Wedding Planning

PLANNING
After getting engaged and choosing a date nearly 1 ½ years out, I figured I would have time to attend to all the little details. I am kind of infamous with my friends for being the ‘planner’ for parties, get-togethers and trips so I knew that there would be some expectation and I was ready to meet it. I started off strong, booking the church and DYC the week after getting engaged. Then we began the hunt for a photographer because that was very important to me. After securing Dionne I felt really good about things.

Over the next year or so I was a pretty constant presence on the knot’s Detroit message board, I got tons of great ideas and feedback from all the great Detroit Knottie’s all the while checking different vendors off my list. My only speed bump was the florist (skip to the next paragraph if you don’t care about it) – I had called Nicole at Westborn to see if my date was available and it was, she had one wedding booked for the same day, but she takes 2 every day so it was open. We set up a meeting, but my mom really wanted to be involved with flowers and when I told her the date, she couldn’t make it. So we rescheduled and this time Nicole had something come up, I was going out of town for work for a few weeks so I didn’t set another date with Nicole right away because I wasn’t sure of my schedule. When I got back home and back on the knot I see that another June 9 knottie was posting in excitement about booking with Nicole, so that would make her limit of 2 weddings on my date. I was pretty disappointed and upset with the way Nicole handled things, nothing against the other knottie of course, how would she know? But Nicole knew that I was interested in that date and just because we had rescheduled some meetings so couldn’t even give me a courtesy call saying there was someone else interested so I’d better decide or something?

Anyway, after that I put off vendor decisions for a few months and put off finding a florist for probably too long, but it all worked out because in the end my florist was fantastic, but more about that later. . .in the fall, I was discussing an idea with my DOC (who is also my friend) I had seen on Brides.com – they showed a STD card that was a little wooden life preserver, since I was using a subtle nautical theme I thought they would be perfect as escort cards, but I couldn’t find anything similar online anywhere and the ones from the actual site were about $7 each so that didn’t make much sense. My coordinator says ‘you know, I’ve seen those as Christmas tree ornaments that are frames, in fact you could put your table information right in that frame and then hire a party photographer to take pictures on the spot to put in the frame!’ Of course I thought this to be a stroke of brilliance, and it was, I just didn’t realize how much of a pain it was bound to become. We went to Bronner’s and found the cutest ornaments that would work perfectly, they had about 500 in stock and since we had not yet finalized the guest list, I decided it would be easier to buy 100 and come back for the rest rather than buy too many and have to deal with returning the extras. Another big mistake.

As the day drew nearer and my ticker number got smaller I was getting really excited, I started making all kinds of to-do lists and I was checking off pretty much everything on them – I purchased the vases I needed for the DIY centerpieces I wanted to do, I purchased a photo frame card box from a fellow knottie, I ordered Jeremy’s wedding gift and bought all the BP presents. There were a few items that seemed to always get carried over to the new to-do list instead of getting checked off, but I figured it wasn’t a big deal I’d do them soon, I had plenty of time. We were close to the final guest list so now that I had a better idea of a number in my head we went back up to Bronner’s to get some more ornaments. They were nearly all gone. We had about ¼ of them break on us (turns out the quality was not quite what it seemed) and the store didn’t even have enough in stock to replace the broken ones, much less for us to purchase the 50 more that we needed. I didn’t freak out at first, I figured I would just contact the manufacturer and buy them directly. I got on the site, found my frames and couldn’t figure out how to get an order form to pop up . . . turns out they were not going to make any more of those particular ornaments until mid-July and they had none that they could send me. So I started to freak out, I contacted Christmas stores all over the country and found 16 in upstate NY but for $2 more per ornament and shipping charges and the fact that still wouldn’t be enough I knew I had to figure out something else. At this point, with about 6 months to go, I realized I wasn’t having much fun. Usually when I am planning events, I love it, but wedding planning was more of a chore than anything else to me now. I still cared, but now it was about having to do things rather than wanting to do them.

My BM dresses came in early and so did my dress – I figured after all the buzz on the knot that I would get my alterations done by Hana even though it was an hour drive one-way for me, but I had started to finally drop some of the weight I had gained a few years ago due to PCOS and a back problem that left me bed ridden, so I wanted to wait until the very last minute to begin alterations, I figured I would just call her when I was ready to start.

About 2 months before the big day we finally decided on a florist, even though I still had a bad taste in my mouth about it and I’ve never really cared much about flowers anyway I knew I had to have them. I was planning on doing tons of candles everywhere so the flowers wouldn’t really matter. Then I picked up our invitations from Tifany, after initial shock of them being printed wrong and actually seeing the details in print, I sent them out. When we booked with Tifany we said we would get back to her on designing and printing the rest of the stationary we would need, I looked back at her quote and for whatever reason I just could not get behind paying her costs for things that I thought I could easily do on my own for much less. It wasn’t that I didn’t have $$ in the budget for it, it was more of the principle of it – I work in advertising, I am creative, I can do it myself. Come to think of it, my being a control freak and a perfectionist probably played a lot into this as well.

