Let’s take a quick detour on this journey of wedding recaps… before I tell you about the execution, I need to tell you about the plan. One of the things that this blog has allowed me to do, outside of meeting some great blogging buddies and keep my friends and family in the loop, is to put my thoughts down somewhere that I can go back to them. I’ve kept ideas, pictures, check lists and thoughts on this blog as yet another method of keeping myself organized. My DIY list on the side has been like my list of goals and the “to do” lists being on here kept all my resources in one place.
I planned my wedding for 19 months… yep… 19. We got engaged on December 31, 2009 and basically started planning immediately. Our original thoughts were a wedding in September with a color scheme of red
and orange, which was put on the table on January 1, 2010… obviously that changed, even though I’m not so sure when. We knew we’d get married in Ft Wayne, but living in Texas meant a lot of online research. Our one “wedding planning” trip happened in April 2010 and we had to be ready to make some major decisions so I did a lot of research and made a lot of lists and once the list was made, J and I discussed and decided on things and moved on. He was involved in 99% of the major decisions for the wedding and probably about 75% of the detail decisions, but when it came down to the final product, I think that I was the one who had the vision of the day.
I would consider myself a creative person, but my creativity has to be inspired… it usually doesn’t just come from my brain. I tend to see something and use the idea to form my own version of the inspiration. Sometimes it’s similar and sometimes my creativity develops it into something that looks nothing like the object that inspired me.
There were a lot of things about this wedding that were put together in my head. By that, I mean that when I came up with an idea and turned it into a reality, most of that time the reality was 1,000 miles away from me where I couldn’t touch it or play with it or create a plan with the actual materials ahead of time. Some examples for you… Escort Boards… I bought the boards, the wrapping paper, the ribbon and the easels and then immediately sent them up to Indiana with my parents when I had the chance. I got the idea from a fellow blogger and had the vision of them, but could not measure or do anything with them until the week of the wedding so it just sat there in my head as a vision. Or Favors… I knew what I wanted them to look like and I was even able to put parts together during some earlier visits, but the final product was not created until the week of the wedding and although I had an idea of how they should be done, but the fact that I couldn’t try it meant that I also couldn’t explain how it could be done to someone else and know it would turn out how I wanted.
When I got to Indiana I had people around who kept asking me what they could do to help. I know it was kind of annoying that I didn’t always have tasks to give them, but basically everything that had to be done that week was something that was based on theory… a theory of how I thought it should be done, but wasn’t sure because it had been 1,000 miles away for so long. Once I got to touch things and measure things and try things and make an example for people to follow, I was able to let people help me, but until then, I was afraid to put that responsibility on someone and be disappointed in how it turned out.
This was one thing that J and I kind of struggled with toward the end of the planning and preparation. He kept asking me how he could help and I kept telling him that I didn’t have anything for him, but then he would be frustrated when I’d say that there was so much to do. It’s because I had to create things and then once I could communicate what I wanted done, I could pass it off. It was sometimes hard for him to understand because he obviously was not in my brain looking at all of the things that were sitting in there waiting to be changed from a vision to a reality.
I wouldn’t say this caused “problems” for us… it’s not like we were fighting about it or that I was having major break downs over anything, but it made me realize that it’s an area where my communication fails me. I can’t explain things in my brain until I have worked them out myself and made my final decision on what exactly I want them to be. There’s nothing more frustrating than when someone asks you to do something and then gives you instructions that are either not clear or that you find out, once you have a finished product, is not what they wanted. That’s stressful for everyone and I wanted to avoid that if at all possible.
I am so lucky to have a great family who was always there to help, but who was also so patient with me that week. In the beginning they asked what they should be doing and I told them that I was not ready for help, yet, but they didn’t give up on me and they were there when I was ready for them to help. They didn’t stress me out by asking me questions before I was ready to answer them… they waited until I gave them a project and then asked questions if there were things that I didn’t explain well, and at that point, I knew what it was that I wanted and was able to answer their questions without any frustration.
Next: Wedding Day Recap – Executing the Plan
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