Garlandy goodness

We're thinking of having some kind of garlandy buntingy things to decorate the marquee at the wedding. To help us make this happen my mum got on the search for some options for us and found this site which has some awesome garlands, she liked this one:

Image from uponafold.com.au

It's very cute, but a bit pink and girly for us, my favourite one was this one:

Image from uponafold.com.au

They're definitely too expensive for the scale were doing though, and unfortunately for us they're based in Australia, but they do have some lovely stuff. I've fallen in love with this mobile:

Image from uponafold.com.au

Once I'd started thinking about bunting I went on a bit of a hunt to see if we could find a more affordable solution, or some inspiration for something we could make ourselves. My first port of call was Folksy, where I found loads of really pretty options, this is my favourite:

Image from Bookity on Folksy

But again everything I found was too expensive to buy and too labour intensive to make. After exhausting Folksy I had a look on Etsy and found this:

Image from dragonflies on Etsy

This is definitely my favourite of the lot, nice and simple. There are lots of other lovely garlands in this shop as well, but since it's on Etsy it's in the states, so loads of nasty airmiles. Plus this is still out of our budget for the amount we need. But I think this seems makeable?

I had an idea from the start that we would make some kind of bunting out of newspaper. We have plenty of it lying around and it would be a good use for it, so I thought why not try and make something like this with it. I was thinking the labour intensive bit would be cutting out the circles, but then I realised that these circles are really perfect, so there must be a tool you can get to do it for you. A quick google-ing session and it turns out there is! Hurray! So I just need to work out how I can get my hands on a 'circle punch' and give it a go, I'll keep you posted!

Expecting too much

I've just got my exam results back for my second to last semester and they really weren't so great. I'm partly annoyed at myself for not doing better, but I'm mostly just disappointed. I had started to imagine what it would feel like to get my degree results and get a first, and how happy I'd be, and now that I know that's not a possibility I feel like I've lost something.

I've been trying to dissect why I'm feeling this, how I can feel better about it, and how I can avoid setting myself up for disappointment. This got me thinking about whether I have unrealistic expectations of our wedding day, and whether I'm just setting myself up for disappointment with that as well.

In general I don't think I have too many specific expectations, which is a good thing, but then I thought of one HUGE expectation I have: that it's not going to rain. I realised that all our planning, and all of my imaginings, feature a lovely sunny day. Ooops.

Our wedding is in Dorset, not renowned for it's dry weather, and although it is summer rain is still pretty likely. I think we need to spend a bit of time thinking of back up plans, as well as just imagining a rainy wedding day. Thinking about it I'm not actually that bothered by the idea of rain, I mean it's not ideal but it's not the end of the world either. But that's just it, it's not that the rain itself would be disastrous, it's the loss of the sunny day I'd imagined that would upset me. I'm definitely prone to getting needlessly upset about things that really aren't that bad, just because I had a better outcome so clear and fixed in my mind.

So this is what I need to try and avoid, not 'bad' things happening, but holding rigidly fixed ideas of how things will go. I certainly don't want to advocate doom-and-gloom thinking about your wedding day, but in this case a bit of 'worst case scenario' (I mean really? It's just a bit of rain!) thinking might be the best innoculation to a whole load of unnecessary disappointment.

Equal Love

image from equallove.org.uk

Marriage law in the UK at the moment is in a funny in between stage of progress; same sex couples can be legally joined but in a separate institution to heterosexual couples. Separate but equal isn't really equal to me, and some people who feel the same are currently pursuing a case in the European courts to open both institutions to both same sex and heterosexual couples. A couple of days ago a story also broke that the government were soon to announce some reforms to marriage law, no announcement's been made yet but it sounds promising.

