Prenuptial Braindump

Okay, so, our engagement party is over, Great Western is over, I think it's time to actually start doing wedding-related shit. Here beginneth the brain dump:

Wringing my hands about wedding rings (ooh, I punned!)-- Part Deux

So when last we left our heroine (me), I had given some cashola to the jeweler I lurved in Ventura as a promissory payment on a custom ring... of some kind. I was torn about teal-blue diamonds vs. sapphires and feeling kind of guilty about spending so much money on such a frivolous thing and debating the moral implications of buying diamonds, even ethically sourced ones, and generally wringing my emotional hands about the whole situation.

So I got a call from the jeweler yesterday, and he told me he had ordered some diamonds for me to look over, but the color variations weren't as diverse as he thought I would like. I went in to take a look this morning, and he was right. I was hoping for a five-stone ring that had a very light stone, a medium-colored stone, a dark stone, a medium-colored stone, and a very light stone in a line, but when we put the diamonds next to each other, they all looked like pretty much the same shade of teal. Teal's my favorite color, and the stones were beautiful, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

So long story short, I looked at the sapphire ring again, I looked at the diamonds, I mixed up the order of the stones, and finally George (the jeweler) suggested we put a couple of sky-blue diamonds on the ends of the line of teal stones. I took out the two middle stones, bumped the lightest color teal stones into the second and fourth positions, and put two sky-colored stones on the end, and voila--colors I loved, the gradations I wanted, and stones I didn't have to worry would wear out in fifteen years, like sapphires can. Sold.

Until recently, I'd been wrestling with buying a diamond wedding ring. I trusted the jeweler when he said the diamonds were ethically sourced, but I felt guilty about spending what, to me, is a good amount of money on a purely symbolic item. I felt like diamonds are so stereotypically decadent and chi-chi, would I really be happy with a diamond ring, or would I look at it and think I could have had something almost as pretty without the pricetag? Would I feel guilty about spending money other folks didn't have on something that was, on some level, a status symbol?

So I was driving to work on Thursday and it occurred to me--I'm paying for this ring by myself, with money I earned. Doing so isn't going to keep me from paying my bills or put me in debt. Nate's not helping me with it. My family isn't helping me with it. I'm choosing to spend money I earned with my own work on this.

All of a sudden, the ring changed from a petty concession to capitalism (and my fixation on sparkly things) to a symbol of my independence and capability. I'm spending money I earned on this ring, money I worked for. It's not an indulgence or a stereotype, it's a token of achievement. It's a symbol of my ability to take care of myself, to commit myself to a marriage as an independent adult.

That doesn't suck. :)

Wringing my hands about wedding rings (ooh, I punned!)

In which I do some emotional handwringing about wedding rings. Sorry, kinda long, kinda fluffy.

After yesterday's srs post, something light

Have some tasty dress inspiration. Sadly, I can't give credits for these photos, but none of them are mine.

Wedding thought of the day

Slightly Firefly themed wedding.

Geeky, yes. Also awesome. Also, if there's anything that I like at all in the current "vintage" trend that seems to be sweeping the wedding/decor/fashion world, it's a grungy old-world Western kind of look. :) All the other vintage stuff kind of drives me crazy, but if we rocked the Firefly stuff, I could wear something like this:

This moment of vanity and geekery brought to you by a slow day at work.

Transmission ends.

I'd hit that.

Thinkin' thinkin' thinkin'. 

Clothes make the man

So every time I ask Nate what he wants to wear for the wedding, he says "Top hat and tails."

Now, it's an accomplishment in and of itself for Nate to have an opinion about what he's wearing--his default setting is "shirtless with flannel jammie pants." His outlook on life is pretty casual in general, so I was surprised to hear that he had an opinion at all about what he would be wearing... but I wasn't really surprised to hear he wanted to wear something fancy-pants.

Nate likes to dress up, likes to look nice (good little Leo!), and generally completely subverts the stereotypes about how men never ever give a shit about what they're wearing and have to be shoehorned into their formalwear by the long-suffering women who deign to put up with them. That's one of the ways we completely upset the gender stereotype--he loves to dress up and I always feel awkward or uncomfortable. So when he says he wants to wear black tie formalwear, I get a ball of nausea and ice in my stomach--that's so not me.

But, you know, it's not my wedding, dammit, it's our wedding, so if he wants to dress up all fancy, we'll make it work. There had to be a way to coordinate my laid-back hippie beach wedding dress idea with Nate's penguin cosplay. Right?

So I got to thinking. And it occurred to me that associating a top hat and tails with black tie attire is a very modern convention--it's about as formal as men's formalwear gets. But roll the clock back a couple of hundred years, and tailcoats and hats on dudes were worn in much more casual situations. What if Nate rocked a tailcoat with a sort of archival, costumey quality?

Enter the Edwardian tailcoat.

If we designed something for Nate that was kind of evocative of Colin Firth's costumes in the A&E (six hour marathon) Pride and Prejudice, only hopefully without the terrifyingly crotching high-waisted pants, and made it in a color, rather than just black, that might work. I wouldn't want to do a perfectly period design, but I'd want to distance it somehow from modern tailcoats. I'm hoping to do something tea-length and not-too-fancy myself (with a dash of color or two), so I think we might have found a workable compromise.