POW - Renting Stuff

Because we were having a doing-it-ourselves reception, there were a lot of items to borrow or rent.  We could have gone to Allerdice Party and rented everything in one fell swoop, but we decided to try to do some deal-hunting first.

The Tent
Lorna, our hostess, had recommended Belmonte for a tent and tables.  Mom called around a few places just to be sure, and found that they did have better prices on tents than Allerdice or Clifton Park Rental.  We were very happy with their service, too. 

Tables
We used tables from a mish-mash of places.  Lorna had a few, we borrowed a few from church, and we rented the rest from Belmonte.  We wanted to use mostly round tables, but did use a few rectangular ones.  Our servers recommended that we push the rectangulars together in pairs to make squares.  That worked well, especially for a few larger families.  We figured that families that would otherwise fill or nearly fill an eight-person round might like to sit with other people for conversation during dinner.

Chairs
I loved the look of wooden chairs, and my grandmother's church had a whole bunch which they lent us entirely for free.  Very kind people.  Of course, someone had to deliver and retrieve them, and I think my Uncle Marshall was responsible for that . . . the only problem with borrowing stuff is that you're making extra work for people!  We did have to rent about half of our chairs, and we just used plain white ones from Belmonte.


Linens
Lorna suggested that we buy yards and yards of cheap white fabric at Wal-mart and sew our own table cloths.  She had a pattern and we (Mom) initially planned on taking this advice.  We had seen a picture of an outdoor reception in a Martha Stewart wedding book from the library, and in it the tables were dressed with long white underskirts and square champagne cloths on top.  This was our goal, but with many, many tables, it was going to be a lot of sewing!  When our caterers suggested that we rent linens through them, we compared prices and found that it was definitely worth-while to rent!  It was cheaper and saved a lot of time.  The caterers proclaimed the white and champagne combination "normal" and had no problem simply adding to their weekly linen request from Morgan Linen.  I don't know if Morgan had fancier fabrics to choose from like Allerdice did, but renting from an industrial linen company was definitely more economical than renting from a party company, and even more economical than making our own.

Dishes
Our original plan was to use high-quality disposable dishes, cups and flatware, but we thought we'd price china just to gather information.  Our discovery was surprising; they were about equal in cost.  My advice?  Definitely compare prices, just to make sure!  China would be classier and wouldn't blow away in the wind, and it seemed better than throwing all that plastic away.  With this decision, however, came a hidden cost.  Our servers decided to inflate their prices once they heard that they'd have to clear, rinse and stack plates instead of just throwing them away.  Prepare for hidden costs!  We rented china from Allerdice, and they offered to drop off and pick it up for an additional $40.  My parents decided to save us the $40 and do it themselves, but looking back, it would have been very worth $40 for someone else to do all that grunt-work the day before and a few days after the wedding. 

Other Stuff
We rented a "deluxe" porta potty from who knows where and borrowed pitchers, bread baskets and chafing dishes from church.  It was a bit of extra work to load all that stuff up and bring it all back, but it was worth it . . . and I'm certainly thankful that people were so willing to lend us stuff!

Now I've been to the OBX

John and I have been gone more than we've been home in the past week.  :-)  Last weekend, we traveled to Kentucky for a wedding, and Monday through Wednesday we were at the Outer Banks with our church's youth retreat.  I'd heard many reports of the beauty of the Outer Banks, so when the opportunity arose, John volunteered us as chaperons.  But, really, there wasn't much work to be done and we had a wonderful, edifying time ourselves.

The retreat speaker was Pastor Steve Gambill from the Reformed Baptist Church of Nashville, TN and whoever got him to come, whoa, made a good choice.  He shared with us his testimony--how God graciously took away his wife and his rock band in order to draw him toward Himself--and he preached to us the gospel. 

1 Corinthians 15 - Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.  For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures . . .

The things that are of first importance.  These are what he called us back to.  Christ, and His saving work.  Holding fast Christ, in His death and resurrection, unites all true believers and I was ashamed to think of how much of my time I spend focused on far lesser things.

