wedding clothes

All photos by Nicole Allen

One of the biggest expenses for many weddings is the bride's dress. In fact, the average bride spends $1505 on her dress, according to the Bridal Association of America. It seems silly to me to spend that much money on something to wear exactly once. I thought my best options were to wear a non-wedding dress, or to buy a used wedding dress. Just like the real diamond, I wanted the real princessy/white dress experience, so that left the used option.

Digression on the topic of being "princessy": Today I was dragging Sebastian through Target, unshowered, hair uncombed, wearing my black clog sandals that I've had forever and this funky knee-lengthish black cotton tank dress with black embroidery, a diagonal zigzaggy hemline and lacing up the bodice. A little girl, probably two years old, walked by, pointed at me with wide eyes and said, "Look! It's a princess!" I laughed out loud, and so did her mom.

Anyway, back to wedding clothes...Everything gets a bridal markup, I guess, because dresses I found at thrift stores were still $90 and up. Craigslist was even worse -- people wanted hundreds of dollars for dresses that were pretty hideous even in 1981 when they were brand new. I was bitching about this to some of my coworker/friends, and one of them offered to lend me her dress.

This was before Will and I were officially engaged, but I was too excited at the prospect to wait, so we stopped by her house right before my birthday dinner (Waffle House, the kids were too hungry for the wait at the restaurant I chose first) and everyone sat in the car while I ran in and tried it on. Might not be the most romantic wedding dress story ever, but as it turns out, Tara and I are just the same size, and I absolutely loved her dress. Here we are together at the reception. Yes, we were doing the dance commonly known as "the shopping cart":

So. Dress problem solved. Can't get cheaper (or greener) than that, and this was seriously the dress I would have chosen if I had walked into a bridal shop to buy the dress of my dreams.

As it turned out, the dress thing was much, much, much easier than figuring out what Will would wear. He knew that I wasn't a bridezilla kind of bride, but I think the first time he realized that our wedding was about US and not about WEDDING was when I suggested that he wear this shirt:In case the image is too small, yes, there are guitars! And yes, it does say "Rock & Roll Religion!" To make a very long story short, we looked at probably hundreds of shirt options, and I told him I thought he should wear whatever he would love and be comfortable in. He really struggled, though, because many of the shirts he loved seemed like they would only look good untucked, with jeans, and he worried that people would think that he didn't know how to dress for his own wedding, or that he wasn't taking the occasion seriously. It wouldn't have bothered me if he had gone untucked with jeans, but we decided that he wouldn't be comfortable unless he felt more dressed up.

In the end, he chose a new bright blue button-down shirt and black pants that he already owned. I found a guitar tie on etsy, and he looked great!Instead of the traditional "wedding party," we had an adult flower girl (my sister) and ring bearer (Will's brother) and our kids stood up with us.

I told my sister to wear any black dress she wanted. She was silly and emailed me beforehand with a pic of the one she chose, all worried that it wasn't what I wanted. Of course, she was gorgeous!I told Will's brother to wear jeans and any button-down shirt he wanted. He was silly and came over beforehand with shirt options, all worried that they wouldn't be what I wanted. Of course, he looked great!

With a little help from my internet friends I found the perfect black sundress for Will's daughter. You obviously can't see them in this picture, but she also wore the cutest black suede mary janes that I got for $3 at the thrift store.

I put white clay flowers in her hair to match the ones in mine.

And that just left the boyz...I found them Hawaaiian shirts with guitars that totally matched Will's tie, and they wore those untucked with jeans.

I think it worked out beautifully -- they were way more comfortable than they would have been in formal outfits, they looked great, and all of the kids have worn their wedding clothes several times since the wedding.

GOOOOOOOOOO....

TEAM!!!!!!!

On Offbeat Bride I saw this woman who had the sweetest little shrug over her dress, and I started thinking about how nice it would be to have a shrug to keep my shoulders warm, not necessarily for the ceremony, but beforehand.

