Sunday, November 25, 2012

Gathering Decorations

Hello again! We've been busy in the past few weeks, scoping out wedding venues (we think we've decided on The One), deciding on wedding dates (again, we're pretty much decided), looking at photographers and doing budget plans and planning what is going to be a spectacular meal. We're looking at an October 2013 wedding, so our next step is to get Save the Dates out ASAP!

One thing that we knew about our wedding was that it was going to be heavily influenced by fall colors and foliage (fall is my favorite season), and that in order to be true to what we wanted and keep the wedding simple, we were going to hand-make or creatively acquire all the things we needed. I don't consider myself to be very crafty, but I do enjoy making things by hand, so I knew people would see the effort that we put in! Since our decorations are all fall-inspired, here's a sneak peek at what we were foraging for this evening:

More updates soon! Happy holidays!

Monday, October 8, 2012

THE DRESS.

Why the all caps, you say? Because it seems like, in the course of planning a wedding, everyone treats the acquisition of THE DRESS as if it were an extremely momentous process. And honestly, to me it felt like a pretty big adventure. Those of you who have only known me for a few years might have known me to wear skirts and be more feminine, but on the whole I am not very girly. Case in point: my favorite skirts to wear are long, flowy, floor-length skirts...because I can wear hiking boots with them. Needless to say, I was not the type of person who planned their wedding since they were in kindergarten, and I was definitely not the type of person who thought at all about what kind of dress they were going to wear. In my sophomore year of college, my roommate (who had more of an interest in things like wedding dresses) sat me down and had me look through the David's Bridal website for dresses I liked, but looking at wedding gowns was never a preferred activity for me.

When Noah and I got engaged, one thing we decided right from the top was that if I was going to spring for a formal wedding dress, I was only going to do it for one of the weddings--the big wedding in a couple years. There was no sense in buying a beautiful, formal gown if I was pretty much going to have to run over from work to get to the courthouse before it closed and not be able to do anything that would make me actually look good in a really nice dress. So we tabled the fancy wedding dress for later, when I can try on lots of poofy gowns and probably still end up with some sensible knee-length number because otherwise I'll trip on the dance floor. Since the civil ceremony is going to be very casual, we decided that Noah will wear a nice woven shirt he recently purchased at Renn Faire, and I would wear kind of a casual party dress or an everyday dress--something I could wear over and over again. And then, the painstaking search was on.

It just so happened that at the beginning of my search, I came upon what I thought was THE DRESS. It was cream-colored and long-sleeved and lacy and vintage-style and looked a little somethin' like this:

http://shop.nordstrom.com/S/kensie-lace-dress/3339125?origin=category&contextualcategoryid=0&fashionColor=BIRCH&resultback=552

But when I tried to order it, I was saddened to find that it was out of stock in every size but a large. Alas, it was not to be. So I ordered a dress from Modcloth that I also liked that looked a little somethin' like this:

http://www.modcloth.com/shop/dresses/fashionably-slate-dress

And it came, and I looked pretty good in it.




















I know, it's an awkward photo. They're all going to be awkward, so bear with me.

That day, Noah convinced me to go out looking at dresses just to see what was out there. We browsed some department stores at the mall and found a dress that looked vaguely similar to THE DRESS I'd found originally, and was also extremely on sale. Unfortunately, they didn't have it in my size. Neither did any other store in the state, pretty much. Here's what that one looked like:

http://www.overstock.com/Clothing-Shoes/Rabbit-Rabbit-Rabbit-Designs-Womens-White-Stretch-Lace-Dress/5795503/product.html

So we started looking at dresses online again, and-cue up Etta James' "At Last"-we found THE DRESS:

http://www1.macys.com/shop/product/kensie-dress-three-quarter-scoop-neck-lace-a-line?ID=689096&CategoryID=5449&LinkType=&swatchColor=Birch#fn=COLOR%3DWhite%26PRICE%3D50.0%7C99.99000000000001%26sp%3D1%26spc%3D12%26ruleId%3D65%26slotId%3D5

If you just did a double take and said "wait, that's the exact same dress that you had originally that was out of stock at Nordstrom!", you'd be right. I spent several weeks agonizingly poring over dresses and trying to decide whether I'd look good in them, only to happen upon the dress I'd loved all along. Like relationships, sometimes you just know when it's meant to be.