Then there was excellently crafted teaching on Christian liberty--which we have, but we have in trust.  He challenged us, straight from the Scripture, to ask ourselves "Is this helpful?  Excellent?  Will it edify?  Does it enslave me?"  Our involvement with the world, he said, should be marked by discerning engagement. 

We talked about how, really, to grow in fruit without trying to do it all ourselves.  After all, it is God who sanctifies as well as justifies.  And it is the Holy Spirit's work.  We left the beach with my earnest secret prayers and desires that I wouldn't come off this spiritual high unchanged. 

It helped that when we got back, we went straight to prayer meeting.  Pastor Steve had been asked to give us a report on the church in Nashville, which he did, candidly recounting the church's history and their current efforts.  When he started telling of their recent, on-going efforts to reach out to a low-income apartment building full of needy, needy souls, my heart was full.  Christ is so real to him and He is becoming real to them.  John and I were sitting near him, and while the men closed by praying for these real people who are prostitutes and drug-addicts, that man was weeping. 

The question for us is how can we "go and do likewise"?  We live in a neighborhood, and can we not reach out to them?  John and I are trying to start by having our nearest neighbors over for dinner next week.  My fear is that we'll establish a friendly relationship and nothing more . . . Oh, for such a passion for Christ and His kingdom!

Planning Our Wedding - Flower Girls' Dresses

Some of the flower girls proceeding to the wedding.  Where are their bows?!

After seeing Wives and Daughters while I was in college, I decided that young Molly's dress in the opening scenes would be an ideal flower-girl dress.  (There's an image or two way down the page at earthlydelights.com.au.)  I was thrilled a couple of years later when Sense and Sensibility Patterns introduced a girls' regency dress pattern.  As my mom and I started hashing out wedding details in maybe November or so, she volunteered to sew the dresses for our five flower girls, and I ordered said pattern.

The next step was to find dotted Swiss, and it was a bit harder than I'd expected!  We looked, and then asked, at Joann's, and they told us to come back when the Spring fabrics were out.  In February or so, we looked again, but didn't find a fine dotted Swiss among all the eyelets they had to offer. 

Snow days are just as wonderful as a teacher as they were as a student!  On more than one such day, Mom and I took the opportunity to drive to the Albany area to work on wedding stuff.  I'd gotten a lead about an independent fabric shop in Latham, and we drove up and down Route 5 in search of it.  We didn't find exactly what we were looking for, but we did find an upholstery shop . . . which was closed.  We returned on another day to browse samples of lightweight curtain fabric which was almost what we were looking for.

Finally, we found the last, lone Alfred's in Albany which had one last, lone bolt of dotted Swiss!  The man (Mr. Alfred?) told us dotted Swiss was not commonly manufactured anymore, maybe because of asbestos concerns--I don't remember details.  But we were very excited and thankful to find it.  Mom bought nearly the whole bolt. 

The only problem was that it was white and my dress was ivory.  I definitely didn't want to appear as if I wasn't wearing white on my own wedding day.  But the dotted Swiss itself was very sheer, actually a bit dressier than the soft cotton I'd been expecting, and we chose a nice champagne lining which ended up working out beautifully. 

Mom was a bit hesitant to cut into our precious fabric and decided to try the pattern out first.  She found a gorgeous burgundy taffeta full-length ladies' skirt at a consignment shop and cut it up for a trial dress.  She made it to fit our little niece as a Valentine's Day dress, and with a black velvet ribbon at the empire waist, it was a darling!  I do wish we had a picture of it.  With new-found confidence in that great little pattern, Mom started sewing away . . . and all their little dresses were just as precious as could be.  :-)

I had pictured bare-legged little nymphs with wreaths in their curls, and one of my aunts suggested that they all wear ballet slippers.  Perfect. 

And the Samples Begin

I'd heard that once advertisers discovered I was pregnant, we would start getting samples in the mail.  But I was expecting little packets of stuff like formula, not entire containers!  When John brought in the shoebox-sized package yesterday, he could hardly believe that I hadn't asked for it or paid for it.

For the record, I fully hope/intend to breastfeed and am really excited about it!  I've read, though, that it's a good idea to keep formula samples around just in case.  They can always be donated.  John says, "Just don't try to put it on my cereal!"