My lovely sister-in-law, Heather, saw that on my list of stuff to do on this blog, and offered to try to make me one. She said try, because at the time she was nine months pregnant, and we were just about 3 weeks away from the wedding, and she had never made a shrug before. We went shopping for yarn on a Tuesday, and two days later, this little bundle showed up:

Amazingly, Heather finished the shrug in time anyway! Thanks, Heather!
You can see it pretty well in this picture (on the left is my dad, who played flute during the ceremony and went with the black/jeans thing, and my mom, who has much better fashion sense than I do)

And I had to include this picture, not only because it shows off the shrug, but also because I have no idea what the hell was going on when Nicole took it, but it makes me laugh so hard every time I see it! I also bought a dress for $25 on sale so I would have something to change into at the reception. I picked it because it was cheap and comfy and would match Will's shirt and my shrug, and was also something that I would wear again. I didn't change until the very end of the reception, but it was nice to have, especially since we were riding our bikes away at the end of the night and I didn't want to wreck Tara's dress.

wedding weekend: saturday morning fun

We met at 9:00 on the morning of the wedding. There were 50 guests, plus the two of us and the scavenger hunt guy. As the group started to gather, it felt like this was a natural continuation of the party the night before. Being the teacher that I am, I had people arrange themselves in two groups according to whether they were having lunch with us after the hunt or not (so I could get a final head count to let the restaurant know how many people were showing up) and then I read off the teams.

The scavenger hunt dude (I guess I can call him John, since that's his name!) had said that we could just show up and divide into teams that morning, but, um, that didn't really work for my virgo self. Any teacher knows that usually when you let kids choose their own groups, you're asking for disaster. So I had pored over the scavenger hunt RSVP list and created teams of people in advance, keeping in mind our ultimate goals of having fun and creating a feeling of community.

I mixed people from Will's family and people from my family, people from in town and people from out of town, and also tried to make sure that every kid had someone close to their age on their team. This was actually easier than it might sound, since we have a lot of friends with kids. I also created one team of families with younger kids, and asked John to give them a more direct route so they had a shot at finishing around the same time as everyone else. Will and I weren't on teams, so I made sure that our kids were on a team with people they knew well who would take good care of them. Gotta say, I'm glad I was a control freak about the teams, and I'm pretty sure that every team hit it off and bonded over the course of the morning!

Once everyone was standing with their teams, John explained how the hunt would work, and the teams scattered to find their first envelopes. These contained clues that led to the next envelope. The clues were a combination of riddle, code, and visual images, and each envelope had 4 copies of the clue -- this made things much easier, since there were 12-13 people per team.

Will and I walked around videotaping and hanging out with the teams as they followed clues around the whole downtown area of our city. This was totally perfect, because it gave us quiet time alone to talk while we were in between teams, and rowdy fun time with all of our friends as we watched them try to solve the clues.

Soooo fun! The weather was gorgeous: sunny but not scorchingly hot. Even though we pretended like it was...
There were nine clues in total. One of them led to the jewelry company that made our rings, and another led to the pub where we had our first date, and where we wrote our vows. The final clue brought everyone back to a spot near the restaurant we had chosen for lunch.

We picked this restaurant because the food is yummy, and they are totally set up to accomodate a large group, even when everyone is ordering off the menu with separate checks. It's super laid-back, and the party area has pool tables, so the kids were entertained while the grownups socialized. People kept moving from table to table, but the waitresses didn't get cranky even though they had trouble figuring out where to bring the food. This would have been a non-issue if we had paid for everyone's lunch...but then, there are lots of things that would be a non-issue if we could afford to buy lunch for 40 people!

A few of my Albuquerque relatives got into town too late to do the hunt, but they met us there and apparently hit it off with some of our friends and ended up spending the afternoon with them. (I only found this out when I saw photos they had taken of the weekend!)

The whole morning was exactly the way I had envisioned it when we first started talking about a wedding weekend. Was it worth the money? Hell, yes! Do I regret changing my original budget to accomodate what we really wanted? Not one bit! Am I proud that even with the scavenger hunt, we spent less on our whole weekend than most people spend on a celebration that lasts a few hours? Why, yes! Yes, I am!

