here's what you could have won

Today, a blog I love wrote a post that crystallised thoughts I've been having for a while. Thoughts about how much we manage to torture ourselves in the name of weddings.

The post I am referring to is this one, from the brilliant a Los Angeles Love. Becca at LAL is having a cool as hell wedding, with a DJ they love and food trucks and plants on the table and a lovely dress - and they are doing all of it between the two of them. Essentially it sounds like a massive party with a wedding at the centre, which is a model we are certainly aspiring to. Every time, I read this blog I find my confidence growing.

But today's post was all about the wobbles. About 'what the wedding won't be.' There won't be paper pom poms and bits of ephemera to photograph, and this bothers Becca, as it has bothered many of us in the past, myself included. There's a lot of justification for what there will not be and it reads like a post where she is rather exorcising these images from her brain. Begone, Martha Stewart! Get your stinking crafts out of my face! I'll do as I damn well please!

It's a sentiment I can get behind. I've felt it myself - weddingprettyoverload. The 'if I see another 1970s-tinted picture of a beautiful thin girl standing in an arty room looking wistful and showing us her shoes i am going to goddamn scream' feeling. That's not to say I don't like this stuff.

But my point is this - if even Becca, who is having a cool as hell wedding and showing people like me how to be confident - if even this lady gets these wobbles, then why? Who is torturing us? Who is forcing these pictures down our throats? Who is telling us that if we don't have crepe paper pom poms and artfully sourced bit of vintage then we will not be pretty enough? I am having a bit of a rerun of the end of this post, where I feel like the consumption of wedding magazines and blog is harming my sense of perspective.

Of course, the answer is that it is us. We are doing this to ourselves - we are reading the posts about the weddings of others and every time we do so, we mourn a little bit for the wedding we aren't going to have.

It is a form og torture - we are making ourselves feel a little more insignificant and going a little crazier every day. We know we can't do it all but all we do is make a decision and then challenge it, repeatedly, by looking at 'what we could have won' (wow, worked a 'Bullseye' reference into a wedding blog).

When we took our parents to see the venue, both sets said the same thing: we wish we could have been married somewhere like this. But neither of them were. One set married in a church hall a few weeks after one partner's redundancy (and cancelling almost EVERYTHING) and the other set married in a war zone. They had no pom poms, no luxury of months of organising, poring over blogs and magazines. They just did it with what they had, which is all you can do. Part of me feels embarrassed by the riches of time and choice at our disposal. We've got to find other ways to fill it than by torturing ourselves.

We do what we do, and we do it because that's us. That's it.

blackboard plant pots

This is a lovely idea, from Design Sponge - make your own blackboard paint (surprisingly easy) and then paint up some plant pots!

quick repositioning

Sooo. Last week, I may or may not have been thinking that I wasn't so fussed about the little details - that they seemed like a lot of work and that maybe they weren't important.

Well, in the grand scheme of things, they aren't important - not compared to basically joining myself to another person. But after spending two full hours on the amazing iDiY last night, I sure as hell want some of these nice bits of stuff.

That's why it's good to have a blog, see. So all you lovely people can share in my stupid circular thought processes and fickleness.








(All photos from iDiY)

gocco massacre

So last night, I went to see the lovely Anna for a spot of dinner and a play on her gocco machine.

This was predicated on three things:

1. I hadn't got a clue what a gocco was (I thought it plugged into a computer. Yes, I'm stupid.) Once I found out, it seemed like fun.
2. It seemed like a cheap way to make invitations
and
3. Anna assured me it was a piece of cake.

Let me tell you this right now:

There was no cake. Not even a whiff.

This may be down to a couple of things: me making a bad call on the design (which to be fair, took two and a half minutes in my office before rushing out the door) and me being a person that attracts mess like a small child attracts mud to their shoes and and food splatters to their face.

But a lot is spoken about gocco in this section of wedding blog land. So I thought you might appreciate seeing what the cute Etsy cards and whimsical blogs by non-messy craftmasters don't show you.

Here's what happened:

1. I made a design. It was for a little engagement party/picnic we're going to have. I found a cute little picture of a picnic table and downloaded a free font. I wouldn't normally use images found online (I KNOW it's bad) but this was just a trial and like I say, I had approximately three minutes to do it. If the IP owner of the clip art ever reads this, I apologise and will buy you beer/gin.