Planning Our Wedding - Bridesmaids Dresses

For years, my sister lived in dread of my wedding day, in dread that I would make her wear a pink, puffy-sleeved "pregnancy dress."  :-)  Personally, I do love pink, but I wasn't set on using it for our wedding color.  As the date became real, I assured her that we could compromise.  The empire waist was a must, but the sleeves could go.  As I looked through magazines, I initially settled on a soft--but warm--violet for my other friends and a slightly deeper shade for her.

I must have scrolled through hundreds of thumbnails of bridesmaids' dresses online.  Make that thousands.  Heidi first tried on a dress at David's that looked promising in a picture but wasn't as flattering in person.  Finally, I found a couple of dresses I liked from Eden and we discovered that Jocelynn's in Clifton Park had them on the floor.  It helped, too, that Eden had gotten good ratings in Bridal Bargains for quality and that both the dresses we looked at were around the $125 max I was planning on. 

Heidi tried them both on and we chose our favorite of the two, but before going ahead and ordering them, we decided to learn from our experiences with my dress and have Dad give us his man's-point-of-view assessment of its modesty.  Mom and I met him at the mall one day after work. 

Unfortunately, the dress wouldn't pass without some "help."  The seamstress in residence offered to order extra fabric to widen the straps and heighten the front and back, but we realized that every little thing she did would add to the cost of the dresses.  A little jacket was another option, but I wasn't going to ask my friends to shell out another $70 for a jacket that I didn't even think was very cute. 

Plan B.  Mom found a McCall's pattern that I loved and we decided to have the dresses made by a seamstress.  Though we couldn't find the same light violet that the Eden dresses came in, we opted for a darker eggplant in the same color family from Joann's line of special occasion fabrics.  We had to go to the Joann's in Albany to order the yardage we needed for five gowns, but the man who helped us was so kind that he let us use 40% off coupons on both the crepe base and chiffon overdress material!  I was also excited that we could trim the empire waists with matching velvet ribbon, just like my dress!  Having gowns made also meant that one of my friends, who is skilled at the sewing machine herself, could make her own dress and save some money. 

Finding a seamstress for everyone else's gowns was harder than I anticipated.  Several people gave me leads, but everyone I called couldn't do it for some reason or other.  We were told that fabric shops often recommended seamstresses, so the next time we were at Joann's, we asked about that.  They didn't recommend particular people, but they did keep a file of cards left by seamstresses, quilters, etc.  Mom took down all the promising phone numbers and I sat down one day to make phone calls.  No success.  The numbers were disconnected, or the seamstresses only did alterations, etc.  One lady was encouraging at first, but tried to convince me that having "custom" dresses made would cost at least $200 a piece for labor alone.  I didn't see what was so "custom" about following a pattern, personally . . .

So, Mom tried the Joann's in Glens Falls.  Once again I started my series of unanswered/discouraging phone calls.  But finally one of the seamstresses called me back.  Yes, she sewed dresses.  Yes, she was within our price range.  And she lived less than ten minutes from Mom and Dad's house!

I was so excited that I wrote off all other possibilities, even though I later regretted it when we ran into some glitches with her.  But we were so thankful to find someone, finally, and thankful for her location, too.  It was February when we first met with her and I e-mailed all my faraway friends with requests to send in their measurements.  Now we just had to wait on four girls with busy, busy schedules. 

Communication was key with our seamstress.  If we hadn't been vigiliant, I think that we would have had very different-looking dresses from the ones I envisioned!  Her early assurances that she didn't need a pattern, just a picture, had convinced us of her skill, but I didn't realize until later that she wasn't planning to follow the pattern!  Thankfully, our earnest request for "modest" did come across, and even though her dresses were slightly different from the one my friend was making for herself, if anything they were a little more modest. 

I definitely learned through it all that not everything will be perfect.  Little mistakes meant that our seamstress had to fix two of the dresses in the day or two before the wedding itself.  So much for planning ahead!  But at the end of the day, my bridesmaids didn't have to walk down the aisle naked, as I'd jokingly bewailed at my most frustrated times.  On the contrary, they looked gorgeous in their flowing empire gowns.  :-)

Franz Rises Again

It wasn't actually dead, just sitting untouched in the office for a while.  Franz is my Grove City Compaq, eight years old now, and I've been using John's work computer (which is here, since he's a telecommuter). 

