GUESTBOOK: Sign ~
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MAY & JUNE (& probably some bits from the last 6 months too).
Reader, I married him.
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A gorgeous husband, our favourite city, 25 degrees & the sun shone all day - what more could any girl want?
© Luca Rajna 2008 © Luca Rajna 2008
The details.........
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Photo credits: Top row & bottom row left © Luca Rajna 2008 . Bottom row right © Bourne. The rest taken by members of our bridal party.
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Above: My Elizabeth Gage wedding ring which was designed to my specifications ~ thankyou for your help Christine. A yellow & white gold ring with a pink/lavender tournaline, diamonds & fleur de lys. My lovely bouquet was a waterfall of Lilacs, Vibernum & Ivy - the Lilacs smelled beautiful & everywhere I look right now I see them blooming in peoples gardens & every year now nature will remind me of my May wedding. The button holes & the bridesmaid's bouquet were Avant Garde roses. I kept it simple by wearing sprigs of Lilac in my hair, having toyed with the idea of wearing a variation of my Papilion comb. It's a good job I didn't as with the extra (delicate) height getting in to a water taxi with a low roof & even lower door would not have worked at all (it barely worked with a corset & 3" heels). The heels were a fabulous pair of caramel colour satin boots from Bourne which blended with my fabric beautifully - I always knew I'd wear boots.
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Part One: The Wedding.
So rewind to March 2007.
At the end of October last year I finally found space in my diary to head out to Venice for a long overdue holiday & so that we could get a few details, like a date, sorted out. We met up with Jayne who introduced us to various photographers portfolios & ran through transport options, video, live music for the ceremony, etc. After some heady romanticising over the idea of a painfully expensive wedding gondola I finally decided there was no way a gondola & a corset would mix, we also decided against a harpist, etc. & in the end chose a selection of classical music & burned a disc to play in the background during our ceremony. We picked our date & time & left it with Jayne to arrange with the town hall. I would have loved to have had a later time but the cost of the ceremony shot up for weddings after 1pm & it made alot more sense to spend that money on a leisurely afternoon spent on the Bauer's terrace with drinks & canapes. Which is exactly what we went back to our hotel to look in to.
In January we hit the sales & found Mike's daughter an elegant black evening dress & black evening shoes finished with rhinestones. I later found some black beaded chiffon to make a stole & bought her a really cute ruffled handbag.
Having sat on our hands regarding photographs - do you need an official photographer when there's only six in the wedding party? I decided, however much I hate being photographed, I'd kick myself if I didn't book a photographer & so we trawled our 2 choices' websites to make a final decision & get them booked. Luckily our first choice Luca was based in Milan & in February during a work trip to Milan we got to meet up with him first. Something I know I felt much happier about, because we got to discuss his work with him & find out if we liked him & after that meeting, we were more than happy to let Jayne know we wanted Luca to do our photos. We also bought two ties from a shop in the awesome Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, one for Mike, one for his son / best man.
Early in the year I also dragged the unwilling suit shopper (quote "I look awful in suits") down to William Hunt in Saville Row. Fortunately having a bride with a heads up on where to to take her groom to find a good suit helps & he only tried on two suits (one style which he loved & looked great in, different colours) before settling on black. I nearly cried when I saw him all suited up (best to get the tears done with before the big day). We also chose a lovely fitted white shirt with really great wide cuffs & some gorgeous Swarovski crystal cufflinks. We didn't see any elsewhere (and we did have a good look) that were as fabulous & they were in his favourite colour: blue (Swarovski bermuda blue, if we're being fussy).
We wanted his son to look similar but as a still growing 16 year old a William Hunt suit would have been a little OTT, so the week after Saville Row we headed out shopping. Big mistake, huge!. Moss Bros Hire without the prior Saville Row trip I'm sure would have looked a whole lot better but lets just say it would have been mean to dress our Best Man in a hired, high street chain suit. However my tip to anyone who needs a slim fitting suit for a slim young man should look at French Connection's suits. We struck on a great looking suit, in a similar vane to the Groom's & by time we'd found a similar shirt to his Dad's, some amethyst crystal cufflinks & we'd had the sleeves shortened a little to show the cuffs off ala Dad's & the back tailored in a bit our Best Man looked great. We bought our French Connection suit, shirt & cufflinks from Baronjon.
Surprisingly I happened upon two more silk ties in TK Maxx that suggested they might be an even better colour match than our Milan purchases. In the end the Groom had the pinky/purple TK Maxx find which was a very good match to my dress & Best Man chose the tie we'd originaly picked out for the Groom in Milan which worked with his cufflinks.
