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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'eſt)
* short s is always used before 'f' (e.g. ſatisfaction, misfortune, transfuſe, transfix, transfer, succeſsful)
* 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. neceſ-ſary, pleaſ-ed), even when it would normally be a short s (e.g. Shaftſ-bury in a book where Shaftsbury is normal)
* long s is maintained in abbreviations such as Geneſ. for Geneſis

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:

Miſter & Miſtreſs Robert Charman
requeſt the pleaſure of the company of

Mr & Mrs Nigel Charman

on the occaſsion of the marriage of their daughter

Miſs Suw Charman
to
Miſter 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!

So, a couple of weeks ago, I realised that the burgundy card I had bought to make the invitations with was, well, the wrong colour. This was particularly painful, given that I thought I'd finally cracked it, just a few days before. Honestly, I felt like I'd been round every art supply shop in London, and had got samples from all of them.



I really couldn't face searching out yet more art supplies shops to try and find yet more burgundy card, so I gathered together my samples and reconsidered the situation. See the burgundy mulberry paper - that's the one that's laid on top of the ivory coloured card? That's the colour I was trying to match. See that burgundy card towards the bottom of the pic, with the writing on it? I figured that was a pretty good match, but as a card it's just way too thin - it won't really hold up very well to having lots of thing stuck to it.

What to do? What to do?

I laid out all my supplies, and had a think.



Then, inspiration! given that I bought a ton of burgundy card that's just enough of the wrong shade to be usable, but the right thickness, why not glue the card that's the right shade to it? That'll give me a double thickness backing card, and the wrong coloured card won't be seen because it'll have ivory mulberry paper glued to the back of it. Sorted!

Of course, this means that we have the added tediousness of gluing together some 25 sheets of card, but it hopefully won't be too much of a chore. When I was home last I got Dad to make me a jig, just two bits of wood at right angles, so that I can more easily line up the two bits of card.

The only issue I then had was that the burgundy mulberry paper that I bought was also the wrong shade. I couldn't find the one that I wanted on the WeddingDIY site, so I had to email them. They replied really quickly and sent me the right URL and, well, frankly, it was just me being a bit dense and looking at the photos instead of the description, and therefore missing the right burgundy because it looked a bit lighter in the photo than I was expecting.

Last week, whilst I was down in Dorset, WeddingDIY sent me the right burgundy mulberry paper, and I am sending the wrong one back tomorrow. I have to say - this is fabulous customer service. They'd put the right paper in the post to me before I even asked them to! If you're looking to make your own wedding invitations, I couldn't recommend WeddingDIY more highly.

Tonight, then, is invitations night. Once we've had dinner, the laptops will go away and Kevin and I will start on making up the invitations for our family and friends who are travelling from afar. The rest of you, however, will have to wait. Invitations aren't usually sent out til about 6 weeks ahead, but given that people need to book travel and accommodation, I suspect we'll do our second batch when we get back from our holiday in mid-Sept.

I just booked the register office (apparently, it's not registry, as I always thought it was) for our wedding in February, and had a sudden and unexpected burst of nerves and overwhelming excitement as I did so. Squeee!!

Now that I'm starting to get tangible evidence of impending nuptials, I'm starting to get much more excited than I have been since Kevin first proposed in January. We have the stuff for the invitations, bunches of lavender and rosemary drying, the 'trial veil' (which I'll blog about only if people actually want to hear about how you make a veil - I have lost the ability to tell what's interesting and what's dull now!).

It's all slowly become much more real, and I'm slowly getting much more excited. Indeed, every now and again I get a sort of flash of "Oh gosh! I'm getting married!", accompanied by a little fizz of excitement and happiness. I'm glad that we didn't rush things - I'd be missing out on all this anticipation if we had!

The thing about weddings is that the majority of the work is in getting the detail right. Luckily, I like detail. One such detail is how to do the place settings at the wedding breakfast. Everyone will have a specific place to sit, but how to we indicate who is sitting where?

I don't like traditional place settings - they're boring. So I struck on the idea that we could use a little posy of dried lavender, with a name tag attached to it with lace or ribbon. Mum and Dad have a lavender bush in the front garden, but it's not enough for the number of posies we need. In fact, it's probably only enough for one. But Mum teaches adult exercise classes, so she asked if any of her members had spare lavender that they would cut for me, and many of them said they had.

Sadly, the weather this year has been just dreadful, and the wetness during June and July has ruined much of the lavender which needs hot dry weather to flourish. The flowers came out earlier than expected, but when people cut them, they were so damp that they just went mouldy.