So I added all the rest of the paper products to my to-do list: favor tags, place cards, event (menu) cards, maps, table numbers, programs – I could get them all done, I would just go into the office after hours and print them there, no big deal. I even went to a stationary store to get samples of the exact paper that Tifany had used on my invitations for all of this printing so everything would match.

I finally called Hana who seemed slightly shocked that my wedding was a month away and this was my first fitting, but she agreed to work with me. At our first appointment she was even more shocked to see me in my dress. To say it was too big is an understatement, you can’t really tell in the pictures, but it wouldn’t stay up even with clips. I could tell she was a little pissed because she realized it was going to take a lot to fix my dress, she blamed it on the dress shop, but I’m pretty sure it was mostly my fault and my shrinking size that was the culprit. Hana showed me her veils which reminded me that I had never really gone veil shopping so I added that to the list along with a garter and a different bustier because the one I tried on with my dress didn’t work. I also needed to decide on shoes, I had been looking casually but never found anything. I swore to Hana that I was going to buy flats so it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t wearing any as she measured my hem line, but I knew I needed to have them by the next fitting.

We had finally solved the escort card issue – I saw these cute boat frames at BB&B that were small and came as 6 boats strung together, I figured we could just cut them apart and use however many we needed. I bought 6 of them and threw them onto the ever growing pile of wedding stuff in our office where they joined the rest of the favors, all the vases, and the still broken cardbox among other things. (I bought it slightly damaged, it was a quick fix, I jut hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet. . . or gotten around to figuring out what pictures I wanted to insert, but that would be easy, I can do that later)

My work was busy as usual so instead of spending time on WR things after work, or staying late to start some of the printing, I was tired and just wanted to relax so I started putting things off as I am known to do with chores. I would think of random things I had to do and add them to the list, but there wasn’t very much being checked off the list at this point.

With one month to go I began to realize I still had a lot left on my plate, I was even planning to DIY my guestbook so that it could be a version of a photo guestbook since we were going to have the photographers there and all. Oh, by the way, I found out that the professional party photographers cost about $1000 so I again decided that I could do it better and cheaper my own way, I would hire one of my sister’s friends to take the pictures, buy a photo printer, ink and paper and along with a circle hole punch that would make the photos fit right into the frames everything would work out fine for at least $500 less.

I began to feel a little stressed out, in fact I was having chest pains whenever I would think about something WR. Since I had recently had 2 PE (blood clot in my lungs), I went to the Dr and after a battery of tests they decided there was nothing physically wrong, so I was put on anti-anxiety meds. The chest pain went away . . . along with most of the stress . . . and therefore the sense of urgency.

I went back to the stationary store to buy more of the paper I would need but they didn’t have very much in stock and it would take them awhile to order it, I realized that no one but me would ever know that the paper on their table at the reception was exactly the same as what their invite had been printed on so I went to Jo-Ann’s to look at other options, I found a cardstock that was a champagne-y color, but it was 12 x 12, after a few days of thought, I realized that was perfect because I could cut it into sections and use the same sheet for a variety of needs, I bought out the Novi store and had about 20 sheets. I started measuring and found I could fit 2 menu cards on each page . . . so, with just over 200 people expected, I needed about, oh, 90 more. I bought out the Canton Store, the Westland store, the Brighton store and the Bloomfield Hills store and I was still short. I looked for other options, another color that was close. At this point I had too many pages of champagne to decide to do half and half so I would have to match it as closely as possible. I found a gold color that wasn’t bad, but the Novi store only had 2 sheets, the other stores didn’t have many either (after my 2nd round of trips around the western metro area) luckily the Novi store got about 20 more sheets in, so I felt good. I bought a scrapbook and a bunch of 12 x 12 pages that I planned to divide into squares so that guests could have a space to write their thoughts and we would glue in their picture later. I would have to let the photographer know. . . wait, who is going to be my photographer? I had delegated that to my sister and not thought about it much since then. After a call to her I realized we had no one. I think this is about the time that things started to go downhill fast. I didn’t have the printer yet either, but I had been to Best Buy and found one I wanted, I just needed to go buy it, that can wait until my days off before the wedding. I’ll have plenty of time to tie up loose ends then.