The wierdest thing I made myself was my hairpieces. Why hairpieces? Well, you get real hair pieces professionally set in a curl & that curl won't drop for days & certainly not for the duration of a wedding. Which is more than can be said for my waist length hair that would probably last an hour & look crap for the rest of the day. I had in the past been using the BBC for my clients, that was until February when the BBC got rid of the costume & wig departments and, I subsequently heard, sold all their stock off. Not that I could have hired the pieces from them because I needed to match the colour to a deep purple shade but I would have sent them down there to be dressed. So I made pieces in a similar natural shade to my own using hair extensions made from real hair & had my hair salon (Saks) dye them to the same colour that I was using, dyed just before we went away. I found another company to set the curl & bought some hair dye from Beeunique to add a few vibrant purple streaks to the front of my hair.
In the meantime I ordered French levers lace & special ordered shot tafetta from two suppliers in France. My dress..... a chance to have exactly what I wanted. Though wierdly I'd never really considered that I might marry, let alone what I'd wear. Unfortunately however the lace I'd always loved, overprinted in blackcurrant & russet shades, no longer came printed only plain. So I had a fair bit of research & trial & error to work out my own way to shade my lace. Though it has to be said, through research, my method to create a similar effect is every bit as good, if not better than the lace I'd always loved. And inadvertantly, I have added a number of extra strings to my bow. My method for shading fabrics is very versatile & the possibilities endless. My colour in the end was not the same as the original, even though I did manage to match that on one of my test pieces but I moved away from a darker colour which would have been very Goth with my skintone & went for a very unusual soft shade. The design was very hard to tie down. When as a designer, the options are endless, how do you strip back all your ideas to one dress? Even though the Edwardian period is not my favourite, my dress is more Edwardian than other historical eras because when it comes right down to it, one has to design for the individual & I suit those styles. I was also well aware that it would be easy to go over the top & that even though I wanted a certain amount of detail, again it had to suit me. When I did come up with my design it felt right & had the familiar studded neckline I have done on so many of my dresses, which I love. And the new details of all over lace (new for me) & the feather & crystal fringeing on my lace coat. Yes there were hiccups, the delivery time on the tafetta went well over, not disastrously but annoyingly. And having someone who's never fitted clothing before- my Mother- fit a corset ....trial by fire. If I'd thought about it, I should have had my Mother sit in on client's fittings last year & watch me but we didn't do that & as a result it became hard work. As it turns out, new hubby being on the same wavelength was a good thing. Having spent two hours one evening in corset, trying to explain where I needed things pinned in order to create my lace overcoat, my feet aching from standing still so long, my fiance called. I sobbed down the phone (pre-wedding there was a lot of crying) that I couldn't create a pattern from my previous two hour ordeal & asked him if he'd give it a shot. An hour later he was at my workroom & half an hour later job done - I'd have married him for that alone! It turns out my husband is not bad at fittings - he follows instructions, sees what needs doing & does it. My Mr Perfect & a life saver......... He also sat with me over a long weekend while I appliqued the lace edging onto the hem of my coat. An interesting stat for you - it took 27 hours to applique just the hem. Of course my Mum did help an awful lot as well. I was told it was bad luck to make the whole dress myself so having Mum & Mike for fittings meant I didn't do it all myself & they strung my fringeing for me too. All in all, the components - French lace & tafetta, Swarovski pearls & crystals, feathers, colour for the lace, etc. certainly did not come cheap and add to this the cost of many many hours of intensive labour. I don't think Brides to be realise how much the fabrics alone can cost when you use quality fabrics & lots of them. I bought 4 lengths of lace 90cm wide by 4.7m long & used most of it. But if a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well the only difference this time being this was my dress.
I have to say though that making my dress was the most stressful, emotional thing I have done. I liken it to building your own house. I piled immense pressure on myself - it had to be what I wanted and make me look a lot thinner. It was flattering, held everything up and in (but one can still hope for miracles, after all why could it make my size 20 something look size 12?) & whilst I pretended it wasn't important, it was really important. Add to this the worry that as a dress designer everyone will want to see your dress, judge your choices & then the pressure is even worse. You have all your own body issues, your own expectations & then everyone else's as well. Plus it also dawned on me quite late that there may only be 6 in our wedding party but there where an awful lot of people in Venice to be seen by & I'm the type that prefers playing wall flower - I'm not comfortable basking in the limelight (I wilt). To be honest it was horrible, I cried a lot - with tiredness, with frustration, the emotional stress of an upcoming wedding. Ehhh. You would think after 10 years of doing this for other people it would have been easy to make my own dress - how wrong you'd be & how ill prepared I was for it. What I am proud to say is, like all my creations, this one too, despite the difficulties of fitting it to myself, fit me like a glove.
