State of the Union

While these do not bode well for my goal of saving money, I must say that my state looks banging on a necklace. I think I need it. Its cheekiness calls to me. (Necklace by Maya Brenner and Privileged)

Wedding Website

So I need a non-fugly wedding website. That will let you be very controlling and annoying. I like to control and annoy. I don't like eWedding. It's kinda icky. Anyone have any ideas? I really just want it for very very simple things, the kind of things I could print out and send to out of town guests like "here are some hotels, here is the nearest airport, there is going to be a brunch" etc. Thoughts? Feelings? Thanks.

Tartan, Susie

I love this luminous shenanigan found on Design Sponge. That Julia Roth is the woman. I want it. To celebrate the awesomeness of being Scottish, of having a Westie and of having a last name that starts with a Mc. Holler back.

Hannah and Davey might be buying a couch

And this might be the lovely couch. It's dirt cheap and it's blue and it's pretty. I kind of love it a lot.

Happy Birthday to Us!

We've been blogging (not very often or very well) for a year. We are bloggery type people.

If you happen to read our blog, we thank you and commend you on your patience. I am now off to write cover letters.

Inspiration

Peonie's shoes are inspiration. Only cheaper. Photo by her. Obvi.

Inspiration Board, Barn Part III

I promise I will try to credit pictures in future. I really will.

Or or or

Or I could find a way to plant heaps of wild flowers around the barn and maybe do flower beds where people are going to be walking up to the barn......

more at Maya's Flickr found via another fantastic Hannah at Seeds and Stitches

Projects

I want to start doing obscene little crafty things. Like sewing lots of tulle flowers like the ones above to put on my bridesmaids heads and finding WEDDING SHOES and I feel like I should start making hundreds of miles of bunting or buying lots and lots of those little papel picado flaggy shenanigans and pouring hundreds and hundreds of little candles. But I need to wait a little while. I need to wait until we establish a font and or script before I worry about programs, or even our wedding website. I need to collect more jars before I go ahead and start pouring candles, I need to actually make sure the flower girls get their dresses before I make them flowery headbands, and I need to buy a dress before I stress out too much about shoes. Maybe I could make a veil... Or I could vacuum the bedroom floor and clean the bathroom. Hmmm.

Inspiration Board, Barn Part II

Can't credit because the sister sent it.

Go, Look

There is also this fantastic barn wedding. Barn weddings should be fun and light and silly. Like this one. APW and Meg continue to deliver the bestest weddingy loveliness around.

Inspiration Board

One of my sisters, who is 20, found a bunch of barn inspiration boards and emailed them to me. I don't know where they came from but she's got the idea. Only summerier and pinker and laughier. You get the picture.

Summer Dresses

When I lived in England my best friend and I were obsessed with watching Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? (because we were poor as anything, very lonely, cold as hell and enjoyed watching other people go crazy, we are not necessarily proud of this time in our lives). Our favourite episode was about Valerie Vazquez. She was the cutest thing that ever happened, perfectly dressed, had great hair and an awesome laugh and totally made us die with jealousy a bit. She had awesome dresses for every vendor meeting, wore four inch heals and never stopped smiling. I want to be Valerie Vazquez in my wedding planning shenanigans. I want to wear this dress to meet with a florist (or since I might be driving to Potomac to buy in bulk maybe I'll wear this dress to do that) or to go and talk to the baker. Or maybe to the rehearsal. Yay for summer weddings that allow me to be a slightly paler, chubbier, not quite so gracious and smiling Valerie.

Diamondy Shiny Pretty Things

Kate Szabone has shipped my engagement ring. It looks like this. Dearest Darling David had the good sense to let me pick it out so we and Madame Szabone together talked about what we wanted and this luminousity is what we got. I'm excited. I want it to arrive and live on my finger and make it pretty.

