The Wedding

We’re back! Sorta…
We got back from Barbados on Sunday, but this morning Kevin flew off to Sydney for five days and my brain is definitely still in the West Indies. So yes, only sorta back, only sorta with it. I’ve been trying to work today, and failing on pretty much every count. If I want to keep Friday free, I’m going to have to really pull my finger out tomorrow!

The Big Day
The wedding was absolutely amazing - we both had such fun! The morning was surprisingly relaxed, really. It all started off with an 8.30am hair appointment, which was pretty relaxing, followed by an hour or so of having my make-up done by my cousin Sonia in my parents lounge, with no one else around as my Mum was off getting her hair done, and Dad was busy ferrying people about. Eventually people - my bridesmaids, Matt who was our photographer for the day, my cousins - started to arrive, the flowers came, and it all slowly started to come together.

I even found a moment to sit down and check last minute emails.

I only had one moment of tension, when I started to worry if we were going to get everyone’s make-up done in time, but that turned out not to be a problem at all.

Thence to the venue, and my Big Entrance! It’s such a cliché, but the ceremony really did go by in a flash. We wrote the ceremony together - I’ll post the whole thing in due course - and I had been concerned that it would turn out to be too long, but it was perfect. Kevin’s cousin, the Reverend Gary La Croix, was a wonderful officiant.

After photos, and spilling wine down my dress - d’oh! - it was time for the Wedding Breakfast. That was a nice chance to slow down a bit, and to look about us and just drink it all in. It was so lovely to have a moment to talk to Kev and enjoy the moment. The food was fab, although I couldn’t eat much with that corset on! And the entertainment - our wandering minstrel, Dante Ferrara - was just fabulous.

The cutting of the cake, which was predictably chocolate, came next.

And then the speeches. Dad did a really lovely, touching speech which was really two Pam Ayres poems, one for Kevin, and one for me. The Groom and Bride chose to speak together, as is our custom. And then The Big One - Chris Vallance gave the Best Man’s speech, which was completely inspired… and at times, a touch embarrassing.

And then, of course, the dancing! We had Diabolus in Musica to do a Tudor Ceilidh, which was a hoot. You’ve never seen so many people look quite so silly all in one spot before!

The best bit was watching the men ‘paw the ground like stallions’. Tee hee!

And before you know it, it’s time to throw the bouquet and leave. I gathered all the unmarried people together, male and female - we’re all equal here! - and stood with my back to the crowd. Then, well, I threw.

Ian was none too chuffed to be the catcher!

Vince recorded his thoughts on the day too, in a typically Vincian way. If any of our guests would like to, I’d be really happy for you to leave a long of a comment as you like, telling us about how the day went for you.

A few people have their photos up on Flickr already, including Ian, Vince, James, Amanda P, Amanda H, Jeff, and Jo. (If you have photos up on Flickr, you might like to join our group and add your photos to the pool.)

I will, in due course, put together a book, probably using Blurb, with the best of the photos and stories, quotes and excerpts from the ceremony, and any other things that come to mind. So please do leave a comment here, and do let me have copies of your photos if they’re not already up online.

And now…
Now I am Mrs Suw Charman-Anderson, although I still have some hoops to jump through to make it completely official, i.e. on my passport. Being married is wonderful. It really was the best day of my life. Kevin makes me so happy, and to be able to stand up in front of all our friends and family and declare our love and commitment has been very important to both of us. All the planning and hard work over the last year was so worth it - the day was everything we wanted it to be, and went as smooth as clockwork.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped, especially my parents Rob and Brenda, my Matron of Honour, Kate, and Kev’s Best Man, Chris. And thanks, of course, to my wonderful husband, without whom all of this would have been a very expensive and complex work of fiction.

Kevin and I both agree that the most important part of our wedding day is the ceremony itself, wherein we pledge to love each other for the rest of our lives. As ours is neither a church nor a civil ceremony (the legal obligation having been discharged the day before), we can have a ceremony that we have crafted and which is just right for us. Of course, figuring out what that ceremony is, what words it is made of, is a different kettle of fish all together.

Today I started looking at various different ceremonies. Kevin’s cousin is a Lutheran minister, and he is officiating for us, so I took at look at the ceremony that he’d sent over to us. I also looked at the Anglican Common Book of Prayer from 1928. The latter is much more familiar to me - the weddings I’ve been to have universally been Church of England and have therefore used some variation of this ceremony. This particular version, though, has a poetry to it - it scans properly, it sounds as solemn and heartfelt as it should, it resonates.

Then I dug a little further and found the The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony from 1662, which is still very familiar, beginning as it does with:

DEARLY beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony…

But which soon goes off on a rather alarming tack:

[...] the causes for which Matrimony was ordained.

First, It was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name.

Secondly, It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.

And then, after a call and response session absent from modern versions, we get to the duties of Man and Wife, in which Men are exhorted to “love their wives as their own bodies” and “be not bitter against them” (gee, thanks!), and Wives are reminded that they are not to plait their hair or wear gold or put on apparel.

I’m pretty sure neither of us want sin, fornication or fear brought into things, and I quite like plaiting my hair and wearing apparel, if not American Apparel.

Going further back, there’s a version of an Elizabethan Wedding Ceremony from the Prayerbook of Edward VI (Reigned 1537 - 1553) (… er, wouldn’t that make it Tudor?), which is also reproduced in a dramatic, if difficult to read, blackletter PDF. The introduction to the PDF tells us that the source for the document is “a true facsimile (probably the only one ever made) of the 1549 BCP [Book of Common Prayer] privately printed in 1896. This book appears in David Griffiths’ Bibliography of the Book of Common Prayer as 1896/5, and is a facsimile of the very first printing of the Book of Common Prayer, Griffiths 1549/1.”

Again, it’s amazingly familiar:

Deerely beloued frendes, we are gathered together here in the syght of God, and in the face of his congregacion, to ioyne together this man, and this woman in holy matrimonie…

There’s some nice period spelling there, but the words are pretty much the same. I will admit, that surprised me, because it had never really occurred to me that the words of the wedding ceremony might actually be centuries old. It’s just one of those obvious things that you never realise until you see it staring you in the face.