It was hard to pull myself away from the restaurant, but before I knew it, we had to go home to get ready for our photo op...

wedding weekend: friday

Friday afternoon our wedding crew met at the church to start decorating. It felt like we were moving in -- we filled up my van, Will's car, plus my friend Shen's truck and part of his trailer to head over there. Will went first, to meet the rental delivery guy, but the rest of us followed close behind.

Everyone worked really hard for a couple of hours, figuring out exactly how to set up chairs for the ceremony, hanging lights, putting together the flower arch, moving tables, rolling up rugs to create a dance floor, and trying to set up the photobooth.

When it was time for the rehearsal, the peeps who weren't participating in the ceremony kept setting up, while the rest of us went out back to practice.

In Colorado you can solemnize your own marriage, so we didn't have to have an officiant, and I was willing to contemplate just doing our own ceremony, but Will thought it would be too weird. Lynn is the minister at the church we usually go to (which is where we got married -- subject for a whole 'nother post), and she's also my parents' next door neighbor. Once we decided to have an officiant, we never considered having anyone but her perform our ceremony. Lynn was around when I was going through the hellish drama of custody battles and the draining everyday life of single parenting, and she's watched my boys grow up since infancy. Even so, I was surprised at how emotional she was both at the rehearsal and the ceremony. I think you can tell from this picture how much she really loves us!


When we were planning the ceremony, Will and I talked about wanting to make people laugh and cry at our wedding. Laugh because we are always cracking each other up, and cry because our love for one another is so deeply felt. Even though we just ran through the blocking and didn't actually say any of the words, we met that goal at the rehearsal!



We felt really strongly that we didn't want an "in" crowd at our wedding, with some people invited to participate in things that others weren't. So instead of having a traditional rehearsal dinner, we invited all of our guests to our rehearsal dinner. In order to make it affordable, we had a potluck barbecue.

In order to make it manageable, in addition to the set-up crew at the church, I had delegated a couple of families to set up for the barbecue. So while we were wrapping up at the church, they were already hard at work at the park, firing up the grill, welcoming people and setting out food and tableware.

I'm so glad that they were willing to help. It kept me from completely stressing out when we ran way overtime at the church, and it also meant that I got to shower and change clothes before dinner. If you look at the rehearsal pics above, you'll see that this was more of a necessity than a luxury. Sweat, yoga pants, uncombed hair, and race t-shirt don't really scream "bride!" And that moment, when we rushed home and I rushed in and out of the shower and put on cute clothes for the bbq, was when it first started to sink in that I was a bride...the omg-I'm-getting-married-in-just-over-24-hours-! feeling.

In order to make our wedding weekend totally kick-ass, this wasn't just a barbecue, either. There were about 70 people at this kickoff event, and the highlight was a rousing game of kickball. (Get it? Kick-ass?! Kickoff?! You know, kickball, kickoff, kickass? Get it? Ha ha!) It's hard to tell from these pics, but between 40 and 50 people (kids and adults) played. It was so much fun that I think kickball should become a new wedding tradition.

In fact, it was so much fun that the ball broke in half! Oops! Game over...

I'm discovering that it's hard for me to write about the wedding weekend without getting sappy. As I looked around the park, and saw all of the people who chose to celebrate with us -- eating and laughing and talking and running around and having fun -- I felt like my heart was going to burst with love. Not just love for Will, but for the family and life we're making together.

mason jar wedding

Aside from the paper flower arch, the main diy decoration for our wedding was mason jar candleholders. The backyard of our church is surrounded by low walls. Follow a break in the foliage behind where our guests sat, and there is a stone labyrinth. Inspired by mason jar posts on pretty much every wedding blog I read, I decided to put candles in jars on all those walls and around the labyrinth.

I've read about people spending $3.50 or more for just one jar, and since I wanted around 200 jars, that would have cost more than the dessert catering or the scavenger hunt. I wasn't willing to give up food or fun for mason-jar prettiness, but I wasn't willing to give up on the idea, either.