Lovely Lovely Ink

Besty Dunlap has pretty pretty pretty calligraphy. Hannah loves the calligraphy. I want lovely envelopes, lovely place cards, lovely lovely lovely Reserved signs for the first few pews for our families. Maybe Hannah should learn to write prettily or get a friend with pretty writing to help (you know who you are)

Going to the Chapel

It's been a not so awesome week. Jobs were lost. Cars broke down (cars plural, jobs lost was just one) and headaches won't go away. But we got the wedding date locked in. We got the church booked. It's teeny and tiny and sweet and in the country and the drive from the little country church to the barn will be pretty and leisurely and hilly and woodsy. Unfortunately I take terrible pictures so these aren't the kindest of the church but you get the idea: small,

country, white, and built in 1862. Yummy happy joyness.

Winter

It's not nearly so cold anymore but it's still winter. I'm still unemployed. One of my sisters is very sad. Bad news from the home-front. I have been listening to a lot of Midlake. It is good January music.

Wine

We like cheap wine. We buy it by the case. We like it better than wines that taste twice as much. We are, as I have said before, very young. Since we are doing the reception in my parents old barn we can buy our own wine by the case (and beer by the keg and scotch and vodka and gin etc by the handle, we know and love our alcohol) and I think these fantastic labels stuck on our cheap out bottles would be LOVELY.

Now the question is: to pick one for the red and one for the white or to just randomly throw a bunch on a bunch of different bottles. And what to write on them? "Hannah and David 7/17/10" is just not that cool. Any thoughts?

found via I-DiY

I May Not Know Much...

Chucks by mcirbus featuring Converse shoes

...but I'm pretty sure happiness comes in shades of Chuck Taylors.

Excuse Me

Bridal Magazines suck. Not a little. A lot. Not a little. I know we are all always talking about how much they suck but seriously. They. SUCK. They aren't just bad self esteem machines (also: Dear J. Crew and your sample size eights, eff the eff off) but they are full of stupid things, and ugly bikinis that say 'Just Married' on the bum and articles about Fun and Flirty Fuchsia weddings (Not all weddings need to be formal and sophisticated! Embrace your flirty personality! Have a Lingerie Shower!! and SEQUINS on everything) and they seem to think that David should wear an effing white tux (also: Tuxes make me sick a little bit) and I think anyone would be SHOCKED by the tulle. Seriously. (please note that I like ruffles a lot, I just bought a ruffly shenanigan of a skirt for which I assume I will be judged harshly, but swags of tulle in churches make me ill). No wonder we are all constantly referencing Martha, because she is the only one who doesn't tell us to drape tulle or dress our biddies in SHINY SHINY SHINY hot pink with rhinestones.

Here is my real conundrum: I'm kind of quirky. I bought a tutu, I'm having my reception in a barn, and I really want my westie in some of my wedding pictures (she's crazy cute) but I really also want to have invitations Amy Vanderbilt would fully support and I want to say EXACTLY the Roman Catholic nuptial vows said by my great grandparents in NY in 1890. I want flowers and something blue and I would really like to wear my grandma's veil. The Blogs are really not sufficient. ESB is awesome but she's not the whole picture I'm looking for. So please traditional wedding media, stop sucking. Or suck a little less? Martha Stewart weddings doesn't come out often enough.

Shiny For the Toes

Slightly worse than the J Crew yellow pretties and also completely inappropriate for my barn wedding reception are these shiny shiny shiny Christian Louboutin Glitter Slingback Platform Pumps for $745. But they are terribly shiny, and terribly pretty. And David is tall (6'5" holla back) and I am only sort of middling tall (5'9.5") so I kind of want to be slightly closer to his eye level so perhaps spending a jillion dollars so I can be taller is sensible? If I just want to be taller there are always these:

I had a pair of these Capparos in black my senior year of college. They are fuchsia and high and $73. Maybs.

OR these, from Kurt Greiger for £19.99. Pink pretty shenanigans are always so appealing.

On My Feet

So how about sunshine yellow shoes that don't cost $235? I'm feeling cheap and stingy and these stupendous yellow shoes don't really sync with cheap and stingy.

On My Head

I want a veil. Not a big one, a tiny little banging awesome one. Like Katherine (shut up I love her) Heigl's. Maybe with a big flower. Or a thistle. Or some feathers, like the above on etsy.

Found any pretty ones?

Thursday

Looks like this:

Dear Mr. Boddington, Can I have your babies?

Mr. Boddington makes me want to have babies. So I can announce their births with pretty cards. Stationary fills me with dancing happy dappy joy.