I also found, via [A]mazed and [Be]mused, this “reconstruction” of a medieval marriage ceremony - written by someone from the SCA so make of it what you will - which includes the following vow:

I N. take thee N to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to be bonny and buxom at bed and at board, to love and to cherish, till death us depart, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereunto I plight thee my troth.

Like Stephen, who blogged this in May last year, I was perplexed and amused by the idea that the bride should be “bonny and buxom at bed and at board”. I think I can pretty easily vow to be buxom - it’s more of a state than an act, really - although bonny’s more of a subjective judgement.

It turns out that both “bonny” and “buxom” meant different things back then:

This wonderfully alliterative phrase comes from the Use of Sarum, the earliest English marriage service I have found, which was authorised by the Bishop of Salisbury in 1085. [...]

Originally these words meant something rather different from now. “Bonny” is from the French ‘bon’, or ‘good’; “buxom” is from an old German word meaning ‘pliant’ or ‘obedient’; “board” is where you put food (on the ‘sideboard’) so this means mealtimes; and “bed” simply meant ‘night-time’. So “Be bonny and buxom in bed and at board” meant: “Behave properly and obediently through night and day.” The meanings of these words changed over the years and the church objected to talking about bonny and buxom brides in bed, so we have now lost this vow.

That’s a relief and a pity all at once. For a while I was wondering if I could get Kevin to vow to be “happy and hot at home and abroad”, but thought that might be pushing my luck a bit.

But then, as I read more and more, I started to realise… there are no “I do”s. At no point in any of these ceremonies does anyone say “I do”.

In 1549 we had:

[Name] Willte thou haue this woman to thy wedde wife, to liue together after Goddes ordeinuce in the holy estate of matrimonie? Wilt thou loue her, coumforte her, honor, and kepe her in sicknesse and in health? And forsaking all other kepe thee only to her, so long as you both shall liue?

I will.

In 1662 we had:

WILT thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?

I will.

And in 1928 we had:

N. WILT thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?

I will.

Not a single “I do” amongst them.

Yet in the civil ceremony, there it is, the fabled “I do”:

[Groom], do you take [Bride] to be your lawful wedded wife?

I do.

Will you love and respect her, be honest with her, and stand by her through whatever may come?

I will.

Despite this, “I do” gets all the good tunes, movies and TV episodes, whilst poor old “I will” gets one song, by the Beatles (which I’ve never heard and may not even refer to wedding vows).

Next time… Just what is a troth and how do I plight it?

Thank you Lloyd!

Honestly, I have to say that it’s been really hard to figure out who to invite to the day and who to invite to the evening and I’m still filled with fear that I will have forgotten someone important. I just wish everyone could come!

OK, so confessional time. I’m going through that phase of wedding planning that involves the gut-wrenching fear that everything is, in fact, not going to be ok. It doesn’t really matter how often Kevin reassures me that things are going to be just fine, in my head and in my gut, the terror is a cold hard knot that refuses to go away.

The dress is not done. The bridesmaids dresses are no only not done, I don’t have the fabric for them yet. No one has shoes. The veil is not done, nor is the tiara. There are still day invitations to go out. None of the evening invitations have gone yet. I still need to talk to our friend who’s doing the photos about what we want. We need to write the wedding vows and order of ceremony. There’s a half billion things that need confirming. The wedding list need to be written. And my sanity needs to be found - it ran off a few weeks ago and hasn’t been seen since. I know it’s not hiding behind the sofa with a cushion over its head, because I’ve checked.

Friends kindly tell me that I’m more organised than most brides, but I don’t feel organised. I have a huge list of things to do and a Gantt chart, yes, but Christmas is looming, and the list only ever gets bigger, nothing ever gets ticked off, and it all has to be balanced against all the work I have to do.

The most frustrating thing is that all the lessons I’ve learnt have been learnt too late. I wish now that I’d taken a week of in February of this year and made the decisions that I’ve put off til now. I wish I hadn’t assumed that we’d have “plenty of time”. I wish I’d spent more time organising the dresses, and bought all the fabric for everything up front, and had Kevin’s waistcoat made regardless of whether he wanted one or not because now it’s too late. I’ve done things in such a piecemeal way and it’s made life that much harder.

I keep trying to unravel the knot of fear that settled in my gut for the last couple of weeks, but it just won’t go away. So I am focusing this week on getting the really important stuff done - shoes, fabric for bridesmaids, etc. Hopefully that will help.

This is, I think, the phase I’ve been told all brides go through. So if I’m late with the Christmas cards, or antisocial over the next month, forgive me.

Then again, I’m always late with Christmas cards, so you may not actually notice any difference.

With a little over two months to go, last night I had my first wedding nightmare. I dreamt that the wedding was tomorrow, but we didn’t have Kevin’s suit sorted out (we don’t), we didn’t have the wedding bands (we don’t), and I didn’t have the skirt part of my dress (I don’t), but the guests were arriving anyway.

I then dreamt about beading my corset, eventually waking up, only to lie there for ages, thinking about how I was going to bead my corset. Sadly, it’s not the first time I’ve lain away thinking about beading - it’s been playing on my mind lately. Rather than go through all that again tonight, I decided that the best thing to do was to test the beading method I had worked out in my head, to make sure it works. I’m basically doing a bit of a belt-and-braces approach: stringing all the beads together on a doubled thread attached at one end, then using cotton to sew the beads on to the fabric in a sort of back stitch, going through two beads, then back round through the second bead and a new one, and so on in a straight line. When I get to the other end, I’ll secure the thread. That way, if either the thread or the cotton breaks, there’ll be something else to hold the beads on.

