When Lisa Bayne married the first time, her friends baked a wedding cake topped with bride-and-groom cookies. This being 1976, in Berkeley, California, the cookie couple was nude, though the same could not be said of Bayne and her then-husband, who wore his-and-hers tunics that the bride had sewed by hand from vintage fabrics.
Today, Bayne, 61, has two grown children and is the chief executive of Artful Home, an online art gallery based in Madison, Wisconsin. But her allergy to traditional weddings is more or less the same.
For her marriage to Andy Astor, 57, in October, she created banners and flags from handmade paper to mark the site of their ceremony on a windy mountain road in Sonoma, California. Her bouquet combined dahlias and calla lilies with herbs plucked from her garden.
Photo: AFP
After taking lessons from an artisanal preserves maker in Berkeley, the couple produced several varieties of jam, which they distributed to their 46 guests. Astor, the managing director of a technology services company and a novice glass blower, planned to contribute glassware for the occasion, but managed to complete only 20 pieces by the time it rolled around. Instead, the couple assembled a motley thrift-store collection.
TAILORING YOUR WEDDING
“We wanted the wedding to feel like the life we live in Northern California,” Bayne said, speaking on the phone recently from her home in San Francisco. Still, she added, “I don’t think it was the ultimate DIY wedding.”
In few areas has the do-it-yourself fever raged as intensely as in the US$52 billion wedding industry. DIY flourishes on blogs like Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride, and is a dutiful component of mainstream magazines like Brides and The Knot. A tour of Pinterest or Etsy will turn up almost every hand-wrought artifact you can possibly imagine that is eaten, worn, tied around a napkin, suspended from a rafter or carried off by guests in a little bag.
Of course, fluffy-white, off-the-shelf weddings remain an option, but the tools for tailoring an event to fit the contours of your idiosyncratic being are as abundant as the inspirations.
“You can have ribbons customized in a hundred different colors,” said Darcy Miller, editorial director of Martha Stewart Weddings. “You can have flags put on straws. There are tissue-paper pompom kits.”
So how do brides and grooms cope with such a profusion of ways to be special?
ECONOMIZING
The first thing to recognize is that there really is no such thing as a DIY wedding. Only people with Leonardo-like skill sets and an aversion to sleep are capable of personally customizing every detail. Even the craftiest among us need assistance.
For example, when Jessica Hische, 30, a graphic designer and lettering artist, and Russ Maschmeyer, 31, a product designer for Facebook, planned their wedding last summer, they asked 15 of their artist friends to create artworks as gifts. These were assembled into an online narrative about the couple’s courtship that also served as an invitation.
To economize, the couple offered to barter services or give promotional support to vendors, including Sugar and Fluff, event planners that hung tinsel-y decorations from the Green Building’s ceiling and created what looked like a giant color-blind test with the couple’s initials, as a backdrop for the photo booth.
“I think the entire cost was US$35,000,” Hische said from her current home in San Francisco.
“The only way you can do a DIY wedding entirely,” she added, “is if it’s your job for a year.”
“There’s only so much work two persons can do,” echoed Simon Davenport, 29, a senior copywriter at Macy’s and a musician who is marrying on May 17 in a barn at Stonover Farm in Lenox, Massachusetts. “If you’re committed to doing it yourself, sometimes it’s as important to have good people around you as to say, ‘I want this color or that color.’”
Davenport is fortunate to be marrying into the family of Lily Thorne, 28, an artist who is also the merchandise manager at Bird, a Brooklyn boutique. Various members of her Berkshires clan and their friends are putting up guests, catering the dinner, baking the cake and carving chunks of solid walnut into table numbers with a band saw (that last would be Thorne’s father, Peter, a woodworker).
Last weekend, the couple, who live in Brooklyn, were in the area, foraging for moss, fiddleheads and ramps in a friend’s woods, and pulling chunks of marble from a stream.
The moss and ferns will be incorporated into centerpieces by Thorne and her mother, Sarah. The ramps will be mixed with wild morels in tartlets, wilted into salads, and served with locally caught striped bass. And the marble will be set on rough-hewed plinths along the tables, along with other stones the couple received from guests at their shower at the suggestion of Thorne’s parents.
ARTISTS’ TOUCH
Similarly, when Lauren Ireland, 33, and Ian Furst, 32, married in October at the Black Mountain Wine House in Gowanus, New York, they went to a farmers’ market that morning and bought the best-looking flowers they could find, which friends and family members arranged in bottles. Ireland, a poet who lives in Seattle, wore a tie-dyed dress by Lindsey Thornburg, turning it backward so that the plunging neckline didn’t interfere with her dancing.
“I felt like there’s such a movement to homogeneous wedding styles with Pinterest and Etsy, which are wonderful tools but do seem to make things seem very similar,” she said. (In fact, a few of the couples interviewed for this article said they were determined to avoid DIY cliches like weed-filled Ball jars and picturesque hay bales.) Her wedding, she added, represented “not an effort to be unique, but an effort to be us.”
The most crafted element, Ireland said, were pompoms she made in shades of bronze, copper and peach yarn and strung on twine to add texture to the space. “I did spend a lot of time on them,” she said. But she had allotted herself just enough DIY to calm her nerves rather than frazzle them when the pressures of organizing the party began to take their toll.
Because the second crucial point about DIY and your wedding is that if you lack Zen-like forbearance, you’ll need military-like planning skills.
“The one thing you have to stress is that DIY is not for the last-minute person,” said Vane Broussard, the founder of the 7-year-old Web site Brooklyn Bride. “If you’re the person who likes to stay up late and pull all-nighters, you should not do this.”
DIY or DIWO? Whatever the acronym, it takes a posse, Miller of Martha Stewart Weddings agreed.
“The reality is,” she said, “come the day of your wedding, no matter how crafty you are or what great style you have, there’s just no way you’re arranging the tables while you’re also putting your wedding dress on and taking your pictures and signing your ketubah.”
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