Maybe a week ago, John decided that it was time we got all my files transferred off it.  Maybe we'd sell it for parts.  That was fine with me.  Franz was an excellent computer in its day and never once crashed during my college years.  We'd spent many long hours writing papers together, but it had gotten pretty slow and had a battery life of about 30 seconds (just enough to push the boot button and then quickly plug it in). 

But after fiddling with Franz a bit, John changed his tune.  He ordered a new battery online!  He taught it to understand wireless, so all I have to do is plug in the wireless USB thing we have and, voila, internet!  Perhaps we'll have many more years together . . . just thankfully no more papers.  :-)

Planning Our Wedding - Invitations

As our months of wedding-planning progressed, I started getting the sense that we were doing a lot of things "the hard way."  By that, I mean that it seemed like we were making a lot more work for ourselves than most people do.  Still, in many aspects, like the invitations, I think it was worth it.  :-)

Budget-wise, we did save money by not sending Save-The-Date cards.  Those are cool, but I'd read in a magazine that they're only really necessary if your wedding is around a major holiday or if people need to know in advance to make travel arrangements.  Christmas was approaching and I was feeling overwhelmed with the wedding, play-season and preparations for Christmas itself, so it was easier just to skip them.  I did mention our wedding date in my Christmas cards to my friends who were far away.  But, as money is concerned, we definitely went over-budget on the invitations themselves!

A friend from church who also lives just down the road from my parents is a graphic designer (Susan) and volunteered to design our invitations.  John and I met with her one afternoon in November or December at an adorable paper shop in Saratoga called Paper Dolls.  We looked through books and brainstormed so that she could have somewhere to start.  Ultimately, she took away "toile," "calligraphy" and the Latin text of the song "Non Nobis Domine" which I was determined to incorporate into the wedding somehow. 

In the mean-time, I started working painstakingly on the wording.  For inspiration, our pastor's wife had let me borrow a fat envelope full of all the wedding invitations they've received for years.  Dad was definitely in favor of starting it off traditionally with my parents' names, but I wanted to work both sets of parents' names in, so I did.  I also decided to include "in the year of our Lord" before "2009" and the word "joyfully" in the first line. 

The next time we met with our designer friend, she had a prototype ready, and it was beautiful.  Though I'd originally asked her to keep things soft, we decided to deepen the colors into the eggplant purple of the bridesmaids' dresses.  We also made it harder on her by changing the shape of the invitation!  Mom knows that I love squares (nerd), but since square envelopes cost more to mail, I'd requested a standard 5.5"x8" invitation.  But now Mom was encouraging us to go for the square . . .

Several meetings and tweakings later, we were ready to find a printer!  Susan got us an insane quote from Paper Dolls, and we checked out Kinkos.  Kinkos would have actually been a pretty good choice if we'd gone with the standard 5.5"x8", since two invitations could be printed on a single page with one cut down the middle.  But our invitation was a 6" square (4 cuts) and on three layers.  That meant there were 3 sheets and 12 cuts per invitation instead of 1 sheet and 1 cut per 2 invitations!  That's to say nothing of the reply card.  We hadn't foreseen how much our design would inflate printing costs. 

Then Susan contacted a printer friend of hers who offered to beat Kinkos' quote and include envelopes.  Her product was even a bit nicer, so we went with her.  Finally, finally they were finished and printed, a bit later than we'd wanted to get them out in the mail. 

As I might have mentioned earlier, John's brother was getting married just about a month before we were, and they'd sent their invitations in pretty green pocket-folds instead of inner envelopes.  John loved this idea, so I researched pocket folds online and ordered several samples.  We decided on a deep, shimmery eggplant one from cardsandpockets.com and ordered enough for our A-list to start with, since they were kind of pricey. 

We also had to attach the three main invitation layers somehow, so we picked up some spools of narrow ribbon from A.C. Moore in an off-gold color.  Gold was evolving into our wedding's secondary color.  :-)  I spent one evening with Susan and her daughter in front of a movie tying all those invitations together with ribbon.  We anticipated many more evenings of addressing . . .