I wanted to try the corset on again, just to make sure that it looked ok, but it’s a real bugger to get the damn thing on with no one to help. The little busks (a cross between a button and a hook and eye) on the front are a pain to line up properly, even with the laces down the back loosened as much as possible. I swear I’ve pulled muscles trying to do the damn things up. Once they’re hooked, pulling the laces tight is a piece of cake, but good grief, it’s hard to get the eyes positions properly over the busks.

Anyway, I locked Kevin in the lounge, did battle with the corset, and yes, the beading does look lovely. I can now relax, and will finish off the rest when Kev’s not around and I can sit on the sofa and bead in comfort.

I hope that, at least, goes some way towards calming my subconscious and postponing any further wedding-related stress dreams. Still, makes a change from the “OMG, I’ve got an exam and I haven’t studied for 14 years!” dream.

So Kate, my Oh Matron! of Honour, and I have so far failed to come up with any ideas for what to do for my Hen Party. I’m quite clear on the fact that I do not wish to go on a pub crawl, or go out for a meal, as those are, for the first part, really rather dull and uninspiring and, for the second part, something I do all the time. I shall not be trailing round London’s seedier districts with a blow-up ball and chain attached to my ankle, devil horns perched upon my head or a fake veil entangled in my hair. Nor shall I be getting blindingly drunk, snogging a male stripper or any of the other rather rubbish things that seem to be de rigeur for Hens on their Nights.

Were it summer, I would have simply bought a couple of cases of champagne, several dozen punnets strawberries and a vat of Rhodda’s Cornish Clotted Cream, and had a civilised afternoon on a well manicured lawn playing what I believe to be the most vicious and ruthless game known to man: Croquet. As it will be early February, (that’s another thing I’m not doing - I’m not having the Hen Do the night before we wed. Oh no. Not on your nelly), it will be cold, wet and miserable, and croquet is a game not really suited to mud puddles. Before you suggest it, eXtreme Croquet is not really a variation suitable for a young lady betrothed.

I’m really not sure what to do. I had thought about doing something like a chocolate making course, or wine tasting, or having a spa day, but I don’t want to do anything too expensive. There’s nothing worse than the bride-to-be who says “Hey, I’m blowing 500 quid on a tacky Hen Weekend in some poor unsuspecting city on the Continent and I’d love it if you could blow both your holiday allowance and your savings to be there!” It’s entirely unreasonable to expect one’s friends to fork out a small fortune for one’s own entertainment, and generally speaking, spa days and the like do not come cheap.

I had thought about having it down in Dorset, but realistically speaking, I’m not sure if that’s a goer. Many of my friends are in or near London, and they’d have to either have a long journey home at the end of the day or have to spend money on a hotel. So I’m open to suggestions. It mustn’t be expensive, predictable, or involve sex toys. Other than that, I’m game.

Traditionally, deciding on the honeymoon destination is a choice that the Groom is responsible for making, but Kevin and I aren’t really the traditional sort and we like to make decisions together. But with everything else that’s going on at the moment, figuring out where to go has been a bit harder than expected.

Originally, we had thought that going wine tasting somewhere nice and warm would be a lot of fun, but the last two weeks in February aren’t wine season in Europe. We thought about South Africa for a bit, but then decided maybe not. Chile or Argentina would be a possibility, or even Australia, but I would prefer not to suffer jetlag on my honeymoon - it takes days to get over jetlag properly, and I get enough of that when travelling for work.

Since we started to think about our honeymoon destination, though, our priorities have changed a bit. Both of us are in a semi-permanent state of knackeredness, not just because we’re both very busy at work at the moment, but also because every spare minute is full of something, frequently wedding planning. The emphasis has moved towards spending two weeks somehwere very quiet, where we can crash out and do nothing. We’re just not sure where we want to go, so I thought I’d use the wisdom of crowds, and ask you lot.

Here are our criteria:

- It must be warm. I’ve had it with cold, wet and miserable, and I’m sure I’ll be even more fed up with the British climate by February, so I’d like a bit of winter sun. Doesn’t have to be hot; temperatures in the mid-20s C would be perfect.

- It must be quiet. I want to do a lot of sitting about, maybe a bit of reading, and really very little else. Maybe some leisurely walking, possibly some swimming (pool or sea). But I won’t want to hear traffic noise, crowds or thumping bass. Somewhere where the only other human beings we see are the ones pampering us would not go amiss.

- Countryside or seaside, but no cities. I want to hear nature at its finests: birds singing, insects chirruping, kittens purring. Oh, if only one could hire kittens. *sigh*

- Close to GMT. I really don’t want to have to deal with jetlag, so I’d prefer it if we didn’t have to cross more than two or three time zones.

- Not too expensive. We’ve got a wedding to pay for too, so destinations beloved by the rich and famous are out, as we’re neither.

- Maiden-name friendly. This is a tricky one. Due to having to send my passport away to the Home Office in order to get a Certificate of Approval so that I can marry one of them furriners, and then due to possible work in Italy in Dec, I can’t send my passport away in enough time to get it changed to my married name. (In fact, I haven’t even decided if I’m going to change my name yet - that’s a whole nother post.) But some countries apparently do not let you in if your passport still bears your maiden name. Not sure which ones, need to find out.

I think that about covers it. So, where would you go?

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. It’s been a bit of a strange year, work-wise, with a lot of meetings over the summer that came to naught, and the last month being a mad rush of new clients and new work. Of course, I’m very happy to be busy, but it does rather coincide with the run up to the wedding, so I’m rather short of time to write down all that’s going on. I really do want to keep as much of a real-time record of things as I can, because otherwise all this will be lost to the vagaries of my memory and I feel that I really want to chronicle the whole thing, not just the day.

I’m sure everyone on Twitter will be glad to hear that I have finally finished up the beading on the fabric that will be used as the inset for my skirt. Some people have expressed concern over whether or not it is bad luck for the Groom to see said piece of fabric, but in our flat it would be tricky indeed for me both work on it and hide it from him. (You know your flat is small when even the gas man says “Wow! This is a small flat!”) But there’s no way one can extrapolate from a bit of fabric to the finished thing, and as long as he doesn’t see that before the moment I walk down the aisle, I think we’re good. Kev, however, has said that if we have any bad luck after we get married, that’s my fault. Ah well, I’ll suck it up if it happens.

