inspiration boards

Wedding planning has introduced me to inspiration boards. There are blogs, like snippet & ink, that are all inspiration boards, all the time. Quite a pleasant way to spend a rainy evening while the rest of the family is crashed out on the couch.

I'm not a photoshop kinda girl, so I never got around to creating my own until...I found mosaic maker!

Here is my first crack at creating an inspiration board. Go make one and show it to me. It's fun!

save the date

Since our guests have begun receiving their save-the-date postcards, I figure it's okay to post the image that we used now. This was a photograph of our ceremony venue taken by our wedding photographer and friend, Aki. Isn't he amazing?

As bride #2 mentioned in an earlier post, we had postcards made with this image at Vistaprint, with the date and location printed on the image.

We also have a lifetime supply of bookmarkers since we have so many left over cards!

border crossing etiquette

Long time, no blog. I've been traveling, which may be why I am thinking about our guests and customs. Not like wedding customs of our cultural heritages, but rather Canada customs duties and taxes.

As Bride #2 has told you, we've ordered our "save the dates," which put the pressure on to get back to registering for gifts. You may recall that last time we hit the department store, their scanner guns weren't working so we went back over the weekend to finish the job. I'm a little bummed that we only seem to have one option of places to register. We'd thought about registering at another Canadian store just to expand our options and give our guests some choice, but sadly, Canadian Tire is no longer doing gift registries. What lesbian couple wouldn't want to register at a place with a name like that? We are disappointed.

I've already lamented about the difficulties of registering at stores that have both Canadian and U.S. locations. Americans can't order off the Canadian websites without a Canadian billing address. It seemed like an option for us to register on the U.S. website until I realized that we could run into problems with customs. Our guests could ship us gifts, but then we may end up having to pay duties on the shipments. We didn't figure paying duties and taxes on gifts into our wedding budget.

The other option is to have our guests hand carry gifts, but then they might have to pay when they go through customs. Apparently, visitors to Canada can only bring in gifts under $60 in value. I am not expecting people to give us gifts that exceed that value, but if they do, I really don't want them to have to pay Canadian duties and taxes at the airport or worse yet, get fined for not declaring the gift, etc.

Perhaps we should inform people of the customs requirements, but it seems like a rather lengthy and complicated message. And apparently, it is in bad taste to talk about gifts, registries, etc. in the first place. Somehow I don't think all those wedding etiquette books took this type of situation into account.

How My Wedding Attacked My Self Esteem

This self esteem related post has nothing to do with how I look in my dress. In fact, I think I have a rather happy and healthy self esteem...not too bloated, but not absent either. I like me and I don't usually spend a lot of time hang wringing about what other people think of me, etc. Call me crazy, but the wedding is actually attacking my self esteem. I sort of feel like I am setting myself up to be part of a popularity contest where there isn't even another contestant to be vying against. Perhaps this only makes sense in my own head, so excuse me while I dump the contents of my exhausted brain on the internet.

Maybe the culprit of my insecurities in the wedding arena is that I don't ordinarily flap my arms and draw attention to myself. I turn to a select few people for kudos, but generally get a sufficient amount from Bride #2 and from myself to do just fine. Now all of a sudden I am asking dozens of people to drop everything to fly to another country to ooh and ahh over me and Bride #2. What if no one comes? Then there's the question of "will anyone decide to shower us?" The "bridal registry consultant" did ask us and I felt sort of like a loser to tell her no. While I am happy to be having a relatively small wedding for it's cost saving properties, there is actually a part of me that feels sad to not have every old friend of the family demanding an invitation. Yes, it makes me wonder "Is it because we're gay?" Nevermind all the friends and family who have indicated their plans to fly in from far flung places in just the past week. The self esteem gobbling wedding monster knows no logic.

I could probably go on and on, but ya know, this is not really having the intended therapeutic effect that I was hoping for.

*pats self on back*

With little or no supervision from Bride #1, I've successfully proofed, ordered and shipped our save-the-date postcards out. Things happen when you give me an excel spreadsheet, a high resolution JPG and a website with ActiveX plugins. *straightens pocket protector*

FYI, we used VistaPrint for postcards. They're not the greatest ever with canned designs but we wanted low-cost, hey-you-book-your-tickets postcards that say "Vancouver". We had a gorgeous photograph from our favourite photographer EVER ie. Aki (Seriously, how lucky are we that he's our wedding photographer) so it was easy to piece text together into a postcard. It was also DIRT cheap.. and if you follow this link, you get 50% off. They also have mailing services and for about 8 bucks, plus cost of postage, they'll address, process and mail the stuff for you. Fantastical. Ahh.. the interwebz... I love you and your convenient ways

See.. I maintain that there's nothing you can't do in your underpants at home .. except maybe walk the dogs or shower or something...

beep beep beep beep

This is not a picture of what we did today. It's what we wanted to be doing, but what do you know, the scanners at the department store were down. How anticlimactic! Even though we scoffed at the suggestion that we'd need a couple of hours on the first visit, and an hour or so for the second and third visits to build our registry, we did spend a couple of hours wandering around. However, we opted not to write things down by hand. That seemed to archaic, time consuming and just not as much fun as zapping our desired items.

In addition to drooling at various small appliances and touching many towels and sets of sheets to assess softness, we also wandered into the shoe department. I made the mistake of trying on some really cute boots that had an abnormal amount of excess leather near the inside of the zipper. Of course, I didn't notice this as I excitedly zipped them up. It was when I tried to take the boot off that I realized that I was in trouble. Fortunately, Bride #2 likes to model herself after MacGyver and attached her key ring to the zipper and managed to free me. My hero! Isn't it fitting that I bought her this shirt a couple of Valentine's Days ago?

For anyone keeping track, we decided to not register any stores that have Canadian and U.S. stores. Seems like a weird decision, right? Let me try to explain. Stores like Williams Sonoma have locations in both countries, but they aren't linked. We thought it would be too confusing to try to explain to people to, say go to www.williams-sonoma.ca to access our registry. We were afraid people would automatically go to dot com and get lost since they wouldn't be able to access our registry there.

So there you have it, we are signed up, but have nothing on our registry at a Canadian department store. Thrilling, I know.

a watched pot never boils (or something)

Well, I did it! I ordered my wedding dress off the internet. Now I just have to sit and patiently wait for up to 12 weeks for my rush order! Can you believe that? It takes +$50 and three months to rush something?! In defense of the internet, it would likely take this long to get the dress even if I bought it from a local brick and mortar store. The wedding industry seems to run on it's own time table.

In the meantime, I will be on the hunt for a good seamstress in the Vancouver area who can quickly make alterations once the dress actually makes it into my hands. Anyone have any good recommendations?