Thursday, September 12, 2013

Weddings. How planning one takes over your life...

Planning a wedding as a designer, especially as one obsessed with details, is simply a curse. I never dreamed of the perfect wedding, but I got so wrapped up in the madness that the rest of my life took a break. Before I knew it I was doing hand calligraphy on all my invites, and not just for a few guests like I had originally planned. My dining room table was a black hole for supplies for months, and eventually my living room turned into a jungle that was impossible to walk through.

I was not myself, and as proof pink -a color I am not fan of- ended up being one of our main colors. A color I constantly wanted to match to a Pantone since I kept getting Pepto Bismol pink, rather than blush. Designing a monogram and sketching a few pages of our initials made me seem like a schoolgirl in love covering my notebooks in my crush's name. I was not a bridezilla in the sense that I made other people's lives a nightmare, it was my own life and it was all on me.

A free generic wedding website won't do for a designer, and since they are awfully ugly I played around with a Wordpress theme, one that I'm still updating post wedding [ found here ]. Basically anything that can be designed - so pretty much everything - you can't help but try to work on. Despite scrapping most of the DIY projects, those, and Pinterest,  took over my life. I was surprised I got sucked into all of it, but it was nice that in the end guests noticed. I got compliments on all details and even on my hand addressed calligraphy as soon as the invites went out.

I questioned the necessity of it all constantly, and if the lack of sleep was really worth it. This pressure was created because in my mind, people expect designers to have beautiful weddings, that stand out in some way. I've seen weddings of my old design colleagues and was blown away by the details, but now I'm wondering how much sleep they got during their planning period. There were so many signs to make and so many things to spray paint gold...

Now that's it's over, I can get back to life without wedding planning, and just organize the aftermath. I am never tying another bow in my life! (I must've tied over 500). The day was perfect, and the visuals were not bad, but of course I can tell the signs I made at 3 am. Below are some images of the invites.