my "vision"

I have a vision, several motifs, and no theme. Our wedding is going to be a bit of a rag-tag collection of different ideas, and none of them fit together. I am aware of this, and it is fine with me.

You may remember our venue, the Metropolitan Building has a very Parisian, shabby-chic feel to it.
You may think that "Parisian, shabby-chic" would lead a girl expertly to a cohesive vision worthy of Style Me Pretty. You can just imagine it, right? Lots of elegant, slightly distressed detailing, maybe some lace or linen. Sigh. It practically designs itself, this space. Online I read a description of the Met Building that called it an "Anthropologie photo shoot waiting to happen."

The thing is, none of my disparate elements really fit so neatly with what the Met Building has already given us, and I'm fine with that. Essentially, we just wanted to stick with things we like, and not worry about whether they all fit together. Themes and matching make me feel nervous and confined. I would prefer to have the elements of this wedding a little strange and disparate, but also be able to have the things we like, even if they don't match.

One of the early motifs that emerged began with our STD stamps: the only postcard stamps available on USPS.com were the polar bears. We liked them, and had no other choice!

I did notice, however, that some of the pale green tones in the polar bear stamp match the pale green walls at the Met Building.

Oh, ho ho! Maybe I do like a little matchy-matchy! From there, we used "sno-cone" colored paper from Frenchpaper.com for our STDs.
See what I mean? There is a vision and a method, but I wouldn't say I could name it, or that it's as easily identifiable and consistent as Miss Cowboy Boot's perfectly gorgeous peach and dusty rose Santa Fe wedding. Miss Cowboy Boot's vision is so palpable that I see things all the time where think "Oh, that would be perfect for Miss CB!"

I on the other hand, don't really understand inspiration boards and am not focused enough to use one or make one. (Do you use them or make them? Or both?)

This leads me to our invitations, which feature two polar bears, one of whom is wearing a tophat!

So we have polar bears on the stamps, polar bears on the invitations ... but will you see polar bears anywhere else? No!

...But you will see Sherlock Holmes. One of the things about our wedding that causes my mother's lips to press together are our escort cards, which will be Sherlock Holmes-themed. We're going to have each table named after a Sherlock Holmes story (The Adventure of the Speckled Band, anyone?). We'll have plain, tented escort cards with each guest's name, and the name of one of the cases inside. On the table, we'll have a Holmes silhouette:

Followed by the name of the case. Who wants to be at The Adventure of the Six Napoleons? Surely everyone will!

However, aside from the table names and escort cards, there's not going to be any other Holmes stuff at the wedding. My mom is not into the Holmes idea, I can tell, but is kindly indulging me. We picked this because G. has loved Sherlock Holmes since he was a kid, and knows all of the stories. More importantly, we spent the spring of '08 renting the Jeremy Brett version from Netflix. This was a difficult period for us, plagued by work and graduate school trauma, and Sherlock Holmes was one thing we always looked forward to, and I daresay got us through.

As far as my mom is concerned -- which is pretty far, considering she is creative director of all the flowers and the rest of the decor -- the wedding will have a strong "winter wonderland/Christmas" vibe. We're going to have cut paper snowflakes sprinkled on the tables, red Amaryllis placed on tabletops, and mini Christmas trees. And a lot of wreaths.

As you can see, a lot of these projects have yet to be completed, but they are swimming in my head. I've decided that even though my polar bear-detective-Christmas-snowflake-Parisian-shabby chic wedding doesn't all fit together, I don't care. It has all the stuff that we like, and that is the most important thing.

Do you have a vision? Do you have a theme? Are you all over the place, like me? Do tell!

OMG so excited

People keep asking me if I am "excited" for our wedding. Until today, I wasn't exactly sure how to answer that. Last weekend, we went to the third of four weddings we'll be going to this year. The fourth will be our own! While we were anticipating and attending these other weddings, I really didn't feel like I wanted to talk about mine, because I didn't want to distract from the weddings that were actually happening. People would say things (all the time) like "you're next!" (nudge, nudge!) and I'd be like "yeah, but..." just wanting to concentrate on where we were that day. Not thinking ahead to us. Basically, I didn't want to be all about my wedding while we were celebrating someone else's.