2. I printed it out, and then ran to get it photocopied before the print shop shut. Just in case this didn't work, I had also spent my entire lunch break looking for pens that would work with a gocco. (Sharpies and Staedlater drawing pens, if you're interested) and buying card.

3. Then I went to Anna's. Post food, and armed with ginger beer, we set to.

Here's what 'setting to' looks like (note the newspaper-covered table. This would later prove to be the wisest decision we made all night):











This, my friends, is a gocoo machine. Anna's gocco machine, on which she made her save the dates, which look bloody lovely. It is much cleaner now than it was at the end of the evening.

4. We started trying to print things. The first thing we did was make the screen. Here's what that looks like:











So this was my 'design'. I know it's rubbish, but like I say, this was a little test.

5. We tried to block out the screen so that we could make the table brown, the things on the table red, and the writing black. The little foamy bits you use for this are quite thick. This I hadn't realised and was the crux of the problem. We couldn't separate out the red and the brown bits.

6. Et voila, here's the first attempt











Please note, the massive gap between the table and its load. Bean suggested that rustic crapness (ie looking homemade) was supposed to be part of the gocco charm. I'm not sure I agree - or possibly feel that this is beyond rustic crapness.

7. At this point, we tried to remove the inky bits of foam, and this is where the hell started. However hard we tried, we couldn't seem to get it all off. So it would be:

press a card
realise foam still present
use cotton bud stick to try and remove foam
re-ink
press
repeat; repeat; repeat, scream, repeat

Eventually, all we had was a mucky table covered in inky sticks, a mucky Claire and some gocco-ed cards that looked like they'd been made by someone who was bleeding profusely from the hand

Here you go:









To quote Anna: "There's bad, and then there's looking like it was made by a three year old." Never a truer word was spoken.

However, this was an important learning process. Here's what I learnt:

1. If you're going to gocco something, make sure your design has got gaps between things that are supposed to be different colours. CRUCIAL.

2. If you're going to gocco; make sure that it is something that would benefit from being gocco-ed.

This might sounds stupid: I shall explain. This 'design' I made would have looked as good printed on a decent normal printer. The point of gocco is to make something with zingy colours or some other element that would not look as good produced this way. Anna's save the date did this brilliantly, using a zingy purple that would never have looked as good done on a printer.Does that make sense? I'm not sure, but I don't know how else to put it.

3. Make sure you have newspaper down and wear old clothes.

Anna may write a corresponding post talking about how easy it was for her. And I don't doubt it. Look at the lovely cards she made. It can be done if you leave gaps and don't try to be overadventurous with colours.









Herewith endeth the lesson. I suffered so you don't have to.

** With muchos thanks to Anna for her patience, wisdom and quantities of ink.

sooo...

...any of you following my tweets may have seen that the last week was something of a non-event for me, as I spent the whole thing in bed with horrible gastroenteritis. So wedding planning and chatter was pretty much off the menu (what was on the menu, I hear you ask? cream crackers, water and rehydration solution. YUM!)

This week, I'm going to be having a crack at gocco, with a long term view to perhaps making some invitations. I'm just checking if it's bloggable...hopefully there'll be an update soon...

I know it's still a long way off for invitations (OK, just over a year is not that long any more) but if I'm going to make the things, then I'm going to potentially need quite a long time as I don't anticipate being amazing at this stuff (having not made things like this since childhood). Also, I want to send the invitations out just after Christmas. Most weekends are booked up for the rest of the summer. Most will be booked up at Christmas. So I should invest a little brain power in it as often as I can otherwise I'll be staring the festive season in the face with no crafty bits of card to show for it...

Oh, and I also put in a request with my Mum for her to start on bunting. She IS good at this stuff, a crafting supremo. Let's hope I inherited some of those genes...

lovely stuff #3

Seriously good and cheap idea here from the wonderful Boudie and Fou blog.

Painted bottles: blob paint into cheap bottle/jar. Swirl it around. Stick flowers in. Bang: very tiny effort, lovely artsy reward. Nice.