I’ve been told by my dress maker that the corset is now finished, and I will be collecting it tomorrow, when I hand over the silk for the skirt. Wow. Sounds like some sort of dodgy heist…

I bought 15 metres of ivory silk, enough for the skirt, the stole (which I will have to start beading soon - a beader’s work is never done), and a bit left over in case I decide I want to finish the edge of the veil with perfectly matching biased binding. That would, I must admit, be a right royal pain in the arse, but my perfectionism may yet drive me to it.

The corset will be hidden away, where no prying eyes can see it, but having it this early does give me a good chance to think about and experiment with jewellery and other decoration.

Honestly, shop-bought brides get it so easy. One of the things that drives me nuts is all the tiny little decisions that need to be made. As I’ve blogged before, it took me ages to decide on which beads to use, a decision that was tiny but important. Having to go through that decision making process again and again and again is wearing, and sometimes I feel quite jealous of brides who can afford to blow thousands on a wedding planner and whatever dress and jewellery they like. I’m trying to be stylish and inexpensive at the same time, and it’s really hard work. I want everything to be just so, but sometimes the most unimportant decisions are the hardest to make, because there is no clear reason to choose one thing over another. (The fact that I’m reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz at the moment is an irony not lost on me.)

I was explaining this problem to Kevin on the bus the other day, using the example of whether we have paper or linen napkins. Obviously if we have paper, then we can have them to match the colour scheme, but if we have linen they will be cream. Paper napkins come with the venue hire, so cost us nothing, whereas linen napkins are an additional £2.50 each. I was struggling with the decision, because linen would be nicer, but do I really want to blow 200 quid on napkins?

“Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff,” was Kevin’s advice, but that really doesn’t help. The size of the decision is irrelevant, and to say that something doesn’t matter doesn’t make it easier to decide. In the end, Kevin pulled the rabbit out of the hat with a throwaway comment that linen napkins are probably better for the environment, so that provided me with a good reason to sway my decision in one direction. The fact that it swayed it in the direction that it already wanted to go was a nice co-incidence.

Honestly, though, making these trivial decisions is the hardest thing about organising a wedding. The really big stuff, particularly stuff like the venue, the food, the band and the flowers, have turned out to be pretty stress-free decisions, because I was already very clear about what I wanted and the range of option was pretty small. It really was just a matter of finding the right people to do what I wanted. Deciding whether to have round tables or banquet style tables, though, that’s a different kettle of fish.

We still have some big, outstanding matters to clear up, though. Kevin’s outfit for the day, for example. We really wanted something like the outfit Tristan Thorn (played by Charlie Cox) wears in Stardust, but have been unable to find anything like that out there. We looked into getting a frock coat made, but it’s really very expensive. The quality would be amazing, of course, but one has to ask if it is a coat one would wear for years and years after. (Although given that one of Kev’s proudest purchases is a $10 jacket he got from a second-hand store years back, even if the answer to that was yes, I suspect he wouldn’t want to splash out at this point in time. It’s not like we don’t have a lot of other expenses to cover right now.)

Kev has looked at vintage clothing stores but we can’t find anything that we think might stock that style. Much of the stuff up in Camden is more 40s/50s/60s. Costumiers that we’ve found online tend to be fancy dress suppliers, and quality looks a bit shoddy. So we’re rather unsure now what to do. Shame we can’t just borrow the outfit from the Stardust wardrobe.

I think finishing up my dress and getting Kevin and the other males in the wedding party kitted out are probably the two scariest bits left to do. That, plus finishing up the invitations, which we’ve been slowly sending out in dribs and drabs, and getting into the real nitty gritty of organising the big day, and the run up to it. Oh, and immigration. How could I possibly forget the joy that is immigration. I’ll blog more about that little chestnut soon.

Still, I have my to do list in the wonderful OmniFocus, and I have OmniPlan to help me organise the run up, so we’re all good.

It’s strange how much I’ve come to enjoy going to the gym. I never would have expected to be such a convert, but here I am, eight months down the line, still dragging my arse out to the leisure centre first thing in the morning, still using the pushy uppy machine, the squeezey thighy machine, the walkie walkie machine. We get to the gym probably three or four times a week, and it’s finally starting to pay off.

Not that I’ve lost any weight - oh no. I’m still the heaviest I’ve ever been, but at least that weight is more concentrated in muscles and less spread out in flab. I can tell, for example, that I’ve been focusing on my legs because they look a lot less like tree trunks now than they did. Indeed, my thighs no longer scare me every time I look at them (which, if I’m honest, I try not to). My legs still complain like hell when I walk up the stairs at Holloway Road tube station, but they cope better walking up the hill to Highgate.

My metabolism appears to be adjusting too. I’ll confess that I haven’t managed to give up Coke at all, but that seems to be mattering less - my body seems to be processing calories faster. At least, I think that’s what it’s doing, and whilst obvious evidence is thin on the ground, I can attest that I’m not getting wider even though I’ve entirely failed to beat my addiction to lovely yummy tooth-rot-in-a-can.

Overall, I’m quite happy to keep going as often as we can. I frequently grumble about it, of course, because in the back of my head I’m still expecting to hate it, but I’d hate it more if I couldn’t go (although not as much as Kevin). That surprises me, because I’ve never been sporty or outdoorsy, preferring to enjoy the countryside at a sedate pace, usually from the vantage point of a beer garden and with a glass of something alcoholic in my hand. (For some reason, I become deeply attracted to cider when in beer gardens, although not the brands of cider that come out bright orange and are served with ice, as seem to be the rage right now. No drink should be that shade of orange except for Lucozade, and that’s a drink for when you’re ill.)

I suspect the best way to come to terms with this is to just not think about it too deeply. Or, indeed, at all.