Despite this, some of Mum's members have managed to cut some nice lavender and successfully - to various extents - dry it for me. Mum has been keeping it in the airing cupboard, and yesterday i sorted it out. Some of it had gone a bit mouldy, so we had to throw out three large-ish bundles, but the rest of it was fine.



This is what we had left, and I've put it in a box in the loft, where it's nice and warm.

Mum got an additional bundle yesterday, which I prepared for drying in the loft, but I don't think it's going not be usable as it was picked after the majority of the flowers had died.



You can see how much greyer it is than the top photo. I bundled it and hung it up in the loft to dry anyway, as I might be able to use it for small favours.





If you look, you can see there are just a few actual flowers left on this lavender, the rest are just the dead husks of the flowers.



One other option is, instead of having posies of lavender, we use bundles of rosemary. Now, Mum and Dad do have an absolutely enormous rosemary bush in the garden, so yesterday we cut as many of the long stems as we could.



I've bundled handfuls of four or five stems together, and hung them in the loft to dry too.



It should take a couple of weeks for both the rosemary and the lavender to dry fully. It's hot up in the loft, and the weather at the moment is quite warm, so it should dry ok. The rosemary bush grows like the clappers, so Mum's going to do another prune in a few week's time so that I get a second harvest. Hopefully that will give us enough rosemary and lavender so that we can put one little posie on each place setting.

Dammit. I don't believe this. Not only is the mulberry paper I bought the wrong one, but the burgundy card I got isn't actually the right burgundy, even though it looked like it was in the shop.

Waily! Waily! Waily!

At last! After gathering a sample of pretty much every shade of burgundy card available in London, I've finally found exactly the right one! Yes, I will admit that I've been on a bit of a mission, and yes, perhaps I've been a bit more rigourous than maybe I needed to be, but I am a perfectionist at heart, and I really had to find the right shade of burgundy card, to match the burgundy mulberry paper and the burgundy ribbon.

Of course, none of these burgundies are going to match exactly the colour of my dress, but you can't win 'em all. At least they will match each other, and it's not like anyone's going to bring the invitation to the wedding to double check. (Although this is the level of obsessive detail that I naturally think in... *winces*.)

I also managed to get the perfect shade of thin ivory card from the same place - Cass Art London, in Islington. Wow, what a fabulous shop! Three floors of art supplies and stationery. Heaven! It was pretty much all I could do to stop myself blowing a hideous amount of money on unnecessary note books, paper samples and art supplies.

I've also ordered all my other stationery requirements from WeddingsDIY, although they've run out of ivory mulberry paper, which is going to put a crimp on sending the invitations out. We're only doing the invitations to those living abroad at this juncture - usually you don't send them out this early but people have to book flights and stuff.

(I just had to double check with Kevin as to whether I am sad blogging this, but he says not. I think he's just being kind. But, well, brace yourself. There's a lot more where this came from.)

It's come! Finally! Yay!!!


Kevin brought home some bubbly, and cooked a lovely meal and, just when I was least expecting it, he came round to my side of the table, got down on one knee, and re-proposed! Of course, I re-accepted.

It's amazing to finally have the ring after so long. The stones are just so beautiful - now and again I catch them sparkling, and it surprises me every time. Kevin made such a good choice. And, of course, I can't help playing with it - it'll take a while to get used to wearing it, but it's just lovely.

After the disappointment of the last dressmaker I spoke to, who turned out to have a totally unreasonable attitude towards whether or not one should pay for quotes (wtf?! If it was acceptable to pay for quotes, builders would do nothing else!), I turned back to one of the first dressmakers that I found from scanning the advertising in the back of a magazine.

She makes corsets and skirts as well, and we had a bit of a chat on the phone, but today I went out to a small village east of London to meet her and talk about what I want. I have to say, I am much more hopeful that this will work out. For starters, she's just much more down to earth. We talked about what I want, which is going to be quite simple really, and she didn't have any problem with what I was proposing.

I showed her my sketches, which is all I have left after the other dressmaker threw away my collection of pictures of nice dresses torn from magazines, and I showed her my lace, the tiaras I'm working on, and talked about the veil and the stole. She didn't seem at all fussed that I want to make my own veil and stole - on the phone she'd said that it doesn't make sense for me to pay her to sit and bead, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if she didn't see beading as a bit of a chore that she's now well shot of!

We sat and looked through her fabric sample - some beautiful silks and velvets, in various shades of burgundy, ivory and gold. She didn't have exactly what we need, so I am going to go to a shop called Macculloch & Wallis off Oxford Street to see what they've got. Apparently they do amazing fabrics, and for one section of the dress we'll need something really quite special and I'm hoping I'll find it there this afternoon.

