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...

choices

(Stay with me here, I swear that I'll get to the Saturday morning fun in the next post.)

I've written before about the fact that I originally thought we could get married for $1000 and Will said there was no way. I still believe it would have been possible. And I'm sure it would have been quite nice. It just wouldn't have been the wedding that we really wanted.

We talked about doing a very private ceremony, with either just us and the kids or just us and our immediate families. We could definitely have done that for under $1000. But, while I would have loved an intimate wedding in some ways, I think I would ended up feeling cheated of the wedding of my girlhood dreams (even if those dreams were planted in my head by the evil WIC!)

We also seriously considered having the ceremony and reception at our house. If we had done that and had a potluck reception we probably could have pulled off a $1000 wedding. We ended up nixing the home wedding plan for two reasons.

The first is that we decided that either we had to have a small, intimate ceremony, or we had to invite everyone. We both have big families, and we both have many friends. There would not have been room for everyone in our backyard or our living room.

The second is that Will wouldn't have been able to relax if we had a home wedding. He would have been freaking out about wanting everything to be perfect and nice and clean, and the weeks leading up to the wedding would have been super stressful for both of us. It didn't seem worth it.

When we decided to invite everyone, we also decided to try to avoid the #1 complaint that I heard from people after they got married: that the whole thing went by too quickly and they never got to spend enough time with the guests at their wedding.

So we got the brilliant idea of hosting a party that lasted all weekend.

Which brings me to the point of this post...

The thing that really and truly killed the $1000 budget was the scavenger hunt. Yes, you read that right. Kickball wasn't enough, we had to throw a scavenger hunt in the mix, too.

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.