Of course, we’re now getting into tricky territory. The dress is under construction, and I neither want to put on weight - or rather, circumference - nor lose any, as the dress is designed and fitted to me as I am now. I don’t think I’m at risk of gaining girth, so long as I keep going to the gym, and if I unexpectedly lose lots of inches I’m sure I can flab up again pretty quickly just by spending a lot more time and money eating chocolate and drinking vodka.

There’s a bit of leeway in the corset, though, because I can adjust that to fit simply by pulling harder on the ribbons that do it up. Well, not me - it’d be pretty tricky to do up your own corset, unless you had some sort of complex winch and pulley system, and even then I think you’d need help. But if I lose an inch here or there it won’t be a disaster, as Kate will just have to reposition her foot in the small of my back and yank harder.

Still, it’s nice to feel that I may, one day, approach a condition that could be considered “fit”. Best not to rush it though.

These two sketches from Man Stroke Woman are just too true to be funny. I’ve complained about wedding inflation before, and these skits hit the nail on the head. Repeatedly. With a big hammer.

Today was my second dress fitting, and I have to admit that I’m now really excited about it. AnitaJane has done a mock-up of the skirt and the corset, so that we can ensure that it fits properly and do any tweaks necessary before making the real thing out of silk. So today, I tried on the mock corset and skirt, along with my test veil. Even unfinished, in calico, white cotton, and cheap nylon tulle, it looked amazing.

We discussed the beading, I’ve now come to a decision about that - champagne glass pearls with ‘Siam’ red Swarovski crystals. I’ve been agonising over the bead choice for weeks now. The fabric I’ve chosen comes with fake pearls within a metal spiral floret. It looks fine, but possibly a little washed out, specially as the fake pearls are pale and plastic-y. I decided pretty quickly, so replace them with the red Swarovski crystal beads, settling on the Siam shade. But what to go around them?

Pearls were my first choice, but the glass ones I had seemed a bit too big. I found some real, freshwater pearls in two different sizes: 4mm and 3mm. Up close they looked really good, but they aren’t cheap at £5 to £6 per string (of about 170 beads). I also tried clear Swarovski crystals, small metallic beads, glass beads, and tiny plastic pearlescent beads. I beaded a swatch and have been showing it to pretty much everyone, but it everyone had a different favourite! Looking at it today, from a distance (in the mirror), and in the context of the gown it became pretty clear that the fake pearls were by far the best. They caught the light in a way that the real pearls didn’t, and seem more Elizabethan. It’s going to take about 400 Swarovski crystals, and about 2000 glass pearls, but I love beading so I’m looking forward to getting started.

All I have to do now is go and buy the materials. The pattern requires a little bit more silk than I had expected and, of course, I’ve chosen a more expensive silk for the inset panel, but it is going to look stunning.

What was surprising, though, was the decision that AnitaJane and I arrived at about the lace. I’d been wanting to make the lace for the skirt and veil, but in all honesty, it’s taken me a week to make ten pattern repeats, and I’ll need to make about 180 - 200 for both skirt and veil lace. That would mean it would take me about five months to make enough lace, which would finally be ready a couple of months after the wedding. I could feasibly make enough for either the skirt or the veil, but to have one and not the other would look strange. So we have decided to skip the lace.

Emotionally, that’s a strange decision for me, as I had really wanted to make the lace to trim my veil, and it seems a shame not to use it, but I’d much rather the ensemble work than to force lace onto it just because I happen to be able to make it. So now I have a foot of lace that I, currently, have no need for. What I might do is put it away for now, and then when the wedding is over, remove the pearls from the corset and replace them with lace. Or maybe I’ll find something else to trim with it. Seems a shame not to use it now I’ve made it.

I suspect I’ll carry on making lace now, anyway, as a hobby. Kev and I, along with our friend Chris and Syd, went to the Victoria and Albert Museum yesterday. Syd and I went off to take a look at their jewellery exhibit and the renaissance/medieval display, only to find both shut. We did get to take a look at some of the old textiles they have, including some very, very old lace. It was stunning - the thread they used was so fine, it can’t have been wider than a human hair, and the patterns were so intricate. It made my lace look big and chunky and heavy. But my work looks amazing compared to the crap you can buy in the shops, which appears to have been made by machine and is all fuzzy and, at times, almost felt-like.

But this doesn’t let me off the craft project hook. I still have a metre of embroidered silk to bead, and I have to get that done pretty quickly so that Anita Jane can then make up the skirt. The skirt, stole and corset will need further beading after that. Then, of course, there’s the tiara, the corset swatches, the veil, jewellery… In the light of that, perhaps it’s better that I’ve nixed the lace.