The most exciting part of the visit, though, was trying on a corset. I've quite a narrow back, so contrary to my expectations I only needed a medium, possibly might even fit into a small if I lose any weight at the gym! I must say, it does amazing things to one's waist - suddenly there's this whole hourglass thing going on that certainly isn't all that obvious in my normal clothes!

I've tried on an 'under-bust' corset before, which had the odd effect of pushing my bosom into my armpits - frankly, that's not all that attractive. This one, though, was a full corset, so whilst it pushes up a bit, it creates a much more flattering shape. I can't wait to get a corset that's actually fitted to me!

Amazingly, corsets only take one metre of fabric, so one can be quite extravagant without breaking the bank. That said, we're going to keep things pretty simple, I think. I like simple and elegant - too much froth and frill detracts from the style, in my opinion.

Anyway, off now to search for fabrics. Exciting!

I've always found stationery to be very exciting. Don't ask me why, but the sight of a clean, pristine sheet of paper just fills me with joy. Blank books even more so... actually, to the point at which I have banned myself from buying new books until the ones I have are full up. My tendency is to buy really nice books and then think "I can't possibly use this for anything mundane, I have to wait for something really special". Of course, that just means that I buy more books and never use them.

So having our wedding invitations printed was never going to be an option for me. It's not just that it's so expensive, although that point certainly doesn't swing me in favour of going to a printers, it's that it is so much more fun to make your own.

I spent some time a couple of months ago, searching the web for ideas on how to make my own invitations, but it was a friend of a friend who told me about WeddingDIY, which I think is run by his sister or cousin or friend. The site is heaven for stationery lovers - all sorts of papers and ribbons and card and envelopes, all cunningly put together in kits to allow you to make your own invitations.



This gatefold design is the one we're using for the main invitations, and the other is for the evening invitations.

A fortnight ago, I ordered three sample packs, which arrived very promptly a few days later. Last weekend I spent some time making up the samples to see how easy it is.

Materials wise, the quality of these kits is very high. The only issue I had was that the burgundy card that I'd ordered to form the back of the gatefold invitation wasn't burgundy - it was more a sort of plumy-chocolate colour than it was a true burgundy colour. And the two different ribbons widths were slightly different colours. I know that's nitpicking, but, well, I'm like that.

The instructions for assembling the kit were really clear, and WeddingDIY actually provides you with downloadable Word documents with the right layout for the size of paper that you're printing, which saves a lot of time in getting that right through trial and error!

Of course, getting the wording right on the invitations is a whole different matter. I had no idea it was so complicated! Do you go with "Request the pleasure of your company" or "Would be honoured by your presence"? Do you type in the names? Or handwrite them? Or have a generic invitation? And fonts! Which fonts do you use? Small caps for the details, big swirly script for the names? Prepositions on their own line? Time and date before venue?

Gah.

Eventually I settled on something that I think works ok, although if there are any typographers reading this who want to take a look and give me some hints, I'd be more than happy to hear from you! (Bearing in mind, this is going to have to be done in Word or Pages, rather than proper typesetting software.)

The invitations were pretty easy to put together. I didn't have particularly good glue to hand, so the paper sort of wrinkled up a bit, but I am sure that's a problem that can be pretty easily solved, perhaps by using a proper glue roller, or spray mount.

Of course, because I am both a perfectionist and a skinflint, I spent some time yesterday at Paperchase and at the London Graphics Centre, looking to see if I can get any of the materials cheaper, and searching for exactly the right shade of burgundy card. It turns out that WeddingsDIY really has a very good price on raw materials, and the quality of the scored card (for the evening invitation) was higher than the card I could get in the shops in London - just a higher weight and better colour. I did find a better burgundy card, but at twice the price and with a laid surface instead of smooth.

I think I'm going to have to keep looking for the right shade of burgundy card, although I have some leads for a paper suppliers online and will be chasing that up as soon as I get somewhere near a working internet connection. (Right now, I'm on a train... but more of that later.) And I'm going to continue to search for matching organza ribbon in the right shade. But for the rest of it, I don't think I can do any better than WeddingsDIY.

Sunday I spent some time making a few back-of-an-envelope calculations at to how much tulle* I would need to make my wedding veil. I've spent quite a bit of time looking for patterns and instructions online, having initially found a really very simple set of instructions which made me suspicious because, well, it can't really be that easy can it?