With about 2 weeks to go, I realized the mountain of stuff in our office was still there, so I began running all the vases through the dishwasher. That reminded me that I really needed the pillar candles to go in them. You would think pillar candles are available pretty much everywhere, right? Well, they are, but most stores offer scented and only one size. I needed 3 different sizes. After much searching, I found them at Michael’s, and they were on sale! Yay! I had Jeremy buy 20 of each size in white. So that was all set. But wait, the key to my centerpiece is the dock line. . . I had meant to measure that and get a bunch of them – add it to the list. I remembered to order our votive candles and votive holders – they came in mostly fine (3 broken out of 216)

I began designing the event cards, escort cards, and favor tags. I’d get to the programs after those were done. Oh yeah, I should really contact our pastor to find out what needs to go in the program.

I found shoes that would work for me, and my second fitting with Hana went well – she still needed to take in about an inch off my waist, but the dress was actually staying on me! Things were good again, I could relax a little, I was getting things done.

The last week or so is kind of a blur to me, so I’m not exactly sure how it went down, but these are the things I had to get done:
-printing of 100 of 210 double sided menu cards
-cutting of 100 of 210 event cards
-printing and cutting of 150 favor tags
-making one of those ‘cute’ shirts for my FG and MOH and myself (only the FGs got done, 5 minutes before we left for the rehearsal)

My BMs came over the Wednesday before the wedding and helped me with:
- filling of 100 bags with rice
- tying favor tags on all the frames
- cutting the escort cards to fit in the frames
- putting the escort cards in the frames (which by the way, we found out that about 20 of them were still defective and the backings wouldn’t come off, so we spent a good part of the night digging the backings out with a knife and then sanding them down so they could be re-inserted easily)
- cutting the boat favors apart and re tying the strings to make them individual favors (there wasn’t enough string to work for all 6 on the line so I made an 11 pm run to Meijer for more, while I was there I managed to pick up some dock line-ish rope)
- cutting the dock line into the correct lengths, we only got through one of those because then the line started to fray so badly that it looked terrible. . . need to figure out a solution

The Thursday before the wedding, we had appointments with several vendors for final payment, of course most of my vendors were on the east side and I wasn’t. We had to cancel the appointment with the DYC because the centerpieces were not ready (needed to figure out the rope fray) and the favors were not done (we ran out of frames of course and had a few misprints to fix) so we met with: Hana – the dress fit beautifully; Maya (she let us know that we would be using brand new chair covers!); dropped a CD off to Kelly; stopped by Harp’s to get my mom a good bra; got stuck in tons of traffic along the way. We ended up getting back so late that I was literally bawling in the car on the way home. I missed my tanning appointment and I had planned to accomplish so much more that day. I finally went back into the office to print the remaining event cards – I was there until 2 am. At least my dad had taken care of buying the printer and he said he would figure it out for me. My sister had appointed 2 friends to run the photo station. I had talked with our pastor and he had sent me the ceremony details, I still had to figure out that program design though.

On Friday, we had to meet with the DYC, I had figured out that putting masking tape at the ends of the rope would stop the fraying. Jeremy loaded up the car with the vases, the pillar candles, the menu cards, the favors, the votive holders and we were on our way. I was taping and cutting rope the whole way down there. We were 30 min late, but we made it. Loaded everything into the club and Julia left us to put together the centerpieces. Thank goodness we didn’t have to put the votive candles in the actual holders ourselves. . . wait a minute, where are the votive candles?! Jeremy didn’t know he was supposed to include them, they were in our basement. Shit. I called my mom and she said my dad was planning on coming down to the boat with my sister’s boyfriend (who was due in later that night from NYC) tomorrow morning to clean it up in case anyone wanted to see it and he would drop them off. Perfect! My sister (who had come in the night before and was with my mom) said she would let her BF know and not to worry about it. My dad however, still couldn’t quite figure out the photo printer, but he was confident that my sister or her friend would be able to so I shouldn’t worry about it.

We get home and it was much later than I had planned. . . I suddenly realize that we don’t have a unity candle (when I saw how much the wedding places were charging for a set, I again, based on principle, decided I could just wrap some ribbon around some candles and make my own. . . well I had the candles and the ribbon, but I had never done it) I ran up to Michael’s bought a unity candle set that I really didn’t like, but it was slim pickins, briefly considered buying a traditional guest book but instead bought a few more 12 x 12 pages and decided I would draw off the squares that night so my idea could still be pulled off. It was at this time when I saw a full tray of the exact same champagne colored card stock that I had searched all over for. I had assumed that Michaels and Jo-Ann’s had different suppliers and different brands of scrap booking stuff from each other. . . all that driving around for nothing!

I ran back home to change for our rehearsal, tied cards to all the gifts, loaded them into the car, grabbed the FG basket and RB pillow, made and brought the FG shirt (which she never wore because she came to the rehearsal in a dress – of course, that never crossed my mind, I was just ironing on the cute decal while crying in our basement and Jeremy was trying to help, but there was no helping me at that point)