#411: badassness.

my first 'featured guest'? um, more like 'SUPERSTAR'.

post #407 had a lot of you drooling. i rule! nah, i'm joking, it was all kimi. and like you, i was dying to know how she did what she did. so i reached out to her and she graciously agreed to give us the deets. i'm sure her words will inspire you as much as they did me. enjoy.

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I am not a wedding person. Before I met my now-husband I had never even entertained the thought of getting married, let alone having a big wedding. If I'd had my way we would have run off to the woods and gotten married by ourselves, and then had a big party afterwards. But other people had other (strong) opinions. So a slightly more traditional shindig it was. But I decided to make as many things as possible, so it would feel more 'me', from invitations to favors to The Dress.

Not being a wedding person, I am also definitively not a wedding-dress person. I went into a couple of bridal stores but promptly ran out hyperventilating before even looking at anything. After a couple of J.Crew dresses that had to be returned due to total cleavage obscenity, I ordered a cheapo sheath dress from Target. It was so cheapo ($68 on sale) that I really held out no hopes for it. But when it arrived, it fit perfectly and was made of quite decent material. I thought to myself, If you don't want to be typical, here's your chance to get creative. I quickly ordered a 2nd one as a backup, just in case my attempts backfired. I mean, they were $68 for pete's sake.

After many experiments with cutting into the dress, fabric flowers, paint, beads etc., I decided on cutout silhouettes. I went to fabric stores and in the dusty basement of one found a kind of flocked velvet backed with acrylic. If it was regular velvet, or any other normal fabric, the edges would have shredded with the thin delicate shapes I was planning. There aren't really any d.i.y. instructions because they would have to say "Be an Artist and Graphic Designer Like Me", which isn't very helpful. I just took a pair of scissors and went at it—but there are tons of patterns on the web that people could trace. I cut out hundreds of leaves and vines and animals until I had shapes that looked good. Then I took the clean dress and laid it out on the floor and began arranging all the pieces until I got a pattern I liked. Then the hot glue gun came out (superglue also works I discovered later, and I was too lazy to even try fabric glue). I attached a piece of netting to extend the train and glued more trailing leaves down that. Several weeks-worth of evenings later, I had my dress. It has birds, deer, mice, our initials, a big fox, and the words we have inscribed in our rings—"It's all true". Meaning every dream, every fairytale, every story about dragons or empires or even true love, it's simply all true.

And then came the wedding. And even though it poured and we couldn't get married outside, it was lovely. A friend gave us the gift of an original composition for harp and string quartet, his father did an audience-participation jug band, and all these new yorkers got drunk and played washtub bass. The location was an Audubon center in beautiful prospect park in Brooklyn, so bird mobiles were everywhere and we got married next to a giant fiberglass chipmunk. The dress was a smashing success. Everyone wrote and drew such lovely things in the little books. Everyone took the paper flowers and adorned themselves with them, and everything and everyone looked gorgeous.

And that's the story of my wedding and my dress. I'm thinking re-commitment ceremony with yet another dress, in the woods, with a decorated umbrella. Just in case of rain.

The End.

(And there's a brief story of another dress. We had always planned on doing a mountaintop ceremony, just the two of us, sharing personal vows. So I made a 2nd dress for it, using an old silk nightgown of mine with leaves of matching silk that I hot-glued onto it, with a train of leaves in back. It's a pretty risqué dress when worn, not appropriate for the web, so I'm only attaching a picture of it hanging up. The dress brought tears to the boy's eyes, and it was all beautiful, even though it was raining again and we once again had to stay indoors.)

For anyone who wants to see more pics, click here to view our flickr set. I feel incredibly honored that people love my dress and want to know more about it.









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{thank you kimi.}