Sunday, September 7, 2014

The Bridal Shower

     After weeks of planning, today was my daughter's bridal shower. I think the most amazing part the planning is finding out the number of people who are truly invested in my daughter and her fiance. So many
people helped out, and everyone seemed genuinely happy to do so. The bridesmaids and my sister spent an entire evening at my house helping to make 80 invitations. The groom's mother and sister cut, pasted, and put together 60 cupcake wrappers made out of book pages. My SIL make the most delicious cupcakes. My sister and the Maid of Honor spent most of a Saturday making bookmarks for the favors and the Maid of Honor created games and brought beautiful orchids as prizes. The love and commitment of my daughter and her fiance's family and friends was clearly evident throughout the planning of a beautiful event.

   I have explained the details for how we created the decorations for
anyone who is planning their own literary themed affair. If you're not interested in the particulars, you may want to skip down to the last paragraph.

      The wedding has a literary theme, so the invitations feature a wedding dress on a dress form cut from book pages. The pages are from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire-the same book Ryan proposed with (though not the actual copy). My copy was falling apart, so I didn't feel too guilty cutting them up. We cut the pages into the shape of a wedding dress and mounted it onto antique-looking card stock (The Old World Stack) in various shades of purple (the wedding color). Then we added a purple ribbon and a self-stick pearl to finish the dress (see a framed copy in the picture above).

     To decorate the white cupcakes, we created wrappers out of more book pages glued onto ivory card stock. Then we added tags stamped with, "Happily Ever After" and tied on a purple ribbon. We thread the tags onto toothpicks and placed one onto each cupcake. To display the cupcakes, we placed some on a store bought cupcake tower in the middle of the cake table. The rest were displayed onto stacked hard-covered books that had been covered with purple or white paper and tied with ribbon.


     The centerpieces were made of wrapped books tied with ribbons. A purple tag with the bride and groom's names and the date of the wedding printed onto book page hearts was tied onto each stack.
     Then a romantic quote in a white frame was leaned against each stack of books. The quotes were printed onto card stock from the Once Upon a Time Stack.  Each was also accented with a heart die-cut from book pages. *Note: The cards needed to sit a while for the ink to dry before putting in the frames.

The quotes I used are:
  • “I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself but for what you are making of me.” Roy Croft
  • "Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering." The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
  • “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” By Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
  • “For the two of us, home isn’t a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS  By Stephanie Perkins
  •  “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Lorrie Moore
  •  “I would rather share one lifetime with you than face all the ages of eternity alone.” The Fellowship of the Ring 
     My daughter's lovely Maid of Honor created 3 games for the festivities. Everyone received a blank Bingo card. They had to write in gifts they thought my daughter would receive. The first person to get five in a row won an orchid plant. Next, she placed pictures of handsome hunks under each chair. She pasted faces of famous actors onto a picture of a tuxedo jacket. The person who had a picture of the groom received a prize. Finally, people had to match the love quotes with the correct author. The person who knew the most was the winner. 



      Finally, the favors were homemade bookmarks. They were made from a 6" x 8" length of card stock from the Once Upon a Time Stack, then folded in half to be two-sided.  We cut rectangles from the book pages that were about 2 1/2" by 7". We used a heart hole punch to make a heart at the bottom of the book page. Next we pasted the book page onto the card stock. On some we placed a picture of the bride and groom behind the book page so their picture showed in the heart cut-out. On some, the color in the picture clashed with the color of the card stock, so we left the picture out. They actually looked very pretty with the colored card stock showing through. If I were to do it again, I would print the photos in black and white. It
would have added to the old world feel of the bookmarks and the color wouldn't clash with the card stock. Then we glued a diagonal piece of card stock with the quote from Lord of the Rings across the upper part of the bookmark. Finally, we tied an ivory ribbon at the top of each one. The bookmarks were placed at each place setting.

 
 As the host, you try  to make sure everyone is taken care of, that the decorations are just so, and the food meets the needs of everyone there.  Overall, you just want everyone to enjoy themselves. You also want to make sure everyone feels like an important part of the celebration-to feel genuinely appreciated for their participation. I know I appreciated all of the love and support that was shown for my daughter and her fiance. The fact that so many people genuinely care about their happiness made me very proud of the woman my daughter has become and the choices she has made. I know she has touched each of these people in special ways for them to want to be an integral part of this moment in her life. I hope they all know how much their kindness was appreciated in return.


   

Sunday, January 12, 2014

And so it begins...

I took December off from both writing and working on Emily's wedding dress. A week-long trip to Germany to watch my son compete in the World Show Dance Championships put all the wedding planning on hold. Between that and Christmas, December was a bust. But now that Emily has booked a venue and set a definite date (December 27, 2014), the planning has begun in earnest.

So, to begin this journey, I have been reading everything I can find about dress construction. I haven't spent much time sewing in the last couple of years, so I need to brush up on my skills...and this project is going to require that I develop new skills as well. Here are two that I purchased which have been very helpful. I also visited my local library and found many books explaining construction and couture techniques which should come in very handy.


I have also looked everywhere for patterns that even remotely resemble the dress of my daughter's dreams. So far, it can not be found. After trying on several dresses and looking through many, many bridal magazines, Emily came up with this sketch.


So now it is up to me to figure out how to make it. Most wedding dress patterns you can buy have fairly simple lines. Several were two pieces, a bodice or corset and a skirt. As you can see in the sketch above, Emily does not want two separate pieces. The patterns I found with boning tend to have the boning attached to the outer layer or the lining, instead of using a separate corselette, which I am not sure will provide enough support for the many layers of dress Emily wants to have.

I did look at the Marfy catalog. This is a pattern book from Italy. It had the widest selection of anyone, including patterns for petticoats, undergarments, and coats. But again, many of them were two pieces--a corset and a skirt, or had a definite seam at the waistline (which Emily does not want). The Marfy patterns are a little pricey, but I would gladly pay the cost if they had one that closely matched my daughter's dream dress.

So for now I am torn between finding and buying several patterns and trying to figure out how to put them together, or creating my own pattern from scratch. I think I'll do a little more reading while I focus on converting the extra bedroom into a sewing room. Next up, adventures with dress forms!