But!  Happy word.  My mom-in-law-to-be came through on this one.  She and my dad-in-law actually found and purchased the font which Susan had used for the invitation itself and ran every single reply card envelope and almost every single outer envelope (twice) through her ink-jet printer.  I don't think that was an easy mail-merge, since the list of addresses I'd given her was in an Access database.  All I know is that I stopped at their home after school on a Friday and the work was all done.  :-)

There were two more steps:  postage and some means of holding the pocket-folds together.  A magazine article I'd read advised bringing a fully packed invitation to the post office to get weighed before buying 180 wedding stamps, so I did.  Not only did the square cost more to mail, but the three-layer invitation and sturdy pocket-fold had made it heavy.  Wow.  I needed to purchase a 60-something cent stamp and a regular 44 cent stamp for each one, plus regular stamps for all the reply card envelopes.  I was just happy that they had pretty wedding stamps in both denominations. 

John's brother's invitation had a pretty pink ribbon slider holding their pocket-folds, but we didn't want to totally copy them and I was hoping to find a more economical means of holding all of them together.  I researched stickers and faux wax seals on-line.  One day when Mom and I were looking at similar items in A.C.Moore, we saw good old-fashioned gold sealing wax and just decided to go for it.  It was no more expensive than fake wax seals and it was real.  Once all the invitations were assembled, with a pressed violet tucked into each one, Derek helped us with the careful art of sealing up all those pocket-folds.  I carried them to the post office in boxes.  :-)

Some Recent Knitting

I've been doing kind of a lot of reading about baby stuff lately.  :-)  In the spirit of being healthy, frugal and green, I'm really interested in cloth diapers.  For a week or two, in fact, every time the thought of food was about to make me sick, I refocused and tried to picture putting a clean baby's bottom in soft cotton prefolds with wool covers.  Ahh. 

I still have a lot to learn about using wool.  I was first inspired by seeing my cousin Missy's little girl in pink wool leggings, and have learned a lot more from my friend Amy . . . Apparently, these little things I've made are called "soakers," and I'm excited to discover how well they work.  My mother diapered all three of us in prefolds with pins and rubber pants, and I have some memories of my 5-year-younger brother wearing them.  They seem natural and nice.  But wool is much more exciting than rubber pants.

Sooo, for those interested, I used a free pattern from Fern and Faerie for these, mostly because the pattern worked with the needle sizes I have around.  The blue one came first, but since I was also using yarn that I had around, it's from a rather thin wool.  Hmm.  I'm considering trying to felt/shrink it a little, but I've never felted anything before and don't know how to get it to the size I want to get it to.  We'll see.

The second went much faster for several reasons: 
1.  I was using thicker yarn (only 25% wool, though, so it might not work so well.)
2.  We were visiting my mom-in-law, who convinced me to try using two pairs of circular needles instead of four double-points. 
3.  She also convinced me to (once again) try knitting in the Continental method.  Way faster.

In the process, I had the opportunity to try to teach myself the Kitchener stitch from youtube, which was interesting.  Now they're awaiting lanolizing and product-testing.  :-)

We're Home

We're home after a delightful month in New York with our families.  The house is still standing, the goslings are getting huge, and our tomato plants have little green tomatoes on them.  :-)  The lettuce isn't much taller, though.  Perhaps it's been too warm.

We're also 14 weeks pregnant, and a full week into the second trimester!  Praise God.  I was hoping that all the "morning" sickness would magically stop once I hit 13 weeks.  Well, I was sitting on the couch with John when we arrived home a day or two ago and my stomach decided to give up its dead . . . too bad there was no food, only bile.  (My apologies to the squeamish.)  I lost my breakfast of yogurt and blueberries today, as well.  It's frustrating to fill yourself up with good, healthy food and then see it all go to waste.  But it's sooo worth it for a baby!!  And I hear that I have it easy in comparison with some. 

That's about it for today.  Thankfully groceries are now in the fridge, the laundry and 90% of the unpacking are done, but we're still settling back in.