Anyway, recently it seems like some progress has been made, so fingers crossed things will move forward. But a few months ago Arthur and I had to reach a decision about whether we could reconcile getting married given that some people are excluded from the institution... and it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. We eventually decided that we wanted to be joined legally, even if it wasn't in the open fair institution we wanted, and even though there was something a little bit painful in propping up a system that we disagree with. Because it was such a hard decision to make, and because our feelings about it will colour our wedding, we decided to explain our feelings and our decision to our guests on our wedding website. Somehow it just felt better for everyone to understand why we might not be quite as joyful as we'd like on our wedding day. Here's our manifesto:

Our Ceremony

We will be holding our marriage ceremony in the garden, having signed our marriage into being earlier in the day at the local register office. There are a some practical reasons why we are not holding the legal marriage ceremony as part of the celebrations. Firstly, the register office is far too small to fit all of our lovely family and friends into. Secondly, we want to hold our ceremony in the open air, and to be able to plant a tree as part of this.

Our choice to separate the legal marriage from our celebrations is also one based on our feelings towards marriage law in this country.

There is currently a bid going through the European courts to open both Civil Marriage to same sex couples and Civil Partnership to heterosexual couples. As supporters of this campaign, the Equal Love campaign, we don’t feel a register office is an appropriate place of celebration for us. This feeling is compounded by the signage which must currently be displayed in all register offices by law. Personally we would prefer a Civil Partnership to a Civil Marriage as we feel this better reflects the way we see our relationship.

The main difference between Civil Marriage and Civil Partnership is in the name and the wording of the ceremony, and we’re not entirely comfortable with the wording of the Civil Marriage ceremony. We thought long and hard about whether we could happily get married with these things considered, and it was a difficult decision to make. In the end we came to the conclusion that only a ‘marriage’ ceremony conducted in our own words would be an appropriate celebration of our love and commitment. We also decided that as we cannot know how long it will be until Civil Partnership is available to us we’d rather be legally joined as husband and wife than not at all.

This ceremony in our own words is the ceremony we have chosen to share with you, our community of family and friends. Your support is important to our partnership, and it’s your presence when we state our vows to each other which will seal the commitments we make. We hope you’ll be as happy to be part of this ceremony as we are to share it with you.

It's funny how just sharing how we feel rather than keeping it under wraps makes everything feel a bit better. It's possible that when this announcement comes out we'll find a civil partnership will be an option soon, and that would be great, but if not I feel much happier knowing people understand what this marriage means to us.

The invites are out!

So we've finally got the invitations in the post!

We bought penguin and puffin postcards from amazon for £14 to make the invites, and we've used less than half of them. The rest of the postcards we're going to use as a sort of guestbook, the idea is that people will sit down and write us a postcard at a little table at the wedding party and then post it into a little postbox that we're making. We'll then put the postcards into a photo album with clear sleeves so you'll be able to see both sides of each card, which should make a nice bright record of our day. And hopefully people will enjoy writing us a postcard!

So this is how we the invites went:

First we laid out all of the cards so we could see them all and choose one for each guest, this is half of the postcards:


We stuck each persons name on their card on a post-it note:



Then we addressed them and stuck stamps on them, or stamped and addressed an envelope for the ones going overseas. We got the addresses collected by sharing a spreadsheet with our parents over google docs, so they added all the addresses they knew and we just had to find the remaining ones.





Once we'd done that we used a stamp we got from vistaprint to stamp on the main invite details. The stamp actually wasn't as great as we'd hoped since it ran a bit, but it did save us a lot of time. Then we just wrote greetings and any little messages we wanted on the cards and we were done. Here's our stamp:



So that's another big tick on the to-do list! And because we chose postcards it was nearly as green as physical post can be - minimum space and weight used. If we'd used recycled postcards it would have been better, but we also chose them based on price and looking nice and £14 for 200 different really awesome postcards of book covers was kind of a done deal.

I think the decision to send out paper invites at all kind of sprung from the fact that I really like getting post because it's a bit of a novelty these days, can you get that same kind of feeling from a web invite I wonder? There's definitely plenty of websites with invite options around, and if you're committed to making the greenest choice possible I think that has to be it.