From top: Mischief in the Crib; Hip Hip Hooray

Little Girls

This plus

This plus

a pair of these plus

one of these a piece equals the cutest flower girls ever

Dear Mr. Boddington

I love David a lot but will you marry me? K. Thanks.

Love and kisses,

Hannah

xoxoxox

Mr Boddington's Bodacious Stationary (not really the name but WHATEVA)

The Children

I feel like every time read Dear Abbey there is some shenanigan about "my sister won't speak to me because I won't let her brats come to my wedding" or "my brother is marrying some b*tch who won't let me bring my precious bundles of joy to her wedding". Children and weddings are an issue. To have them? Not to have them? Whose to have? What to feed them?

We are having a small wedding (seriously. small) and including everyone's children would be an increase of 31% (my godmother's children alone would increase the guest list by 10%). We are having David's siblings' children come to the wedding reception because they are going to be IN the wedding (and those five children are going to eat grown up food and try very hard not to go into any of the off-limits because of danger areas of the barn) but we've been trying to think of something to do with the children of out of town guests. Babysitter at a hotel? There is now a thought that perhaps we'll hire a couple of babysitters to occupy with pizza, games and pool at a nearby condo (another idea for out of town guests: condo for the young and broke who don't mind sleeping on pullouts, 13 to a condo).

Are you having/did you have children at your wedding? The thought of my tiny, teeny wedding disappearing is just a little too upsetting to bear.

Photo via Lillian and Leonard, it makes me think that little people at a wedding would be nice. The thought of those little hands in broken glass in the off-limits areas of the barn makes me think it would not be so nice.

Look, Go

Maybe it is just because it's very cold, or maybe it's that the Westie has a chattering jaw and the cat has a cough and weddings are stressful and expensive and we are experiencing guest-list inflation but this January seems heavier than most. This is a good wedding for January. Go. Look.

Falling Darkness

I don't know how you guys feel about HBO's Big Love but I for one am mildly obsessed. I love it so much that I even kind of like Chloe Sevigny now simply because she is so brilliant in it. That being said the season 4 premiere was last night and there was a new opening credit sequence that visually complements the much darker turn the show has taken from its first season.

The reviews of the new credits have been mixed. I happen to think, however, that it is one of the most beautiful and haunting montages in recent memory. You can watch it here.

Also, how beautiful is Jeanne Tripplehorn? I want to look like her when I grow up.

Bridesmaids Option #1 of 93,462,534

Other than the cost, bridesmaids dresses have been my least favourite part of wedding planning. Here is a thought. Just one. One of many many many thoughts. If you are a bridesmaid and you don't have anything nice to say.... SHUSH.

via J. Crew, because realistically, I know it's lame but they have pretty dresses and pretty colours and options under $200

Guestbook

Guest books suck. This is well regarded as fact. Which is why there are typewriter guestbooks, and index card guestbooks and why Martha (why do I LOVE YOU SO EFFING MUCH WOMAN?!) has an entire photo gallery of crazy-ass suggestions.

Liz at Chic on the Cheap is a genius and made a photo book of pictures of family weddings going back to the early 1900s that people could thumb through and look and and sign. Apparently it hangs out around their house and people look at it when they come over. Holler. I especially like this idea since all four of my grandparents are "no-longer-with-us" and it I like the idea of placing our wedding, our marriage within the greater context of our families. I am the oldest daughter of an oldest daughter of an oldest daughter of an oldest daughter. My mother married a foreigner and my grandmother did too. Let's acknowledge and rock these things in a guestbook. Please.

Deanna, the very very cool illustrator who documented her wedding shenanigans here, and her husband put together a book of photos, movie tickets, receipts, notes and letters and used that as a guestbook. Much much cooler than a typewriter (note: typewriter is super cool, just don't understand what I'm going to DO with all that typewritten paper. What to DO with it is the issue, ditto index cards and vintage postcards).

So dear David: Can I please have some wedding pictures from your family past? Since I have a lot of mine floating around.

Pictures: Top is Mum, June, the third generation to wear that dress, bottom is my great-grandmother, also called June, the first to wear that dress.