Wedding Photos

The long awaited wedding photos are finally on Flickr. Six months after the wedding, we have picked out the photos of which we'd like prints, and have ordered them from the photographer. It was a big job to pick out just a few from so many. Maybe in a few more years we'll actually get a wedding album put together. Maybe I should go buy a wedding album as some sort of start towards that.

Anyway, here they are! These are a few of our favorites, but to see the whole batch, click here. I suggest using the "view slide show" option in the upper right if you want to view all of them.
This seems to be the best view of the infamous bunny stole.
Thank you to everyone who was able to come share our wedding day with us, especially folks who had to travel or rearrange their schedules to be there. We both really appreciated it.

The Best and yet another Jayne hat

I had been warned that weddings can be stressful. Had been warned about the things that can go wrong, funny and not so funny. For Chris and I, this wasn't a big worry. Our goal was the same, our tastes are similar, and neither one of us can work ourselves up over the color of napkins, even if we tried. However, there were still loads of phone calls and schedules and logistics to get through, plus orchestrating the very specific ceremonies that happen around the actual wedding day. Early on (within a week of the proposal) we got to choose 2 people to keep track of us on that day. Two witnesses to the vows we made who will be more than willing to remind us what we promised, should we ever need reminding. I just finished reading an English novel in which they were referred to as "best man" and "best woman." I wish I had found that wording a few months ago before the bulletins were printed, as it's a better description than "maid of honor."

Lots of women choose a maid of honor who's good at throwing parties, or picking out clothes, or running down the groom. I picked the best woman who I wanted at my side on that day, who would keep me in the right mindset and keep me calm as we finished making table favors and ran around to rehearsals and such. She did not disappoint. For instance, getting to the rehearsal in rush hour traffic and going the wrong way on the highway (I was the driver) meant that I was half an hour late for my own wedding rehearsal. As we pulled in and I was freaking out over that fact, Lisa turned to me and said, "a bride is never late, nor is she early, she arrives precisely when she means to."
She also got me into the dress, explained the laws of crinolines to Aaron, packed the emergency kit, and wore something with a pocket in which she stowed a handkerchief that I believe the entire wedding party used. And she sent me a morbid bunny as a shower present.

Our best man was Chris's best friend from college. He was by far the best choice to make a speech at our wedding. I was really moved by what he said about us and our relationship. That all left me feeling really pleased that Chris had talked me into knitting him a thank you gift. Behold, yet another Jayne hat (from the too soon cancelled Firefly series) on the internet. There are several patterns already out there on the web, and Chris and I re watched the full episode, pausing every time the hat was on screen. Man, these new-fangled DVD thingys pause mighty purty. Too bad the show has dramatic moody lighting or we could have counted the stitches.
The hat was mailed to the roughest character on the ship, the one who may mutiny in any episode, by his mother, and no one has the nerve to tell him how silly it looks. It was a bit of a challenge in that it's intentionally made badly, so I had to copy the bad knitting. Not being able to help myself, I still did a "jogless join" where the stripe color changes, which is a good thing since I accidentally put the join in front when I added on the ear flaps. Andras loved it so much he brought it to the wedding and made it part of his speech. Phil loved it so much that he keeps trying to take it from Andras.

Chris packed the hat as it was packed in the episode, complete with a copy of the letter from Jayne's mother laying on top. Here it is in a still from the actual show, you can judge how close we got.

Thank you to both of our best!

Wedding Origami

No, there were no homicides on the honeymoon--we've just been a bit busy/out of touch. Chris is busy moving into our new apartment, and I started my summer job in Cooperstown immediately after our honeymoon. Since I don't have Internet access at my housing (or cell reception for that matter) I am out of touch as far as blogging goes. Now that I have battled the fancy new technology of an mp3 player, and come to some sort of truce, I can spend part of my once a week computer time on updating the blog. I loaded a bunch of pictures onto my computer a few days before the wedding, so the summer's posts from me are likely to be in the past tense.

Chris is still planning to post wedding photos, or a link to them, here on the blog when he gets a chance.

One of my contributions to the wedding was origami. I learned origami from my Dad as a kid. He did stuff like take apart the paper airplanes his students threw at him to figure out how they were folded. He also taught me the "water bomb" which he may have learned the same way. At some point my Aunt Stephanie gave me an origami book for Christmas. I loved it, but was too young to understand the directions, so when I wanted to fold something from it, Dad would follow the directions and fold it first, then teach me. I would fold it a few times to memorize it, since I could not yet read origami directions.

The wedding origami began with flowers. At least one of these is in the original origami book. I've collected a few more books and most of a calendar since then.