Last time I announced that I'd found THE DRESS people demanded pictures, so have some awkward pictures of me wearing a wedding dress with awkwardly-drying hair and that tired, "I've been at work since 7am today" look in my eyes, against the sweepingly romantic backdrop of my bathroom that hasn't been cleaned in awhile.




Noah, by the way, will wear this:


Wednesday, September 26, 2012

For those that missed the original announcement

Below is our original Facebook engagement announcement, for those that missed it or don't have Facebook. It should answer some lingering questions, especially for people who are wondering why I keep talking about two separate weddings.


We are so proud and excited to announce that we are getting married! Hooray!!! We'd like to start out by saying a big "thank you!" to all of our friends and family who have loved us and supported us over the years. We're so excited to share our love with you! 

I know everyone probably has a lot of questions, so I'm going to try to answer some of the big ones for you right now. :-) 

OMG, when are you going to post pictures of your ring???
I generally don't wear jewelry, so we decided it would be best to save the ring until our wedding day. We have several ring options on the table right now, and we're still narrowing it down to the one we like the most. I can promise you that it will be unconventional--we will be buying our rings from a person we're familiar with who forges metal (mostly copper) into strong, modern-looking jewelry. So it will probably look like no wedding ring you've ever seen before!

Have you set a date?
Not yet, no. Our dream is to buy a house in the next couple years, just outside of town with a little bit of land attached to it, and have a simple wedding in our own backyard. However, we are still several years off from being in a place in our lives where that is possible, so we've divided the wedding into two parts. Part 1 will be a tiny civil ceremony at the courthouse, and it will occur this winter (as in, 3-4 months from now), probably December or January after I finish my student teaching. Part 2 will occur after we've bought a house, and will be a backyard wedding with extended family and friends. This will also be the wedding where we will have religious officiants present and will have a full ceremony and reception. 

But Florence, I am your uncle/aunt/cousin/very close friend. Can I come to your civil ceremony?
We are holding firm to our plan that the civil ceremony will be extremely small and will only include immediate family.  Our guest list for the civil ceremony includes 11 people including ourselves and the officiant, and everyone on that list is a parent, sibling, or grandparent. Remember that we are having a whole other wedding that we are excited to invite you to! You are not missing our wedding at all, and we love you very much and are excited to celebrate with you when we have our formal wedding. 

Tell us about your super-romantic proposal!
Everything about our relationship has evolved very organically, and our decision to get married was the same way. I usually don't tell people that one of us "proposed", because we just discussed it together and came to the decision that it was time to get married. We'd been bouncing around the idea for a while, and last weekend we kind of just woke up and wondered why we weren't married yet, and all of a sudden it was clear to us that it was time. Nobody got down on one knee, nobody produced a ring, and there was no romantic proposal, but it couldn't have felt more right to us.

Welcome to the dinosaur wedding!

Hello friends, family, and visitors! If you've found your way to this blog, you are probably interested in keeping up with the details and information regarding our wedding! We chose a blog format instead of the traditional wedding website because our wedding plans are different from many people's and we felt that we could cover all that information better in a blog. Plus, with a blog you will all get much more detailed information about plans that we're making and vendors we're using, as well as lots of stories about our relationship and our wedding ideas. :-) We're so happy you're following along with us, and we're very excited to plan some great celebrations together!

First things first: you're probably wondering what's up with our name. The backstory is that one day at the beginning of our relationship, I wrote Noah an email in which I included the following sentence:
"By the way, have you ever thought about how much the word "thesaurus" sounds like a dinosaur? I have. Even more so if you make it into a dinosaur and call it the Thesaurasaur. I should draw a picture of this and send it to you...I have odd thoughts sometimes." (By the way, folks, this is the beauty of never cleaning out your inbox--you, too, can find inane details you wrote in an email years ago!) I did, however, draw that picture, and this is what resulted:












Since that day, I have nicknamed Noah Dictionarydon and myself Thesaurasaur, and that is how we sign our emails to each other to this day. So it made a lot of sense that this would be the Dinosaur Wedding!

To close, I would like to warn you that you probably will not see tons of activity on this blog until after the civil ceremony we have planned. Most of the planning is going to involve the bigger wedding we're having an a couple of years, and we'll start planning that in earnest after our civil ceremony is over. But we will have exciting things to update with between now and then, so keep checking back!

Love,
Noah and Florence