Last night we saw our friends P. and S. (of the wedding with the bus debacle that should never be mentioned again, but surely will, again and again). They just returned from their honeymoon the other day. Now I feel like everyone's married, honeymooned, returned, and our friends are turning their attention to us. It is actually kind of exciting to talk about the wedding and not feel that I am detracting from another bride who's making 600 tissue paper puffballs for next week.

I also feel like it is becoming more real. It seems less and less like some abstract thing that's going to happen in the distant future. Today we took G.'s parents and sister to the Metropolitan Building to check it out, because they had not yet been. G.'s mom wanted us to get married in their family church, and has taken some time to warm up to the idea that we're doing our own thing, so to speak. We spent awhile looking at the space, talking about decorations, and asking Carlos (who really runs the show at the Met Building) all sorts of questions.

Luckily, G.'s mom has very similar taste to me and my mom, so I am happy to incorporate her suggestions. She is a big fan of Michaels, as am I. She has a snowflake-shaped hole punch, so we decided we'll make paper snowflakes to sprinkle on the tables. Awesome.

Then we took a trip to the Ravel Hotel, which is this new and super chic hotel in a quite improbable section of Long Island City. We took a look around there, and were super-psyched about the awesomeness of it, not to mention the (totally great-for-NYC) room rate they gave us.

Now that our friends' 2009 weddings have happened, and all parents have seen the Met Building and started thinking of ways to make it even more awesome, this really seems real.

When did things start to seem real for you? Or did they always?

PS - Thanks to Miss Sunbeam for posting her Etsy loves. Thanks to her, I am afraid I am going to be $300 in the hole for this gorgeous knitted shawl. I don't want to wear a winter coat over my wedding dress, but a girl does need a little something in December, right? (I plan to get dressed at the hotel and drive over to the ceremony.) I haven't decided whether I'll buy this or not, but damn, it's nice!

Snapping up a photographer - Part I

One of the (very few! I swear!) things I researched during that weird, post-Talk, pre-engagement period was our photographer.

Two things -- besides actually getting married surrounded by our loved ones and their dates -- are really important to me in this wedding: the venue, and the photographer.

I looked on Theknot.com and checked out some photographers I found on there. I went through my local issue of The Knot magazine, and bookmarked the websites of photographers I liked from Real Weddings (man, are "real weddings" a great resource or what?). I even did a little snooping around on Craig's List, since I know one of my favorite Bees, Miss Joey, has had great luck with The List (as my mom calls it).

Once we decided to start seriously thinking about the photographer this past June, I went back to some of the stuff I had bookmarked. Some of it I no longer liked. One woman's site I remembered I really liked several months ago, but I was having a devil of a time getting her website to load, so her and her Flash fell to the bottom of the list.

At the top of the list was a young woman who graduated from the same college my fiance and I did. Vassar has a kind of intense alumni connection thing going on, which I can't explain to you, it just is. So, by virtue of the fact that I
a) liked her website
b) she went to Vassar
c) she took lovely photographs,

we made an appointment to meet with her at a hotel bar in Manhattan. Swank!
She arrived in a snappy outfit with her portfolio and a giant umbrella in order to super-protect her stuff from the rain. Prepared, I like that!

She was all business. She took copious notes about us and our vision, asked a lot of questions, talked about her style, showed us a ton of work. I liked how things were going.

Then she showed us the price list. And she was expensive. And she was expensive before the albums, which were doubly, mind-blowingly expensive. My heart sank, and I pretty much wanted to be like, "Ok, well, thanks but no thanks, see ya." But I was polite and pretended like there was still a chance we would hire her.

As we left (after awkward whispering between me and my fiance about whether we were supposed to buy her drinks or whether she would buy ours), I was like, "Superbummer!" And G. was like, "Mmmm.... I didn't actually think her photos were all that great. And some of them seemed like they were great by accident."