I sent an email to everyone I work with, asking them to save pasta sauce jars for me (we've got free curbside recycling here, and people are used to rinsing their glass jars and throwing them in the recycling bin, so I wasn't asking them to do anything extra except bring them to school.) I also asked our friends and in-town family to save jars for us, and they started slowly piling up.

Over the course of about a month and a half, we had collected around 100 jars. My friend Danita loaned me another 25 or 30 (it is not easy to get the wax out afterward, so I don't recommend borrowing jars for this purpose.) Then my amazing cousin Melina saw me post about jars on facebook, and she offered to ship a bunch of them from Albuquerque. I didn't think it would be worth it, until she reminded me that she works for a large national shipping company. Apparently, she collected jars from all of her friends as well, and about 40 more jars arrived the day before the wedding! Wow!

When we moved into this house, we found a bag of sand, and I decided to put a little of the sand into the bottom of each jar before putting the candles in. I had the candles made locally with soy wax. Cache la Poudre Candleworks gave me a much better deal than I found anywhere except the dollar store. Hmmm...dollar store candles made out of who-knows-what by little children or underpaid adults in China and shipped halfway around the world, or local soy candles made to my specifications by someone I know...no contest!

It was still light out during the ceremony, but as it got darker and darker the candles got more and more dramatic. I came outside to cool off for a few minutes during the reception, and the yard seemed so magical it literally took my breath away. I almost wish that we'd planned to have the whole reception outside, not just the ceremony (though some people did hang out outside, the food and music were inside.) But I guess it's just as well we didn't, since the sprinklers turned on before the party was totally over!

If we had more time, I would have wired up jars to hang from trees or from the gazebo, and if we had more money I would have bought some shepherd's hooks to hang the jars from, creating sort of a path out to the labyrinth. As it was, we planned our wedding in only three months on a pretty tight budget, so I'm glad we were able to pull off the mason jar thing at all.

hello, again!

No, we didn't get tattoos (or pawn anything) -- we just got hitched! Stay tuned for deets about the whole wedding weekend...

wedding budget

I read a blog post the other day that inspired me to keep track of wedding purchases here, in the spirit of sharing what's realistic and possible in terms of wedding budget. I also think it will be good for me to keep a running list of how much we're actually spending, in order not to let it get too far out of control. I'm notoriously bad at tracking my finances, so it might just be that the only way I'll know how much we've spent is if I vow to blog every penny.

I was just going to include straight wedding costs, but my mom says we have to count rings and honeymoon, too. So far, this is what we've spent and what we've gotten:

8(ish? I'm too lazy to get up and count) strings of white twinkle lights on green cord (wah! haven't found any for cheap with white cords, but we're using the green ones for outside) -- $8.78 thrift store

3 sheets to use for diy photobooth backdrop -- $9.57 thrift store

deposit for church (ceremony and reception will both take place there) -- $150

shirts for the two younger boys -- $24.34 inc. shipping Children's Place

dress for the girl -- $38.65 inc. shipping Gap

shirt for Will -- $20.00 Macy's (sweet sale, 50% off original price + 25% off of that!)

round trip honeymoon plane tickets for BOTH of us (woot!) -- $265.60 Southwest

paying off my rings and Will's wedding band (not sure the exact total for all three rings, will update when I figure it out) -- $396.11

rental of 60 chairs, 50 tidbit plates, 50 dessert plates, 100 forks, 10 dinner plates (not sure of the exact breakdown, will update when I figure it out) -- $298.41

wine and ingredients for sangria tasting -- $40 (approximate, cuz I bought a bunch of other stuff at the same time and can't find the receipt)

dress for me -- $0 borrowing from a friend

jars for candles -- $0 asking everyone I know to save them for me

ring pillow -- $0 borrowing from a friend

invitations -- $0 free wedding website

candles -- $0 so far, I know we'll have to buy a bunch but friends have donated a few to the cause

fabric for napkins -- $5.95 thrift store

giant paper magnolia -- $0 but I will end up spending some $ on paper flowers, I'm sure

So we're at $1,248.63 and counting.
If you take out the rings and plane tickets, it's $586.92 so far for the actual ceremony.