I decided that I want a fingertip veil that goes down to, well, my fingertips, with what's called a 'blusher' - the bit that comes over your face and which gets lifted at the altar. I did a bit of measurement, and decided that I'd need 45" of tulle for the fingertip part and 30" for the blusher, making a grand total of 75" of fabric. Tulle comes in two widths - 72" and 108", and the wider fabric is recommended for a longer veil to that it's nice and full. This information I gleaned from the web.

Last night, I popped into Peter Jones on Sloane Square on my way home from a conference and went up to the haberdashery on the 3rd floor. Sure enough they had the two widths of tulle, but the measurements were all in metric. Damn. I still haven't really got my head round how big metric measurements are, other than at the millimetre and centimetre scale. In my head, distances are measured like this:

- thou (thousandths of an inch, for really small stuff that you need to use a pair of callipers to measure)
- millimetres
- centimetres
- inches
- feet
- miles
- light years

You'll notice two key measurement missing - metres and yards. (Oh, and AU - astronomical units - but that's not generally an issue in day to day life.) For some reason, I can't visualise how long a metre or a yard is, although I know that a yard is three feet, I find it very hard to judge whether something is that long. And I know that metres are a little bit bigger than yards, but still can't really just look at something and figure out if it's a metre long.

Oh well, I knew that I needed the wider tulle, so that's easy, and that I need 75" or more of fabric, so I asked for, oh... let's say 3m. Seems like that'll be enough.

I couldn't quite understand why the assistant was questioning why I needed 3m of tulle. I explained that I was making a 'test veil', to make sure that I get the shape right and stuff before I do the real thing, but didn't really cotton on to the fact that, well, 3m of tulle is a lot of tulle.

I got it home, got it out of its bag, and sort of arranged it into a roughly the right shape. Standing in front of the window holding the mock veil to my head, I realised that I'm only 5' 8" - which is 1.7 metres for those of you who do find that measurement meaningful - so not only is 3m way more than 75", it's almost enough to fold in two lengthwise and still reach the floor when pinned in place. I actually have enough tulle to make a chapel veil with blusher, i.e. one that's floor length. I'd need a bit more to do a cathedral veil, but that would be overkill. I'll just make the fingertip veil and see what's left over.

Not that it really matters - at £4.95 a metre, this stuff is hardly expensive and I can experiment until I get it right.

I noticed, though, that they had some really nice embroidered tulle which came in a sort of antique ivory colour rather than the standard white, and which would make an amazingly impressive veil. The edging would be tricky to deal with and you'd need to do all sorts of things to get enough fabric together to make a fingertip veil as they only had the narrower width. So that'll take some thought and further investigation. It was only £10 per metre, too.

Whilst I was in Sloane Square, I also went to VV Rouleaux, possibly the most amazing ribbons and trimmings store I've ever been in. It wasn't immediately apparent to me that it will actually help me with the wedding stuff, but still, it was fun to take a look around. I had a look at the laces that they sell, which looked hand-made but might not have been. The real laces that they had were in the Torchon style, and whilst they had two that were finer and wider than the stuff I make, they had nothing in the Bedfordshire style, which is my preferred style these days.

I'm not sure if I am going to make the lace edging for the veil myself now. If I go with this embroidered, antique-looking lace, then that will negate the need for lace edging as it has an embroidered edging. I really need to get to some proper bridal fabric shops to see what else is available - Peter Jones didn't have a brilliant selection, to be honest. If I can get a wider embroidered tulle, then maybe I'll go with that instead. We'll see.

Meantime, still haven't got the invitations together, although I have got samples so that's a start. But all this playing with tulle and tiaras is just too much fun!

* Tulle is basically netting

Almost the first thing Kevin said when I got home on Friday was "Can you explain to me the cultural significance of Take A Break?", at which point I burst out laughing.

Yes, that's right, this week, I'm in Take A Break magazine (you better rush - it goes off the shelves tomorrow). A while back, you may remember, I was contacted by Elaine Pearson, asking if I'd be willing to talk about 'wedding inflation' - that phenomenon where prices mysteriously increase when you put the word 'wedding' in front of a noun, e.g. 'wedding photographer' or 'wedding cake'. Of course I said yes. I always do. And now it's out!

Although I did clear it with Kevin first, I'm not sure he really took much notice at the time, so he was somewhat surprised when his colleagues at The Guardian started ribbing him about it. Bless. I've got a copy, so I'll show it to him when he's back from Kuala Lumpur. Meantime, wow - my 15 seconds of fame!

And welcome to anyone who's here because of the URL that TaB kindly published. Do feel free to poke about in the archives and leave comments if you'd like!