Once he said it, I realized I wanted to be blown away. We weren't totally blown away. Especially not for the money. I felt relieved, that we could move on without feeling bad or like we missed an opportunity.

Then I remembered that I had bookmarked the site for a guy who had done a wedding at our venue, on the exact same floor. I was like, "Let's call that guy!" so we decided to make an appointment for the following week, and went home to walk the dog.

Choosing the Venue

Once I got engaged, I surprised myself by going into full planning mode right away. I didn't think I was the type of girl to start devouring wedding magazines right out of the gate, but I did. My friend Carolyn gave me The Knot's New York City magazine, and I was all over that ish. (Incidentally, she also gave us not only a sweet-ass bottle of fancy champagne, but also a 100 Grand candy bar. Is this an engagement tradition that I don't know about? It was delicious frozen.)


Anyhow, we knew we wanted to get married in New York City, and not in a church. We also knew that a Manhattan wedding would be big-time expensive. We live in Queens, so a Queens wedding seemed perfect. And convenient!Many friends of mine had planned long-distance weddings and finding a hairstylist in Santa Fe or whatever was not a headache I wanted to take on. Ten minutes away by car? Perfect!

I have to admit: I started snooping around on the internet, looking at wedding dresses and venues before we even got engaged. I made up arbitrary rules for myself about what was "ok" too look at in advance and what wasn't. (Wedding dresses and venues, totally ok. Full-on wedding sites like Weddingbee, not ok. Who knows why!)

By the time we got engaged, I had half of it planned out already. Then I totally changed my mind about everything. The perfect Queens venue that I found turned out to be way too expensive. Apparently, they had recently filmed an episode of "Gossip Girl" there, so it was not in the slightest bit an undiscovered Queens gem. Also -- more importantly -- my mother hated it.

Then I regrouped and I googled "Long Island City weddings" and found a "real wedding," which had been held at the "Metropolitan Building" as the ceremony and reception venue. I looked at the pictures of the building online, and loved it.



Six days after we got engaged, G. and I drove over and took a look. The neighborhood is mainly warehouses, and the Metropolitan Building is an old electrical parts factory. We like things that are a little offbeat, so this was excellent. When we looked at the space (an entire floor!) we just about died. It was so perfect for us: affordable (most importantly), very shabby chic, a little Parisian-looking, and overall pretty weird, with random skulls, romance novels and Buddha heads scattered about. We loved the idea of our guests arriving at a run-down warehouse and then finding such a wonderful, romantic space inside.



A week after that, my mother came to visit and we put down a deposit. Two weeks after engagement, we had our spot! I couldn't believe it was so easy.

In addition to loving the space, it is run by a very eccentric woman named Eleanor. Eleanor keeps a little dog with her, and was quick with the jokes.She told us that the cost of the site would be free if we used their catering, which we will. I am a one-stop-shopping sort of girl, so I am super-psyched that I don't have to worry about choosing a caterer and linens, or ordering tables and chairs. We just have to supply alcohol, the cake, the flowers and the DJ. I did another Google search and found a message board where former brides raved about the Metropolitan Building catering, so I know I won't have to worry. (An aside: Eleanor politely requested that we not ask for baby lamb chops for dinner. Apparently, they are a very laborious dish. Who knew?)

When we met with Eleanor in February, the space was either $6,000 flat fee, and you bring your own catering, or you get the space for free and you pay $150 per person for their catering. Also, they are very relaxed about how much time you spend there. We are able to drop stuff off the night before, and have the whole floor from 9:00 a.m. until midnight on the day of our wedding. Also -- I know, right? The awesomeness continues! -- they are a prop rental business, so they have a whole floor of crazy antique furniture that we can use at no extra charge. So if I desire a purple velvet chaise lounge and orange banquettes, I shall have them!

Did you pick your venue easily? Did they offer you any cool perks?