You may have noticed a theme here; I love how saving the earth and saving money so often coincide! Green wedding strategy #2 is to borrow stuff as my first option, buy it used or rent as my second, and buy it new as a last resort.

wedding flowers

Well, I know where I'm not getting flowers for the wedding. Today I hosted a baby shower for my sister-in-law, and I went to Whole Foods to get her a nice big bouquet. I ended up getting white daisies and hot pink gerbera daisies and myrtle leaves, which did make a gorgeous centerpiece. At least some of them were "whole trade" but I was seriously shocked at the amount of plastic that came with those flowers. Also, the whole trade designation does include an element of environmental sustainability, but does not mean that the flowers are organic.

I still feel better about getting the flowers at Whole Foods than at the regular grocery store, but there certainly wasn't less plastic on them than there would have been if I got them somewhere else. Each bunch was wrapped in one of those cellophane floral bags, so three of those (plus the girl at the checkout offered me a floral bag to hold all three bunches together -- I said no, of course!) plus the gerberas had plastic tubes over the stems to keep them standing upright, plus each bunch was held together with a rubber band, plus each bunch had one of those little floral preservative packets. Now I'm wishing that I took pictures of all of the plastic before I threw it away AND the flowers before I gave them away. Oops!

I have a friend who wants to talk to me about wholesale flowers for the wedding, and I'll start checking farmer's markets as soon as they open in mid/late May (but I have a feeling that early June here is too early for great local flowers), and I'm going to look into the option of borrowing flowers, but in the back of my mind I had thought that I could always just get them at Whole Foods. Guess not.

Green budget wedding strategy #1

My first strategy involves the lack of paper invitations. We created a gorgeous wedding website with all of the information, as well as some interactive elements (a cheesy vow contest and a place for people to suggest music for the reception.)

This is not traditionally acceptable. Oh, well. All of our friends and most of our family are very comfortable online. I don't even know anyone's real address, let alone have time to address invitations. Since it's free and doesn't use unnecessary resources, I've got no regrets. I did phone both sets of grandparents to tell them we're engaged and to personally give them the wedding invite link. Other than that, we've sent the link via text, email, and Facebook.

According to stats I've seen, the average cost for 100 invitations is between $225 and $450, but some people spend as much as $2000! On invitations! People, do you realize how much good you could do in the world with $2000? I also read somewhere that invitations should be about 3% of the total budget, so for our budget, we should be spending $54-60 on them.

I'll take zero dollars instead, thank you. Web-based invitations also mean zero trees wasted, zero pieces of plastic stamp backing to throw away, and zero carbon emissions to deliver.

Lots of wedding sites offer free websites for couples -- if you are interested, take a look at mywedding.com, theknot.com, or weddingpearl.com. If you are goth or want something not quite so...um...traditional, check out nearlyweds.com -- but that one is $49, not free. Might be worth it, though, if the templates are your style.

planning a budget green wedding

I've given up on reading wedding books, because mostly they don't seem relevant. They have advice about duties of the bridesmaids and groomsmen, proper etiquette for seating people, how to address the invitations, and how to have a budget wedding for $5000-$10,000. We're not having bridesmaids or groomsmen, or a "bride's side" and "groom's side," or paper invitations, and we definitely don't have $5000. Oh, yeah, and we're not 20 years old, and we've got four kids. So I took all the books back to the library.

That said, I'm also not taking the advice of people who have told us we should just have a potluck wedding. What we're trying to pull off is something in between the traditional formal church wedding and the casual backyard hippie wedding. I guess we'll find out in a couple of months if it's possible. So far, my best resource has been the offbeat bride tribe, even though I'm not wearing a red dress (sorry, Dante) and don't have any tatoos.

I initially wanted to do our wedding for under $1000. Will told me that was impossible. I still maintain that we could do it, except we're not. I got the brilliant idea to have a scavenger hunt the morning of the wedding, and that plus photographs already put us over $1000. If I had more than 2 1/2 months, I could put together the hunt myself, but we decided that in this case it is worth outsourcing. So our revised budget is somewhere in the $1800-$2000 range, which will allow us to rent space, pay for the officiant, have beautiful photographs and the scavenger hunt, plus all the incidentals and food for the reception. I think that's still pretty good, considering that we're figuring on around 100 people for the ceremony, and that the festivities will start on Friday evening and end on Sunday afternoon.