Still it's done. True to form I dislike most of the photos. I hate that the sun made me squint all day, my eyes are one of my best features & it would have been nice to have some with my eyes open properly. I learned that I should have confirmed the sort of photos I wanted via email shortly before the wedding. On the day, if you choose to hand the organising over & just enjoy like we did you run the risk of not getting everything you'd wanted. I'd wanted some posed shots & asked for some of me, on my own, showing my dress properly (front, back, side), which we didn't really get, I now know I wanted close ups of us exchanging rings & instead I have photos taken from a distance, I would also have liked some posed portrait shots of me not squinting - relaxed after the wedding ceremony. I wanted photographs taken in a particular location (my favourite church across from the Bauer) & had veto'd the suggestion we pose in a gondola boatyard (not in my dress!). I don't know why but the church was bi-passed & the boatyard put back on the agenda. We didn't do the boatyard, it involved a good deal more walking & a bridge to get there & there was no way I was expending the energy required on something I didn't want to do. I'd seen a previous couple's shots at the yard, pointing at a plank of wood with the "hey we're in a boatyard" expressions & quite frankly there was no chance I was going to be able to muster up enough 'fake' enthusiasm to make those shots work. Besides there were half naked boat builders lounging about in the sunshine, sleeping & I don't need those featuring in my wedding day memories. As it is, my favourite shot was taken on a bridge near the boatyard so something came out of that, that might not have otherwise been.
But I digress.......
Venice:
We flew out on Sunday morning for our Tuesday wedding. I left the feather fringeing to do when we got there as packing a dress into a case is challenge & worry enough without having 127 delicate ostrich feather fringes already attached to the hem to try & pack carefully so that they made the journey intact.
Weddings abroad are a logistical nightmare. Before 9/11 my brides had carried their dresses in garment bags onto the planes. One had room found for her's in the crew's wardrobe, another had her's fly in the cockpit with the pilot & others stowed their's carefully in the overhead lockers. After 9/11 this is no longer an option & we have the worry of packing our dresses into cases & stowing them in the hold, praying they come out the other end & that they haven't been put on a plane to Russia. And some us thank out lucky stars we're not flying our wedding outfits with BA through terminal 5. We managed to get my parents to share one case & Mike's offspring to do the same, giving us 2 extra cases - one for my dress & bits, one for the suits, BM dress & their shoes, etc. That way when the four of them returned to the UK they had four suitcases. We of course where staying on in Italy for our honeymoon.
Sunday we arrived at the Bauer, a five star hotel in Venice & our oasis of luxury for a few days a year. We feel at home there & the staff are great & they remember us. I'd booked a junior suite through Expedia so we ladies had room to swing a cat on the wedding day but the Suite we were given was more like two junior suites. No. 257 had 2 bathrooms, a walk in wardrobe, a large bedroom, another well lit wardrobe area (& make shift workroom for the sewing on of feather fringeing) & a living room. It even had 6 comfy chairs. We loved our suite, 2 bathrooms were a godsend & it gave us a perfect space to retire to when we needed a rest from the rushing around. We cut our cake there on the evening of our wedding day, which Mike shopped for the day before & the hotel happily stowed in their fridge for us.
Monday we had a meeting with Jayne & strolled over to the Rialto to meet the florist who'd evidently had a mare with my Lilacs. Apparently her supplier rang her on the Saturday to say the Lilacs had gone over (AKA died) & the panic buttons were hit to track some down, which they did after some midnight phonecalls (yay) & I had a mix of Italian Lilacs & some from Holland. Jayne told me, when this story came out at the florist's, that she was no way going to drop that bombshell on me seeing as it was so close to our flying out, I'd been working so hard on my dress, etc. But I said to her, this happens all the time. A supplier somewhere down the line lets you down & the person at the end of the chain like me or the florist in this case has to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Which she did & considering it was about the only aspect of my wedding I relinquished control of (I had plans to do my own flowers but decided to dump the inevitable stress factor & have faith in another wedding proffessional), I was very pleased with her services. The flowers were great.
We had booked 2 rooms at the Bauer's sister hotel, the Bauer Palladio across the canal, the two hotels linked by a courtesy electric shuttle boat. Their hotel was in an old monastry & every bit as great as the Bauer but much more tranquil, stone courtyard, lovely restful anti rooms, a garden & a Spa. Mike swapped with his daughter the night before, so we girls were in the Bauer together & my Mother joined us for breakfast in the morning. It was an early start - 7.15am. It had to be as I was doing my bridesmaid's hair & make-up as well as my own. We'd been up late, virgin fake nail creators, not through choice but nessesity. I didn't want to get mine done before I went & Mondays, it turns out, is traditionaly the day barbers & beauty shops are closed in Italy. Jayne did manage to track down a nail bar in Venice that did open on a Monday only to be told they were on holiday that week. So my bridesmaid & I did our own nails using Kiss Lightening Speed kits we'd bought from Boots. Not bad results for newbies if you didn't look too close. I found out after I painted mine you need to file them down ALOT but we had nails & we were happy (& maybe a bit high from the fumes!).
