30 Aug
Most of our guests were travelling 8 hours to come to the wedding, so I wanted to make a “Welcome to Vermont” bag. At first, I played around with the idea of doing a map of Vermont design, but decided it would be easiest to just reuse the Ferris Wheel. I split the image in 2 and burned Gocco screens. I used 2 tubes of black, 2 tubes of red, and 1 tube of blue fabric ink to make 60 tote bags.
Halfway done and drying on a clothes rack:
23 Aug
A month before the wedding, we still had no bands and I was getting a little nervous about it. Ok, minor understatement, it started almost every conversation I had with J. I wanted a plain band and I wanted to get J a sapphire eternity band to go with her engagement ring. I kept looking, even though I found perfectly acceptable rings, they just weren’t right. Then I saw Ms. Awesome’s post about C’s ring and I was blown away. The feather was so super cool. So I contacted the etsy seller, Adzias Jewelry Atelier, and we ordered 2 rings on 18 June. They were done on 25 June and we received them on 28 June. The whole experience was really easy and quick.
Here are the boxes we received:
Our two rings in the boxes:
18 Aug
On Wednesday afternoon, we went to get our marriage licenses. I was nervous about getting them because on the website it states to bring your IDs and maybe your birth certificate. I thought my birth certificate was in my safe deposit box in NJ, but it wasn’t, just a receipt of the registration of my birth or something. My real reason for wanting to see it was that I wasn’t sure if my father’s name was listed or not. I know his first name is David, but I can never remember his last name and I definitely don’t know what town he was born in. So with just our IDs, we walked to the front desk and said we wanted a marriage license.
They gave us a blue form to fill out and for my father’s information I put unknown.
16 Aug
Our plan was to leave the Tuesday before our wedding. We had so much stuff to bring up to VT with us that we needed to rent a SUV, as my Aveo is really little. I had originally rented a Rav4 sized SUV for pick up at 10am, but had changed it to 1pm because we weren’t going to start driving until 10 pm. When I went to pick up the car, they had given it away because it the time hadn’t been changed. I had a moment of panic, but the Hertz counter directed me to another location 6 blocks away. It turned out really well since we were upgraded to a GMC Acadia.
I was so in love with this car after I got over the intial shock of trying to drive it through the city. If we hadn’t gotten the upgrade, I think we would have had to leave some stuff in our apartment. It barely fit even with the bigger car. We were also moving the Tuesday after the wedding, so our whole apartment was in boxes and my biggest fear was that we would bring up boxes of books instead of boxes of wedding crafts.
This was our car 80% packed. It was really good that the rear view mirror had a video from the back bumper because I could not see anything out the back.
14 Jul
When I first started picturing our ceremony, I wanted to get married under a tree with origami cranes. However after looking over our venue, there was no perfect tree (think Goldilocks, too big, too small, etc). To be honest if there had been a tree, I would never have thought about using a chuppah. However as there is no tree, I felt that we need something to define the ceremony space.
There are two symbolisms given by MyJewishLearningof a chuppah. The first is that a chuppah “symbolizes the new home to which the bridegroom will take his bride. In this context, the appearance of the bride and groom together under a huppah before an assembly who have come to witness the event is in itself a public proclamation by them that they are now bonded together as man and wife.” The second is that a chuppah refers to “The tent of … Abraham that … had entrances on all four sides to welcome wayfarers, so that no traveler, no matter from which direction he came, need be burdened searching for an entrance door. The huppah, with four open sides, is thus a symbol of the Jewish home filled with hesed (acts of love), an important component of which is hakhnasat orhim (hospitality to strangers)”
In order to understand what a chuppah, specifically this chuppah, means to me there are two things I have to explain about myself.
The first is that while the majority of my family is not very religious, I attended a yeshiva (a Jewish Orthodox Day School) from preschool through 8th grade. For those who don’t know, at yeshiva half of your day is taught in English and half is in Hebrew. The dress code is strict, with no pants allowed, knees, collarbones, and later elbows covered. In 4th grade, boys and girls took separate classes and in 6th grade the girls moved to a school a couple miles away. It was very hard attending yeshiva because I had to lie about the rest of my life so that my friends wouldn’t know I wasn’t as religious as they were. During 8th grade, I told my mother I couldn’t take the school anymore. For high school, I attended a public magnet school. At that point we joined a conservative synagogue and I gradually came to be active to the point where I joined USY (United Synagogue Youth) and became our chapter president. My senior year of high school, I went to services every morning, had my own tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin, and read from the Torah on some Saturday morning services.
9 Jul
Since choosing a carnival theme, I knew that I wanted the table numbers to be named after carnival rides. Here is my super quick and easy post on how to make them.
6 Jul
I wanted to have our Thank You notes ready to go before the wedding. I had been casually working on the design before, so the whole thing was really painless. I used the Ferris Wheel outline and used Word Art to make the words mirror the curve of the image. I bought red A2 envelopes and cut a normal size piece of paper into quarters so I ended up with ~4″ x 5″ flat cards.
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