Obviously, our other big concern is environmental. We're going to attempt to have a waste-free, no-new-plastic wedding. I'm not entirely sure this is possible, but we're going to try. As we go, I'll post a series of strategies and updates to dazzle and inspire you all! Or, um, something like that...

nice day for a green diamond

I've had "White Wedding" by Billy Idol running through my head for a couple of days -- maybe 'cuz I'm officially engaged as of Saturday night?!



But as my dad reminded me last week, I'm used goods. Mostly he was trying to talk my dowry down to two goats instead of a camel. The fact that he doesn't have either goats or a camel to give, and the fact that Will isn't really expecting a dowry didn't figure into this conversation at any point, but the fact that I've been around the block was apparently relevant.

At any rate, "white wedding" didn't seem like an appropriate title for this blog entry, especially since our plan is to have a green wedding. We're still figuring out exactly what that entails, but it all started last fall when we first talked about getting married...

We went to the jewelry store to look at rings and it was soooo fun and they were soooo pretty. Then I did some research, and realized that those beautiful, sparkly stones hide a really brutal reality. Apparently, things have gotten better in the diamond industry than they used to be, but there still isn't any guarantee that a diamond that is purported to be conflict-free really is. So I decided that maybe the best idea was to get a Canadian diamond. No blood involved, right? Well, sort of. Plus, even Canadian diamonds have to be mined.

I can tell you from experience that it's a bummer to get excited about celebrating your love for someone only to find out that you'll be leaving a trail of blood and tears and ravaged earth behind. But I wasn't willing to give up on the whole diamond thing. Maybe this is one of the few ways that I'm a typical "I've dreamed of this since I was a little girl" shallow, materialistic traditionalist. I know that there are other gems, and that deBeers is like the mafia, and that synthetic diamonds are pretty good these days. But {insert whiny voice here} I didn't WAAAANT another gem, and I didn't WAAAAANT a synthetic diamond.

Then we moved into our new house and life got so hectic that we didn't even have time to think about rings, let alone figure out a solution to the dilemma. In the last month or so, things calmed down a bit, and we started talking about getting engaged again. I decided that the only way I could have the diamond ring I wanted was to get a used diamond (just like the only way I can buy sweatshop clothes is from the ARC).

On a whim, I checked the jewelry section of craigslist, and found what turned out to be the perfect diamond for us. The lady wanted much much more than we had planned to spend, and it had appraised even higher than that, but she liked us and our story and accepted our offer. Because we don't know enough about diamonds to take her word for anything, we shopped around a bit and found a custom jeweler who was willing to meet with us and check out the diamond. He confirmed that everything was on the up-and-up, facilitated the transaction, and set the stone in the ring I wanted (he's also designing my wedding band, using estate diamonds and recycled gold).

Oh, and in case you were worried, it's not a bad karma diamond either -- no acrimonious divorce or dead husband or someone selling her jewels to avoid the poorhouse -- just a simple story of an engagement that didn't work out. He's happily married now, and she's happily single. They are still friends, but she decided it was time to let go of the jewelry from that relationship.

Will was worried that getting engaged would be anti-climactic, since we've talked so much about it and it wasn't a surprise. He's been married before, but I never have, and he wanted to make the proposal special for me. He also knew that I really wanted to be wearing the ring for our housewarming party last weekend.

Far from being anti-climactic, the proposal turned out to be like our lives -- hectic and thrown in with everything else we had to do, but totally perfect and full of love. He did get down on his knees, and we both got tears in our eyes while he talked about how he feels about me, and then he asked me and I said yes and we kissed and hugged, and then we rushed off to separate rooms to finish getting ready for our party (this was at 6:40, the party started at 7:00, we were still not done cleaning the house, and neither one of us had showered yet!)

For more info (probably the most unbiased summary I found) on diamonds and alternatives, click here.