T minus 4 weeks

Wow.

The Ceilidh Dress – Princess Victory

Remember that I ended up with two pieces like this for the top of the ceilidh dress bodice? And that the aim was to stitch the red lines together in a single smooth seam?

I appreciate that it’s not entirely clear from the rather cack-handed Inkscape illustration, but essentially the point is that I have been trying to insert an angular seam with a sharp point in the middle into a nice smooth curvy seam, and do so right-sides together so that they curve the same way, completely counter-intuitive to one of the fabric pieces (as for a standard princess seam). Plus it’s in silk taffeta which marks permanently any time a pin so much as goes near it.

Clear as mud, I appreciate, but any sewist reading this will currently be wincing and going “You’re trying to do what???”

So it is with great pride and enormous pleasure that I show you the right-hand side complete. I used every trick in the book – I cut my seam allowances down to 1/4″; I thread-basted by hand; I notched and clipped; I sewed reeeally slowly and pressed it on my tailor’s ham. In the picture I’ve got it sat on my knee to demostrate the 3D curving effect (as this part of the bodice will be covering a, erm, 3D curve). It isn’t nearly as puckered in reality either.

Oh yes! Now to do the other side the same…

Confetti Confessions – The Reply

(This started off as a comment in reply to a blog of Flix’s, before I realised that I was over a month late in replying and it was kinda relevant for here anyway. So go and read the original, maybe, and its comments before reading this. In my defence, I’ve been busy planning a wedding :P)

I think I always knew that being able to get married would be amazing, but I honestly couldn’t see it happening to me just because I honestly couldn’t imagine finding anyone perfect enough to want to spend the rest of my life with. I think the whats and the whys and the hows suddenly fell into focus when I found that person – not least when I realised that I was going to be able to have a Quaker wedding.

(It’s not that I couldn’t have had anyway – non-Quakers can marry Quakers in a Quaker ceremony. But it would have felt funny for me not to have had a Quaker ceremony, and would probably have felt equally funny for a non-Quaker to have done things in ‘our way’. I didn’t intentionally fall in love with a Quaker, but I’m glad it’s worked out like that from a large number of points of view.)

And as soon as you are having an unconventional wedding by most people’s standards anyway, it liberates you to go the whole hog and be damned with tradition if there’s a particular tradition you dislike. So my father will not be giving me away, we will not be cutting a cake (after J told me about the symbolism!), and all of the speeches will be joint because I don’t see why it’s only the men who should have the say.

At the same time, it’s important to keep the traditions that you like – you only get to do this once, after all. I think I’ve mentioned on here before that despite the Quaker testimony to simplicity and the traditional implication that in my case would be frankly inaccurate, I discovered that what I really wanted to get married in was a white princess dress. So I will, simple as that. I once joked with my second/ third year housemates, long before I got with J, that if I ever got married then I would ban posh hats and fascinators at my wedding. “You can’t do that!” they replied, horrified. Well just watch me!

One final remark in relation to the comments over at Flix’s. You think that everything is going to be kept terribly simple and inexpensive and stress-free because your wedding’s going to be different. I point at your naïvity and laugh 😉

Preparations

What goes on hen do stays on hen do 😉

What’s In An Name – Email Edition

I’ve just got a gmail account! LucyHisSurname was taken on hotmail but not on gmail, so I figured that I’d better strike while the iron was hot.

Whenever I go onto Google now, my new name-to-be is shining up on me, and man, it looks weird! I suppose I’d better practise a new signature next…

RSVP (no really)

When we set an RSVP deadline (trying ever so hard not to actually call it a deadline), we allowed leeway for the inevitable fact that there would be some people who didn’t reply on time, or would forget to give us food choices or what have you.

That deadline was nearly two weeks ago. We started chasing people up in spare moments at work (having not got the internet here yet at that point). A few more have replied, including the best man and his girlfriend. A few still have not. Not huge numbers, but probably more than can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

You have to allow for the fact that I am tired and stroppy while writing this post due to a combination of exhaustion and depression and stress. But still – is it me, or is it just really rude? We’ve put a lot of effort into making this wedding as ‘user-friendly’ as possible, and at the end of the day we’re inviting people not because we have to but because we want them to be there. I can understand uncertainties over clashing commitments or travel plans or whatever and that’s fine – but they could at least have the courtesy to tell us! If they can’t be bothered to reply (even after a reminder) then I can’t be bothered to have them there. Sounds harsh? Do I care?

First Dance

I can finally reveal* that the traditional first dance at the start of our wedding ceilidh will be to Aaron Copland’s ‘Saturday Night Waltz’!

I’ve been in email contact with the guy who leads the band playing at our ceilidh (- Jimmy Smith of the Crewneck Ceilidh Band, if you’re interested). He’s done a folk dance arrangement, and we are both absolutely in love with it – any initial apprehension at clicking ‘Play’ on my part was very, very quickly swept away by what we heard from the mp3 recording just now.

We’ve just got to learn how to actually dance now…

*You know that you were waiting on tenterhooks 😛

What’s In A Name Change?

See ‘What’s In A Name?’ for the background to this.

I do like websites which tell you information clearly and concisely (even if I suspect that the particular website in question is that of a private company aiming to make a pretty penny out of people’s ignorance; this, I believe, is the official government guidance. Nice and transparent like most government documents…)

However it turns out that if I want to make the previously discussed change to my name upon marriage, I have to do it by deed poll. Even taking J’s surname and abandoning my own would involve on average 30-40 notifications of the change of name; doing so by deed poll would apparently make the notification process more complicated and cost me £64.43 for the privilege.

Do I care that much? Do I care £64.43 much? I mean, sure, what’s £64.43 compared to the personal significance of being able to have the name that I want, but… I dunno.

What would you do, or what did you do in this situation?

Emotional Overload

Getting married’s a big thing, right? To have found the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with, and to be planning a big, happy party that focuses on the two of you being in love… it’s pretty special.

I love weddings. I’ve hardly been to any, and less still within recent memory* – so maybe it’s as a result of this that I’m getting incredibly teary and emotional whenever the subject comes up of two people affirming their love for each other. I got teary in Debenhams when buying the matching knickers to go with my bra. I was trying not to cry all the way through the royal wedding. And now, to cap it all off, I have just link-hopped to a beautiful blog containing some of the most beautiful wedding paraphenalia I have ever seen.

It makes me want all the more to document our wedding properly, actually. I’d like lots of photos to be taken on the day – but also of things like my hen party and the little bits leading up to it. I’d like some soppy photos of me and J, but this might take a bit of doing because we’d have to find somebody to take them and I’d have to persuade J that he actually wanted to be in front of the camera rather than behind it for once. I’d like to do the little emotional things like leaving notes for each other, and flowers, and the First Kiss.

My pragmatic self is laughing right now – laughing and scoffing. But the emotions are still squeezing out of all the little cracks and corners, and they’re pleading with me that we will only do this once.

x

*J has been to none. If you don’t count the celebration and re-affirmal of vows of a couple of our Quaker friends that we’re going to in late June, J’s first wedding will be his own!

The Ceilidh Dress – Tracing

This is what I spent an hour or two doing this afternoon/ evening in Inkscape: tracing monarch butterfly patterns from Googled images onto measured out petal shapes.

Once I have added seam allowances, I will print this out with the aid of this tiling tool and use it as a pattern for cutting my silk habutai (and the cotton batiste backing). I will be able to trace the shapes through onto the habutai (using a 6B pencil, probably) and then go over the lines in gutta resist. Drawing by hand has never been my strong point, and I decided that this was the easiest way to get a result that I was happy with!

Please work, please work, please work…