Mod Mischief

Because the rules in Ontario are pretty strict, the wedding we wanted wouldn't be legal. So a year ago today, Chris and I were legally wed in the Ottawa City Hall. I was still on crutches thanks to broken toes and only our parents and a few close friends were there. Our awesome friend Mike was kind enough to take some photos and film the ceremony.   While the legal wedding was really just a formality for Chris and I (the wedding with all our friends and family is what mattered to us), tonight we celebrated our anniversary because Chris will be working on what we consider our real anniversary. We went for a delicious dinner at Antoinette's and talked about much much our lives have changed in the last year. It's been an incredible year!

Our wedding was featured on Offbeat Bride today ! Offbeat Bride has been my favourite wedding blog since long before Chris and I decided to get married, so I'm beyond excited to have our wedding profiled. It's always interesting to see which photos the editors chose and what they cut. Here are some of my favourite parts that didn't make it into the post: - Our Claptrap card box which I posted about building here ,  here and here . -The nerf battles! I think everyone should bring nerf guns to their weddings. -The etched glasses. To avoid both disposable glassware and doing the dishes post-wedding, we bought thrift store glassware for all the guests and, with a lot of help from a temporary sweatshop in my parents' hotel room, etched them all with our wedding designs so guests could take them home as souvenirs. -High five! We snuck in a high five before kissing and exiting the ceremony and I didn't even miss Chris' hand!

Photo by Colleen Johnson.  byfieldpitman.com Putting together the bouquets for myself and my matron of awesome was one of my favourite wedding projects. I posted before about ordering the kit from Princess Lasertron , starting the flowers and even bundling them while I was in Whitehorse for job training before the wedding. Photo by Ben Welland.  byfieldpitman.com I used the kit as a starting point and added as many personal touches as I could squeeze in. If you look at the photos closely you might spot  zippers and studs leftover from my Bebop costume ,  Beau's Beer ribbon,  mesh from the suitcase that travelled the world with me when I was a teenager, buttons from Chris' father's military uniforms and his uncle's fire fighter uniform,  bits of bicycle inner tube rubber leftover from making armour,  ribbon collected from all sorts of events and gifts, tulle snipped from tutus, aluminium roses, feathers and bits of jewe...

Our wedding photos are finally online! Ben and Colleen from byfield~pitman photography did such amazing work! Between the terrible lighting conditions, everything running late and our guests waging nerf warfare while we were supposed to be getting formal portraits taken, it couldn't have been easy for them. They still managed to capture the event beautifully and Chris and I are both so impressed.

I've started to assemble the bouquets. I'm making one for me and one for my best girl Kristy. Unfortunately, I didn't see Princess Lasertron's video on how to assemble the bouquets until after I had already made most of the flowers. It probably would have been easier if I had all the leaves on their own stems instead of attached to the flowers. I think I'll have to cut out more felt leaves to compensate, but I'm still pretty happy with how the smaller bouquet is looking so far. After I add more leaves I'll wrap the handle in ribbon to finish it.

We've been very busy with wedding stuff this week! Now that we're only a month away from the big day we're scrambling to sort out all of the logistics.  This week we had meetings with our venue, photographers, baker, officiant... Lots of details to go over! We've also been working away on several wedding crafts. Friends have been helping us with the centrepieces and bunting and so many other projects. I've started working on a project that uses some of the scraps from my wedding dress and I'm really happy with how it's turning out.

I had another hair trial yesterday. I was really happy with what Karmel did last time , but she wanted to test out some different options before the big day. I'm not sure if it was the humidity or the shampoo and conditioner I've been using, but my hair was super limp. My hair really wasn't cooperating, but Karmel still managed to pull off something great. I made the hair clips  to match my bouquet . I'm going to have to make a bunch more before the wedding!

I had my make up trial this week. I found Amber Sheikh through a local photographer's website  where I saw some really cool work she did on a punk themed shoot. She's fantastic and I'm really glad we decided to go with her. I love it when our vendors seem almost as excited about our wedding as we are! The make up is going to be really dramatic! I don't wear make up on a daily basis, so this is quite a change from my normal appearance, but I think it's going to look amazing with the dress and all the post-apocalyptic decor. In other news, Chris' tailcoat arrived. I can't wait to show you pictures of Chris wearing it, he looks incredible. It fits perfectly and makes him look ready to lead an army into battle. While we've been working on a few projects, we haven't made much progress on decorations lately. But we had friends over last night to help us out and more coming by tomorrow, so I think we'll be checking things off our list ...