As well as trying hard to find exactly the right shade of burgundy card for the invitations, I've also been trying to find exactly the right silks for my wedding dress. Having finally settled on a dressmaker, who not only can do exactly what I want but can also do it at a reasonable price and without throwing a strop about “design rights” and attempting to charge for quotes, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the right fabric.
AnitaJane, my dressmaker, showed me a number of dupion silks by James O'Hare, some of which were lovely, but they didn't have any silk brocades, which we'll need for the insert in the skirt. Instead, I went off to Maculloch & Wallis, to see what they had, and found about half a dozen vaguely ivory-coloured brocades, and a few more burgundy silks. I also managed to get three brocade samples from Dalston Mill, but when you compared all the brocades with the ivory dupion, most of them were a long way away from being the right sort of ivory: too pink or too gold or too yellow. One was about right in shade, but it was a bit too subtle - from a distance you really wouldn't be able to see the detail. I thought I'd deal with this by beading it with pearls and burgundy Swarovski crystals, but that also seemed like an awful lot of work, not just because beading is quite slow and tedious, but also because it would require a whole new thought process about what would be an appropriate design.
Last week was Kevin and my anniversary - two years ago we had our first date, and so Kevin booked us in to one of our favourite restaurants, Andrew Edmund. We had about an hour to spare before our booking, though, so we wandered round Soho looking for a place to have a quick pre-dinner drink. That's a lot easier said than done on a Friday night in London, especially when a warm day has people grasping at summery straws, pretending that autumn hasn't really set in, honest guv. We ended up in a vodka bar that appeared to be mainly frequented by gangsters. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. Kev has a good street sense about these things, and I'd put money on there being various mafias present that evening. We finished our drinks and legged it.
On our way back from the dodgy bar, we walked down Broadwick Street, right past Broadwick Silks. They had some brocades in the window that immediately caught my eye, so yesterday we went back for a closer look. It seemed that they had a much bigger range of silks than Macculloch & Wallis, although M&W only put samples out on display, keeping the rolls themselves behind the counter, so it's really hard to judge. But Broadwick Silks' staff were dramatically nicer, letting me browse when I wanted to, and then helping me out when I asked.
I earmarked a few silks to examine further, then I told the assistant what I was doing and what I was looking for, and pointed out the rolls I liked the look of. She asked me if I had the fabric for the rest of the skirt, explaining that it is actually hard to match fabrics off a swatch, and that if I buy all the ivory I need from them, both the dupion and the brocade, then I can ensure a better match. She went on to explain that silks are dyed in batches, and that so long as the colour is within 10% lighter or darker - within “industry tolerances” - then it's deemed a match, but you can't really tell until you have a large piece to compare.
We haven't bought the ivory dupion yet, so she showed me the dupion that would go with the silks that I had chosen, and you could see it was a good match. I ended up buying 10cm of each, so I have a decent amount of fabric to play with. The assistant agreed that my choice was a bit more period than the alternatives - it's actually not a brocade, it's a dupion that's embroidered and beaded.
(For those of you who don't know, a brocade is “a rich fabric, usually silk, woven with a raised pattern, typically with gold or silver thread”; a dupion is “a rough slubbed silk fabric woven from the threads of double cocoons”; and a slub is “a lump or thick place in yarn or thread”. There, I bet you thought I'd never explain.)
This is all very exciting! Firstly, it means I don't have to do so much beadwork as I had expected. Secondly, it's going to look more period, and thirdly, I can go in some time next week and buy the fabric I need, in time for my second fitting. Of course, on the way back towards Oxford Street, we passed two more fabric shops, so I don't suppose for a second that I'll be able to resits popping in to make sure that they don't have anything better, but I really do think I've found the right silks now.
You'll noticed that I said “second fitting” - had the first one on Thursday. Really all it was just having my measurements taken, trying on a corset again and making a few decisions on how I want to adjust the shape, and deciding on a skirt pattern. Pretty simple stuff, but it's exciting to be making these decisions and getting on with it all.
Of course, as the process progresses, I find myself changing my mind about things, and refining what I want. I was originally going to have lace trim on my corset, for example, but have since decided that pearls (or rather, Czech glass pearls, given that real ones are rather expensive to buy in bulk) would be more appropriate … and less work. I still intend to use lace on the skirt, but I'm also considering whether pearls might not work better there too… it's a rather organic process, this, which means high cognitive overheads as I do more research and try to make decisions, but also gives me a real feeling of ownership. This dress, for better or for worse, will be a true expression of my personality, not just some pretty thing I picked out of a book.
Makes me wish I had room in my flat for a sewing machine.

After finally getting all the right shades of paper and card to make our invitations, the next thing to get sorted was the wording and the typesetting. If you've ever bought a wedding magazine, and I pity you if you have, you'll have noticed that they tend to come with half a forest's worth of inserts, usually including at least one from a stationers advertising invitation printing. Some of those brochures even have suggestions of how to word your invitations, so I thought that it'd be a pretty easy thing to figure out.
Wrong.
Ok, so if you want to be traditional about these things, then there are a number of forms and rules that you have to follow. Firstly, who's hosting the wedding? The bride and groom? Bride's family? Bride, groom and both families? Bride's and groom's families? Groom's family? Divorced parents? Divorced parent who has remarried? Widowed parent? Old Uncle Tom Cobbly? All (of the above)?
We're being quite traditional in some senses, so my parents are hosting the weddings. Right, so that's:
Mr & Mrs Robert Charman
Now, do you “request the pleasure of your company” or “request the honour of your presence”? A not-so-quick Google discovered that you use “request the honour of your presence” for religious venues, and “request the pleasure of your company” for non-religious venues. Ok, so we're getting married in a public school (always feels weird saying that), ergo:
request the pleasure of your company
Except, these are for form invitations, where you're not stating the person's name. Each one of our invitations names the people invited, so:
request the pleasure of the company of
One then spells out the name of the recipient in full. I had a bit of a moment there when I was trying to figure out if it should be Mr Nigel Charman and Mrs Margaret Charman, or Mr & Mrs Nigel Charman. I ended up going with the latter, mainly for space reasons but also because it sounds a bit more formal. It is a wee bit sexist, but it is just too much to spell out everyone's name in full. The only time we broke with this male first rule was when we were inviting a friend and their (named) partner, and the friend was female. Just seemed wrong to be inviting someone we didn't know as an adjunct to someone we did!
The next bit's easy, given that my parents are hosting:
at the marriage of their daughter
I'm their daughter, I'm getting married, so no arguments there really.
Susan M….
Ok, so now we do have a problem. I don't mind my name in full, but it seems strange given that whilst Susan is my full name, my mother is the only person who uses it. Apart from immigration officials, and they don't count. Kevin preferred not to use his full name, so it becomes:
Suw Charman
to
Kevin Anderson
Still following me?
Then it's the date, which some people say you should spell out in full, e.g. Saturday, the sixteenth of February two thousand and eight. Now, one could slap an 'Anno Domini' in there too, just to pep things up a bit, but again, it gets a bit too wordy.
Now time for another couple of rules: The prepositions should be on a separate line:
on
Saturday, 16th February 2008 at 2.30 p.m.
And the date should come first. Except, of course, when it doesn't, and I've seen plenty of invitation examples where the location comes first and the date second. I can't find the guide that insisted it was the other way round, but that's what we ended up with. I also didn't put the prepositions on a separate line, because it just took up too much room. Ooh, such a rebel.
RSVP is to the Mother of the Bride, even if she did protest otherwise, and I chose to include email and phone as well as the traditional postal address.
And there we are! Done! Sort of…
Next up was the font. Again, easy enough to get ideas from samples and brochures, and my first stab at it ended up looking like it had come straight out of the pages of the Confetti stationery brochure, with a copperplate type font for everything except our names, which was done in a big swoopy calligraphic font, Edwardian Script IT.