At this point I got concerned that the bouquet didn't look like much, and would just look like we cheaped-out on flowers. I also started to remember that flower arranging is not necessarily one of my skills. All that concern, however, was unfounded. I split these into two groups, my bouquet and my maid of dishonor's bouquet, and then began to spread them out and intersperse them with "leaves" cut from banana leaf paper.
As it turned out, less is more, which I should have realized when it comes to anything Japanese. I mean, that is their aesthetic, right? A week before the wedding, I remembered that the guys usually have boutonnieres, and a few days after that some memory of Mother's having corsages started poking in around the corners of my brain. By then I had help folding from Lisa, who was a great maid of dishonor who can pinch hit on stuff like origami flowers. She and Aaron and Derrick are all really good at tying up candied almonds in net squares, too.

Also seen at the wedding were this warren of rabbits, standing in for table favors:

See that little brown guy in the lower right? He had quite the adventure that night. I think the bright green guy on the left ended up a little sloshed too. They were on each table to declare that we decided a donation to the House Rabbit Society was way better than table favors. Rusty agreed.

Getting our Stuff Together

Stuff we're making for our wedding:
lace shawl
2 wedding bands
2 origami bouquets
2 origami boutineers
table favors
centerpieces
bulletins
1974 Volkswagon "Thing"

Stuff we've finished:
lace shawl
engagement ring (that has to count for something, right?)

This isn't a problem yet, is it? We have almost 6 weeks left, and it's a small car. I guess for a little more perspective, I should look at...

Stuff we're not making for our wedding:
wedding dress (Thanks, Georgia!)
other people's clothes
other people's transportation
music
food

Wish that list was longer.

What Canada has to offer

Finally, some knitting to show. Much progress has been made on the satin angora/soy silk/cashmere stole. I knitted several swatches of it quite a while ago, but was unwilling to post them or choose one until I had found the embroidered fabric for my wedding dress. Chris and I spent two Saturdays looking for fabric, first in Toronto, especially in Little India, then in Hamilton. Fabric we liked completely eluded us in Toronto, although we did eat some great Indian food and dim sum, and spent time in Lush and in our favorite Toronto comic book shop. Luckily Hamilton came through for us, and also gave us the chance to eat pierogies and schnitzle and shop at IKEA.

My knitted swatches accompanied us to the shops. My sketch of the dress accompanied us on the second trip after Chris reprimanded me for not having it on the first. He got a post it note version for the first trip.

All of the stitch patterns shown are from Barbara Walker. The top pattern is rose trellis lace, then razor shell or new shell, then feather and fan or old shell, with cobweb frill finishing the bottom. The second picture shows sunspots and ogee lace. I loved the cobweb frill as soon as I knit it. This will be perfect at either end of a long rectangular stole. It finishes the ends nicely and is so much more elegant than fringe for a lace stole. I've been swatching the ogee lace for years, trying to use it somewhere, but it's been either the wrong scale or looked wrong in the yarn I was using. This is where I finally get to knit it. I was pretty sure ogee lace was the pattern I wanted as soon as I had knit it, but I wanted to wait to see what sort of shapes the embroidery made on the fabric for the dress: whether it was curving like the ogee or more geometric like the rose trellis. Interestingly, although all the swatches are knitted on the same needles, I think the ogee pattern will need to be knit one needle size larger, even though all the other patterns look lovely at this gauge. Just goes to show you how important swatching is! I blocked all the swatches too. I've learned the hard way that you have to block a lace swatch to get an accurate gauge and to see what it will really look like when finished.

We looked at a lot of fabric, none of it quite what we wanted, until we found this in Hamilton, just before the shops closed.

What you're looking at is an embroidered and beaded net with a scalloped border. The right side is laid on a black card so you can see the detail in the embroidery. Each flower is filled with five bugle beads in the petals in shades of silver and gold. The left side is laid on a natural color silk similar to the silk satin which will be the main fabric of the dress. I didn't try to buy silk satin in Canada because silk is sometimes tricky to bring across the border. I don't know the details; it has something to do with country of origin even though we can often buy the same fabric from the same country here in the US. Whatever the reason, it's easier to mail order from Thai silks in California, although the shop owner in Hamilton looked disdainful when I said so.

One of the things I liked about this fabric was it's mottled appearance. Western wedding dresses can be painfully dull in their monochrome. Chris tried to talk me into a pale blue dress, which is when I realized I did want to get married in white-ish, but with a little color and interest. This was one of only a few off-white fabrics that included some subtle color and variation. It also goes well with the stole, don't you think?

After we bought the fabric we wandered into Yarnopolis, which stays open a full hour later than the fabric stores. We were high on the excitement of finally finding what we wanted, and finally having one concrete thing accomplished towards getting married this spring, and Chris, who has excellent taste, fell in love with a skein of Manos del Uruguay yarn. Since he is the world's most interested and helpful groom when it comes to buying dress fabric, I couldn't say "no" to his big brown eyes (which look so good with this colorway). I started knitting him a scarf that night.

You should know if you haven't knitted manos yet, it's lovely to knit. Very co-operative, and it feels wonderful running through my fingers. He's a lucky guy, and since it's an easy scarf pattern, he'll soon be a warmer guy. Good thing since it snowed today.