DIY and the Dead Fly Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Despite my insistence that I'm not a DIY type of girl, I find myself doing a lot of things for this wedding myself. Among my projects is the Martha Stewart flower pillow.

I love this pillow, and from the moment I saw it I knew I wanted one for my wedding! I have a little sewing experience and this seemed like a project I could do.

For inspiration, I studied carefully the diagrams and tutorial over at Martha Stewart, which boasts this beautiful example:

Then I also read the more explicit tutorial of Weddingbee blogger "Mrs. Perfume," whose mother helped her with this beautiful one:

I picked up some remnant fabric at Joann's to practice with, and set to work with my little sewing kit. Here was some of my inspiration while I worked:

Oh yes, Michael provides the perfect sewing music.

First, I cut out those ovals just as Martha described: ovals with straight sides. FH pointed out that they look a lot like my little mouse, so I put them side by side. Twins!

Then, I got my sewing kit and went to work, following all the directions. I cut my little ovals out, and instead of pinching them with wire, I stitched them through the middle.

Then I started sewing them together. But I noticed something odd. Where the directions said there should be no gaps, there were plenty. And this didn't look like a flower at all! It was a weird, floppy thing. I tossed it onto my keyboard and noticed that it looked.... like a dead fly!

FH came over to see, and when I described it to him he immediately began holding it through the air, buzzing around with it. Guys!

Anyway, I quickly saw what my problem was: the ovals were too straight and too long. They really need to be more like circles. Why doesn't Martha say this? Wait, who am I kidding?! It wouldn't be a Martha project without some frustration.

So I cut out some new ovals.

These were quite a bit smaller (and the flower tends to get smaller as you add petals to it), so it was harder to sew. Still, there was an instant improvement.

And for good measure, we checked -- it's cat-approved!

Invitations pt. 2 [It's Real Now] Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The first thing that helped me get over my disappointment was seeing FH's reaction to the invitations. Earlier readers may remember that it was him who turned me on to these invitations in the first place -- he has excellent taste!

When he came home, I showed them to him without comment, to see what he'd say. He didn't say anything for a long time, but he just sort of stared at them, smiling. He said, "We're getting married!" It was very sweet.

These invitations, of course, are not about shades of pink and cursive and script and fonts; they're the first announcement that my fiance and I intend to start a new life together. Seeing him hold the invitations in his hands and really get that for the first time was priceless, and everything else I'd been worrying about suddenly mattered much less.

Another thing that helped was a little design tweak that was inexpensive and only took a few minutes! I decided to round the corners.

Smock can round the corners of your invitations for you, but we didn't select this when we ordered them. When they arrived, I knew it was the "something missing" that I needed to fix. I ventured into Hobby Lobby and found this sturdy-looking "Corner Chomper" and its cute matching case:

 

  

 This is the perfect tool for this sort of thing; it cuts clean, perfectly curved corners, and holds up really well. It's perfect for the super thick card stock of our invitations. 

And now for the results! First, the before: 

 

This tool cuts two types of corners; a quarter inch (it appears that this is the shape Smock uses if you have them round the corners)...

 

...and a half inch, which is the one we're going to use:

 

You can see the corners better in this shot:

 

I have to give major props to the Crop-a-dile. The corners it cuts are absolutely perfect... no flattening of the paper or extra weird notches. It's amazing how different the invitations look now. The softer edges really help our names to stand out, since they're now the only angled things on the invitation. I think the soft corners provide some much-needed balance and definition. Not only that, but with this hard cardstock, they're much easier to get in & out of the envelopes!

So for now, that's the story of our invites. Now it's on to a task I'm dreading: finalizing the guest list!

Everybody Jump! Sunday, January 31, 2010

That's right, the namesake of this blog! It's time to focus a little on the broom. Jumping the broom is a tradition for African-American weddings. Its origins are a bit uncertain, but it's significance is clear.

After the minister has pronounced us "man and wife," and we kiss, and we turn back to the congregation, we'll jump the broom just before we walk back down the aisle. I think it will just be a joyous moment and a great signifier that "we are married." 

I have a vision in my head for this broom, and the feeling that it has to be handmade. It just seems like that type of item. I don't have too many ideas yet, but I do plan to have a basic, "old-looking" straw broom, and decorate it with ribbon, wrap it in a little fabric (maybe some fabric from my wedding dress), and some handmade silk flowers. Here are some pictures (sources are linked):

 

  

 

When it came time to think about it, I was surprised by how emotionally invested I was in this broom. Yes, I'm an American, a Westerner, and in planning a traditional "white wedding" (that term just refers to the dress, by the way) I'm acknowledging that I've absorbed many of society's wedding traditions, and that they resonate with me. But the broom, I guess, is the only tangible evidence we have in the ceremony, the only part that says, "Here is a black woman getting married." I'm very lucky that my fiance, who is white, is as excited about this as I am!

I was also surprised to find myself thinking of it as an heirloom broom. Maybe we'll have a son or daughter who gets married, and wants to jump the broom? Or, in the even nearer future, what if one of my little cousins (I'm the oldest of 8 girl cousins) wants to get married and jump it? The "family broom." What a great tradition!

DIY + HTML + CSS... Saturday, October 17, 2009

I'm not much into DIY stuff... at least not super crafty things like my invites, or making paper balls or sewing a dress. (I did have a plan to DIY the flowers... FH talked me out of that!) I was, however, dead-set on building my own wedding webpage.

I already have a low-maintenance website for my photography, and I just couldn't justify paying for a website when I already pay $100+ every year to a hosting company, which allows me to host an unlimited number of URLs. So, I paid $10 for our domain name, and got to work.

Halfway through our engagement, I finally have a wedding page I almost like. But it's taken me 6 months to do what someone else could have done in a few hours! The problem is that my coding skills, where 1 is inserting hyperlinks and 10 is coding a webpage from scratch, are about at level 5. So that's an issue. The other is that I don't have any major web-building software (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.), so I'm limited to something I can install for free through my webhost.

I started out with a wordpress page, and I hated it right from the start. A wedding webpage should store lots of information, be simple to navigate, and relatively static (I don't think the front page should be changing all the time, for instance). I didn't like the blog-looking format. Also, I couldn't find any templates that were "wedding-y" enough. I worked on the page for a while and left it alone.

About a week ago, I decided that it wasn't enough and threw the whole thing out. In addition to wordpress, my hosting company has an easy 1-click install of Joomla, so I used that and, after a bunch of tutorials & Google searches, I've learned it. I've got the hang of it now, and I like the page. Click here to see the template I used.

It's a work in progress. I'm very proud of myself for adding a favicon. (!) Also, I'm going to create a registration-only portion of the site for the immediate family & bridal party, so they can have access to some extra information that I'd rather keep a surprise for the rest of our guests. I know Joomla has a bunch of form plug-ins, but we're just using a Google spreadsheet for our online-only RSVP.

I know the blogging bridal community has developers & coders far more talented than I. Anyone out there build your own page? How did you do it?

Photo from flickr user RosePhotosEtc.