we'll have plenty of time to take care of that later...

an improvement over our earlier to do lists

A and I went to a friend's wedding recently (as in, "over a month ago") feeling pretty good about where we were at with planning. At the very least, I was feeling good and blissfully ignorant and Amanda's list-making had been worn down by my regular rejoinder of "we'll take care of that in August." August, I imagined, would be a month when our only concern would be passing the pitcher of sangria while we leisurely took care of all those remaining details surrounding the wedding. Between our quickly filling-calendar for July and the inevitable stress of September's one-month mark, August became the receptacle for my procrastination.

Now, this wedding was the first that we had attended since we had announced our engagement; our first in-action look at what we were up against. Until this point, much of our planning had been based on the gauzy, soft-focus romance of how we remembered our friend's weddings (drawn exclusively from our blurry snapshots and champagne-addled memories). Here is what I remember from most of our friends' weddings:

There was food. It was held somewhere. I'm pretty sure they ended up married.

When you boil it all down, wedding's are just overblown, formal, expensive parties, right? If that was the case, then we had nothing to worry about. Our two main priorities had been securing the event space and the caterer and did we accomplish them? Handily. Promptly. Now top my glass off and make sure some of those boozy orange slices make it in.

Then we arrived at our friends' wedding. What started off as a night of Amanda making awkward introductions between me and people she had forgotten she had gone to grade school with, quickly devolved into an evening of conspiratorial whispering between she and I, dissecting their ceremony and reception:
"They have programs, is that on our list?"
"How far are we on compiling music for the reception?"
"Do we need a separate bouquet to toss?"
"Shit, they have, like, a dozen cakes! Maybe we need more cakes?"
"Look at the bride and groom - we won't get to sit the entire night of our wedding!"
"We won't get to eat!"

Great, the two things we had actually taken care of in advance would go unused by us. Meanwhile, everything that all of our guests would be expecting was still waiting to be taken care of in August. Damn, I just spilled my sangria all over myself.

We chose to get married when we did partially because it seemed like the right length for an engagement. We had seen so many of our friends have l o n g engagements with drawn-out waiting periods in the middle. We thought seven and a half months was short enough to be efficient, but long enough to take care of everything. If I could reschedule everything, I would have a one, maybe two month engagement. Like ripping off a band-aid, it would hurt and then it would be done with. And isn't that just the kind of lovely metaphor more wedding's should aspire to?

As I've said before, the wedding industry is huge and maybe a little bit evil. It's really quite easy to get overwhelmed by all of the details that, somewhere in our history, have been incorporated into our cultural idea of the perfect day. While originally we'd been overwhelmed to the point of catatonia, we have found that you can just as easily be overwhelmed into taking on too many projects. Most nights we spend making favors and invites, calling for various appointments and drawing out elaborate play-by-plays of the ceremony. Which reminds me to say that you should never look at wedding books - they overwhelm couples directly into that Martha Stewart automaton mentality. I really think that if we had maybe glanced at even one more wedding book "for ideas," we would be sitting on our living room floor this very minute, trying to figure out how to make individual birch-bark wrapped boxes to hold hand-picked and home-perfumed rose petals for our guests to throw. At least our place would have smelled nice. But I don't think I would have been able to find our to-do list under all of the birch clippings and glue-guns.

two colors = two printings

And these are the photos from round two. After this, I just have to put A to work cutting out and assembling the parts. For hours.



























It actually is a lovely color on the cards. Really.

we're still getting married. seriously.

I know that we haven't been posting at all very much lately (and as I hear it, you haven't been looking very often, either), so just to let you all know, we are still getting married. We're just hitting that mid-point in the planning process when the wedding feels like a dull buzzing in the background of our migraine. Or maybe thats just the heat. Because it is 102 damn degrees in Portland today! As soon as it cools off, we'll post about the planning process and the very special torture that it is to plan the happiest day of your life. For now, since our apartment has started to look like a Jo-Ann Fabrics with all of our wedding craft projects, here are a few photos of why exactly we are so damn busy:
















That's right, I made the brilliant decision to test run my temperamental new old 1950s hand-operated letterpress on our own wedding invitations.



































































I only have to do this 200 more times.