of paper. You now have a “flower.”
5. Pin the flower to the styrofoam ball. I start by pinning them onto the area I’ve wrapped in ribbon, to better hold it in place.  
6. Continue pinning flowers to the ball until it’s entirely covered.

You’re done!  If you used a ball larger than 5”, make sure that the 1” wide ribbon is capable of supporting its weight when it’s hanging.

Updated w/wedding photos:

Introductions

Full disclosure: this is a wedding planning blog, but at the moment I’m still only a theoretical bride-to-be.  My boyfriend and I are not actually engaged yet.  But I’m suddenly planning a wedding because I just moved across the country and I’m dating a good Mormon boy who can’t live with me until we’re wed, so we’ve kind of decided to get married and a proposal is supposed to follow.  

We met in NYC and have been dating for a year and a half.  About a month ago, I got a job offer I couldn’t pass up, and decided to move across the country to San Francisco.  He told me he wanted to get married, and we decided we’d shoot for November (last month of good weather in NYC until May). He didn’t have time to buy a ring because I moved two weeks after accepting the job.  

Since we’re planning to get married in 5 months, I’m expecting to have to make some very quick decisions.  NYC wedding vendors book up far in advance!!  The main reason I’m starting this blog is because I’ve been finding other brides’ blogs so helpful for the venue hunt…and because I’d kind of like a personal diary to record the planning process. :)