I have to say, at this stage I wasn't particularly enamoured of our invitations, so I had a chat with my friend Matt Patterson, whose arm I twisted into agreeing to have a look at my typesetting. He gave me a few tips, the main one of which was to find a font with “non-lining (old-style) figures, i.e. numbers where they're the height of lower-case letters and some of them stick up (8) and others stick down (3, 9).” Inspiration!
A few of my friends are designers or into typography, so I asked around for fonts and links, and was given a selection of suggestions to look at, some of which come pre-installed on one's Mac. For the terminally curious, my shortlist was:

• Aquiline
• Aquiline Two
• Blackmoor LET
• Casablanca Antique
• Dominican
• Goudy Old Style
• Hoefler Text
• IM FELL DW Pica
• IM FELL English
• IM FELL French Canon
• IM FELL Three Line Pica
• JSL Ancient
• Lucida Blackletter
• Ludovicos
• Xenippa
• Zapfino
• Monotype Corsiva

There are some really nice fonts here, some of them with that sort of 17th century feel, which is appropriate given that the wedding has a very light 'somewhere in the middle of the last millennium' feel to it (I wouldn't go as far as to say “theme” because there's no way I can get MrA into doublet and hose, let alone a codpiece).
One thing I learnt is that Hoefler Text has all these really cool ligatures that you can enable:

That really got me going. Swashes! That long archaic s that looks like an f but with only half the crossbar, if anything. Trouble is, whilst Hoefler Text is nice, it's not exactly quite as old-style as I would like. I did experimental invitations with Aquiline, IM FELL English and Ludovicos instead, and after quite a bit of faffing about, decided on a mix of Aquiline and Aquiline Two for the main body of the invitation, with IM FELL English for the RSVP address - at low point sizes, Aquiline and Aquiline Two really don't work.
And it turns out that Aquiline has a nice long archaic s too. Question is, when do you use a long s, and when do you use a short one? I ended up on Andrew West's blog, BabelStone, reading two posts that he wrote last year: The Long and the Short of the Letter S, and The Rules for Long S. Both are really fascinating and worth a read. They conclude that the rules for the use of a long s are:

* short s is always used at the end of a word
* short s is always used before an apostrophe (e.g. clos'd, us'd, and in French books words like s'il and s'e?øt)
* short s is always used before 'f' (e.g. ?øatisfaction, misfortune, transfu?øe, transfix, transfer, succe?øsful)
* short s is sometimes used before 'b' (e.g. husband, Shaftsbury)
* short s is sometimes used before 'k' (e.g. ask, risk, skin, skill)
* long s is used before a hyphen at line break (e.g. nece?ø-?øary, plea?ø-ed), even when it would normally be a short s (e.g. Shaft?ø-bury in a book where Shaftsbury is normal)
* long s is maintained in abbreviations such as Gene?ø. for Gene?øis

OK! That's easy!
Having added in the long s in the appropriate places, I then started to think that the wording needed a bit of work - it just seemed a bit flat and uninspired. Obviously you can't faff around too much with things like time and date - they are what they are - but you can have a bit of fun with the rest of it. We ended up, after much agonising, with:
Mi?øter & Mi?øtre?øs Robert Charman
reque?øt the plea?øure of the company of
Mr & Mrs Nigel Charman
on the occa?øsion of the marriage of their daughter
Mi?øs Suw Charman
to
Mi?øter Kevin Anderson
etc. etc.

Now we come to capitalisation. In modern English, we don't capitalise all that much, really, and the trend in colloquial writing seems to be to capitalise less and less. But I remember, years ago, seeing a reproduction of Shakespeare's First Folio, and he seemed to capitalise all over the place! It was explained to me at the time by my actor friend that this was to emphasise the key words, so that the actors could more easily remember their lines. I've done a bit of a Google to try to find out if that's true and if there were rules about capitalisation in Elizabethan English, but have so far been unsuccessful (although if there's anyone around who knows about these things, I'm still curious!).
In the end, I decided on capitalising the words that looked important. Then there was a bit of … well, quite a lot of … fiddling with the kerning and leading, and eventually we ended up with:

All we have to do now is finish putting them together and get them in the post. Turns out there are a whole bunch of conventions about how you write envelopes but, well, frankly? Bugger that.