I'm starting to figure out this Instagram thing ... We're busy assembling the wedding invitations. Each card has 10 pieces to put together so there's lots of work to do! Thankfully we've got some great friends helping us out.

We're almost done Claptrap! He's just missing his arms and then he can start dancing. No, he won't actually dance, but he will have little speakers playing some of his catch phrases including "Hey, check me out everybody! I'm dancin', I'm dancin'!" For something that I told Chris would just be a weekend project, the card box has taken a lot of time, but I'm still really happy I decided to start work on it. I know there are more important wedding projects that need my attention, but it's the weird and wacky stuff like this that makes the whole process enjoyable. Of course, you might need to remind me that I wrote this when I'm stressing out the week before the wedding because none of the boring but necessary stuff was done far enough in advance. Speaking of more important projects, we're almost done designing the invitations! We've done some test prints and proofreading, and we should be starting to assemble ...

I was so worried about finding a hair dresser for the wedding. Chris has been cutting my hair for the last few years, so I don't have a preferred salon or stylist in Ottawa. To make it extra complicated, I needed to find someone willing to do my hair on location so I could be around to help set up on the big day. Fortunately a good friend came to my rescue and suggested Karmel Koshman . We did a trial run of my updo and it was lots of fun and I'm very happy with the results. Photos and hair by Karmel Koshman

I've been sick for the past few days so we haven't made much headway on wedding stuff this week. We've been slowly working on the Claptrap card box and the invitations. Claptrap's main body is built and we've given him a base coat of paint. Next we need to add the arms and electronics and build his wheel.

Apparently I'm not very good at remembering to post wedding updates on Wednesdays. It's Thursday, but it's also 100 days from our wedding date! We've been doing lots of wedding stuff lately. Chris has been working on the design of the invitations and hopefully we'll be able to start putting them together soon. I've been busy working on our card box. It's going to be a Claptrap, CL4P-TP General Purpose Robot, from the video game Borderlands . I'm basing the card box on a simplified papercraft version  of the robot that I've scaled up and made out of cardboard. I'm almost done covering it papier maché. We've also made progress on the centre pieces. Some of our fantastic friends helped us with making pop tab chainmaille covers for the mason jar vases.

We got some swatches in the mail this week and picked out the fabric for Chris' tailcoat . It's going to look so good! Our friends Grant and Julie came over to help us with wedding crafts and we had fun making photo booth props. The mustache on a stick thing might be a little overdone lately, but I still love it. The results are just so silly! I got the idea to use some of our fake fur remnants from Martha Stewart .

I took the day off work yesterday to get wedding stuff done and we were so busy with wedding projects I totally forgot it was Wedding Wednesday. Oops. Unfortunately that means I don't have any pictures of the crafts we were working on. Instead, here's a photo of our shopping cart a few weeks ago, filled with some of my favourite wedding-related purchases to date: foam swords and hippo bubble machines.

As you might have been able to guess from my post last Wednesday , we've been working on medals and boutonnières for our wedding party. Real flowers don't belong at our post-apocalyptic underground event, so just like in my bouquet and our centerpieces , we're replacing them with bits of metal, ribbon and felt with buttons thrown in for good measure. Our groomsmen/bridesdudes will each be rocking a set of decorative medals and awards, and our male family members will get button boutonnières made from parts of my Princess Lasertron bouquet kit. Some of the medals before we put them in pretty little boxes I'll be posting full instructions on how we made the medals soon!

Wow, is it Wednesday already? We've had friends over almost every night over the last week and we've been super productive, working on wedding stuff. Have I mentioned that we have the best friends? Because our friends are the best . While I've been trying to keep the house tidy when company is coming over, it hasn't been entirely successful. It's hard to keep things clean when you need access to a ton of tools and a million little pieces! Hopefully we'll be able to check off a few more lines on our to do list by the end of this week and I'll have lots more photos to show you.

As I mentioned previously , we've been cutting out fabric triangles for bunting. Now that we have thousands (yes, thousands) of triangles cut, it's time to start putting them together. We shuffled the various bits of thrift store bed sheets, fabric leftovers and random rags (there's even some old socks in there!) with the help of Chris' best man, and put them into stacks of 120 triangles. So it's just a matter of sewing all thousand or so feet of bunting together....

Machete & Sons sent us the muslin version of Chris' tailcoat. It needs some alterations but we're super excited. Just imagine how great it will look in red wool with an ivory lining and pewter buttons!

Most of our wedding progress lately has been logistical stuff. We've booked a bus, reserved hotel rooms and updated our wedding website. Chris put together some illustrations to go with our website FAQ section. The question we're getting most often is definitely "What should I wear?"!