Of course you now know I’m not the super traditional bride. It would therefore not be a surprise to you that I will not be having the ordinary 1-2-3 numbers for my reception tables, although I admit, going for an alternative for table numbers is getting to be a trend nowadays.

As I had been toying around the various possibilities of fairytale themes, I first thought of naming the tables after places in fairy tales, both classical ones and modern ones. There would be Cair Paravel for the bride and groom table, then for the guests

Rivendell,

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Andalasia,

Atlantica,

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Genovia,

Florin,

Frell,

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Agrabah,

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Maldonia,

Pixie Hollow,

Anvard,

Gondor,

Ivory Tower,

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and

The Shire.

This afternoon, however, while trying to layout the names on MS Word, I felt like there was something not so right in the picture. I guess it just felt cheesy and I was imagining certain friends giggling at the names of our tables. So I thought and thought and thought….

Until I came up with another idea. Instead of names, we’ll have letters as our table labels. Not the ordinary A-B-C to Z letters, of course.

While on the train on the way home from work, I started making a list of things that have a meaning to Prince Charming and me, such as our favorite things, our memorable places, etc. I listed them under each letter, depending on what letter each word started with. For example, for letter B, there was basketball, billiards, blue, B____ (his middle name), B____ (my hometown), etc. For P, there’s pineapple, Prince Charming, pizza, pool, etc. C has carbonara, chess, cars, chat, etc.

Now, for our tables, the letters won’t start with A, then B, then C, up to the whichever letter of the alphabet the number of tables would end with. We’re just gonna choose the letters which has the most number of memorable items. Then, on one side of the cardboard label would be the letter, while on its back would be something like

The B’s in our lives….

Basketball – one of our favorite sports
Billiards – our earlier unofficial dates were spent playing this
B______ – Prince Charming’s middle name
B______ – Sophia’s hometown, where we met
Blue – our favorite color

I thought this would be a more meaningful way of labeling our tables. It’s creative, original (I claim it to be an original idea, as the idea just entered my mind simple as that, I didn’t find it in other people’s weddings or blogs or magazines) and also, it shares some trivia to our guests.

Good Friday had been a good day for me.  Although I’m not really one who celebrates that holiday (I prefer to celebrate the Easter Sunday, rather than the Good Friday… rather celebrate resurrection than death), since it was a non-working holiday and had no plans to go anywhere but just at home, I took it as an opportunity to work on the invitations.

Yeah, I had been working full blast on the invitations yesterday.  Since I have only six and a half months to go before the big day, I thought I should get it done as soon as possible.  As you may have seen in some of my previous posts, my invites are handcrafted ones I’m making myself…and they are really requiring such craftsmanship!  I’m targeting to have 75 invites for about 120 people, since some of them are couples and families requiring only one invitation card.

Each “one-page” invitation card consists of 2 pieces of 1/4 A4 white board with silver specks, some centimeters of pale blue-and-silver ribbon, about 10 centimeters of darker blue ribbon and same length of skinny white satin ribbon, about 1/6 of an A4 blue vellum paper, 1 small circular detail of a silver doily (each doily has 10 of it), and of course, crafting glue. Since the white board with silver specks has only 1 side of really presentable surface, I had to glue it back to back, which is good because it makes the card thicker.  The invitation wording is laser printed on the blue vellum in black fonts.  Then a silver film is taped over our names, then had the paper run through a laser printer again (just for the heat, so the silver would transfer to our names), then the film is detached…and there you get our beautiful silverized names!

Oh, the trivia on the silver film… More than a decade ago, my crafty aunt in California sent me a couple of boxes of silver films that a crafty person can use for printing stuff with silver fonts, using laser printer.  Back in the day, we had no laser printer, just an ink jet one, therefore had absolutely no use for the material.  Well, I just kept it somewhere in my collection of useful and junk art and craft materials.  Then more than a couple of years ago, I remembered the films when I starting making invites and posters for church events, using my uncle’s laser printer.  The effect was quite impressive, and people kept on wondering how I made them.  I never thought those “semi-ancient silver films” would be quite useful and absolutely fantastic on my own wedding invitations.

Back to the crafting.  The tricky part is gluing the invitation pieces together.  Glue makes the board curve a bit (I had to put each in between pages of thick books and magazines to flatten it again) and makes the vellum paper wrinkle (making it look like a mild case of corrugated board… nothing can be done so far to flatten it, except to decrease the amount of glue to prevent the wrinkling in the first place.) Oh boy, you really need to be a neat worker to achieve it successfully.

So far that’s the adventure.  I never thought I’d learn so much, but then, as the famous quote says, experience is the best teacher.

About the favors…. I was thinking not just of filling the boxes with chocolates, but also with little edible silver beads. Yeah, those four words describe how they look like when you don’t know how they are really called, like me before, then you later learn that they are actually and technically called silver dragees.

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To me, they have always looked like that string of silver beads you hang on the walls or around the tree for Christmas. Good thing, the world has become modern and we are finally able to eat them (the dragees, not the Christmas silver beads!).

Aside from that addition to the favor box contents, to make the contents a little more interesting than the common, I’m thinking of enclosing a little scroll of a favorite poem inside. Perhaps, it could be some of the favorite poems I’ve had, which had been some of my inspiration through the years.

One of them will have to be “Preparation” by Valarie Hansen, and another would be “A Child of Royal Birth” by Anna Johnson. I grew up loving these poems, so making them part of my wedding would be a treat.

Here’s an update on the wedding gown, featuring the embroidered flowery neckline.

I can be so fussy sometimes. That includes not wanting a typical neckline, or a typical sleeve design.

Okay, so here’s the story:

One evening, I came home from the city carrying these plastic bags….

It wasn’t that heavy, and it wasn’t that expensive either. Guess what’s inside?

A beautiful charmeuse satin fabric! Priced at less than $10 per meter, I decided to buy 6 meters. Hopefully that should be enough for my dream ball gown. Not really a Scarlett-O’Hara-12-yards-of-billowing-material ball gown… just a ball gown that will suit me.

Since it’s a flimsy material, I also bought some fabric for its lining. Originally, I wanted to have some lacy fabric for the bodice of the gown. When I looked around in the fabric store, however, the cheapest white lace fabric they have was more than $100 a meter! Gee, that’s the budget for my entire bridal attire!

So I decided to cheat a bit. Instead of lace, I’ll have satin for the bodice, BUT I’m gonna do some embroidery on it to achieve the textured, somewhat-lacy, kind of look and feel. Then I can also add small pearls or crystal beads on it.  After all, I still have a year to go. Here’s the update on what I had been doing on the bodice so far:

I’m going to finish the embroidery first before I attach the skirt part. This way, it can fit in a small plastic bag and I can even carry this project around and do some embroidery while I sit in the van and travel long distances, watch over a sick child, and anything else that can allow me to squeeze this project in. I also don’t have to worry about crumpling the skirt fabric too much.

PS. I looked up in wikipedia and learned that charmeuse is one of the most challenging fabrics to sew because it’s very slippery, and that it’s not recommended for full skirts because it’s very clingy. Well, what can I do? I’m on a tight budget for this and didn’t really know this fact before I bought it. Hmmm… I guess I’ll have to make do with it. Probably I’ll come up with ideas on how to conquer these challenges. Think positive.