I wasn't very sure whether I should blog this publicly or not, because I fear it might actually be quite boring unless you're really into making wedding veils. But it has been pointed out to me that you are the best judges of what you find interesting, not me. So I'm bunging it up, and if it's not up your street, you can always skip it. But I must warn you, there'll be yet more wedding blogging over the next few days…
So, a few weeks ago, I bought three metres of tulle in order to make my 'test veil', but when I spread it all out I realised that not only is three metres quite a lot of tulle, but that there's also just nowhere near enough room in our flat to spread it all out flat. I also learnt that it's really hard to fold that much tulle up on your own in a confined space.
Last Tuesday, I went back to Dorset to get some wedding planning done whilst Kev was away on his trip. Mum and Dad have a lot more room in their place than we do, so I took down the tulle so that I could work up the alpha version of the veil.
The main set of instructions I'm using were written by Jennifer Haley, but there's this Michael's Stores illustration of how to make a veil as well, and lots of veil pictures on The Veil Shop to give you an idea of how it should look. What I'm going for is a two layer veil, with a fingertip or waltz length lower layer, and a blusher that comes to just above my elbows. The exact lengths will be determined at my first fitting for the dress, so that I can make sure that the veil and dress work perfectly together.
So, right before we get to the whole making the veil thing, a little geometry. When you think about a veil, you think about something that's longer than it is wide, right? Hm, yes, me too. And when you read the 'making a veil' instructions, they all make it sound like you're making something that's longer than it is wide too. But the tulle is 108″ wide, and if the blusher is 50″ long, and the blusher is 35″ long, that's 85″ long… which means that the rectangle of tulle that I'm working with is actually wider than it is long.
The key thing to getting a veil that hangs well, with lots of wavy edges that cascade down your back, is the shape of the tulle. In Jennifer's instructions, she suggests that you fold the tulle in half, and round the corners off with a radius equal to half the full width. Indeed, the diagram makes that look like a pretty simple thing. But the problem is, with a rectangle that's wider than it is long, you run out of length before you've finished your half-width curves. Indeed, given that the curve for the blusher has even less length than the curve for the waltz layer, the whole thing ends up being, well, a bit squished.
Rather than the expected U shape, geometry insists we have a sort of asymetrically flattened 0 on its side.
So, right, Veil Mark 1. I cut the tulle to roughly the right length and rounded off the corners with a radius of 24″, which was at that time my estimate for the length of the blusher.
This is where I have to interject that tulle is a right bugger to cut. It doesn't matter how sharp your scissors, it's a nightmare to get a straight line or, indeed, a smooth curve. It's also quite hard to cut tulle if you have a kitten sat on it.
Anyway, back to the veil. I folded the blusher part over, and then used whipstitch to gather up the tulle along the fold, leaving 24″ on either side ungathered. I didn't have a comb so I had to test it out by pinning it to my hair with one of mum's spring-loaded interlocking toothy comby thingies. You know the sort of thing I mean.
Can't say that I was overly pleased with the way that this one worked. It didn't really hang all that well - you couldn't really see any of the edges cascading in a nice wavy way, nor was the blusher long enough.
Veil Mark 2. I'd only loosely sewn the veil up, so it was easy enough to undo the gather, and fold more fabric over for a longer blusher - this time, 34″. I also this time whipstiched all along the fold, from edge to edge, rather than just gathering in the centre. Whilst the blusher looked about the right length once pinned to my hair, it really didn't fall well, and the waltz layer looked again quite drab.
Mum kindly offered me her veil, but whilst it's a lovely veil it's way too short, but I spent some time studying it and trying to figure out how it had been made. It seemed to me to be made of two separate pieces of tulle, rather than one that's been folded, so I decided to try that tactic.
The problem with the folded tulle is that the gathers of the blusher become smooshed up with the gathers of the waltz layer, and it become hard to separate them when you bring the blusher forward to cover your face. That affects the way that the tulle falls, and it obscures the edges, so where they should be falling attractively to frame the face, they are buried in the depths of the longer waltz layer.
My veil experiment didn't take place all in one day, although if you had nothing else to do, one day would be more than long enough. Rather, I spread it out over three days, picking it up and putting it down. I'm pretty sure that I can make the real thing in one day, or maybe one weekend, given that the real thing will need more embellishment than this trial veil.
Veil Mark 3. I cut the tulle in two, one piece 51″ long (I had intended 45″, but it came out a bit longer), and the other around 34″, and then gathered the longer piece with whipstitch all along the flat top - now it really did have the fabled U-shape. The blusher piece I trimmed down further, so that it was the same width and length as the blusher on my Mum's veil, and then I gathered that too. I sewed the two together and again pinned them to my head.
Now the blusher was falling better, but because I am going to have it pinned quite far back, rather than on the crown of my head, it was producing a rather unattractive undulation in the hemline when brought forward. I pinned it where it was falling too long, then took it apart again, and trimmed the bottom into a smoother, more circular curve. Sewed it up again, and bingo, problem solved.
That just left the longer bottom layer to sort out. By this point, I'd figured out that to get a very subtle veil with few waves you need a U shape; to get what they call an 'angel' veil you need a V shape; but what I wanted was something in between, without the V point of an angel veil, but more curvy than a U veil, which has all it's drapes in the middle instead of the edges. (Bearing in mind, of course that the U and V are wider than they are tall.)
Veil Mark 4. I undid the waltz layer again, spread it out on the floor, marked out a longer curve with pins, sort of a half-oval, and shooed Castor away. (The little blighter had decided I was paying way too much attention to the veil, and had come to the conclusion that a good tactic to regain my attention would be to position herself in the middle of the veil and then move as if to sharpen her claws on the tulle. I will admit, it was a tactic that worked flawlessly.)
It took four attempts, but the last, more sweeping curve worked just fine. The edges of the tulle cascade nicely down the sides, and it works really well with the narrower blusher.
I then took my lace samples that I made a couple of months ago, and sewed three of them to the bottom of the blusher, just to see what they would look like. I was surprised that the wider sample actually looked far better than the narrower ones. I still need to find some other patterns to try, because it's going to take 4ft of lace to trim just the blusher so I need to be able to make it quite quickly. The rest of the veil would need 17ft, which is really rather a lot, so I need to think of an alternative trim for that.
Friday, we popped into Ringwood and I managed to get a proper comb, albeit black, and some satin bias binding, so I could see how the veil looks with the waltz length layer thusly edged, and with the whole thing attached properly to a comb. And I have to say, it looks good! The bias binding is a little bit stiff and it flattens out some of the curves, but it's a possibility.
That's as much as I can do, really. Next thing is to try it with the dress and see how the lengths work, and to buy the right coloured tulle. Obviously I can't do that until I have a sample of the ivory silk dupion that the dress will be made of. I might see if I can find some real silk tulle - although it's much more expensive than synthetic tulle, it falls much more softly.
I also need to decide how to decorate the veil, and how much decoration I should indulge in. The dress is going to be quite simple, so the veil can afford to be a little bit more flamboyant, but I don't want to overdo it! Still, we have time to think about all that yet!