BCBG, and why it's awesome.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again, BCBG rules.  Seriously.  Their stuff is so rock 'n roll, it's ridiculous.  If I were planning a different kind of wedding, you can be sure my dress would have come from here.  Plus, right now they're running a 30% off sale through the end of June 1 (PDT).

This one is perfect for a sweet little city hall wedding.  $418, on sale for $292.60.

A sweet number for those of us who can't decide between satin and lace.  :o)  $498, marked down to $348.60, on sale for $244.02!

The next two are are so rock 'n roll it's obscene.  I can vouch, in particular, for the first.  I made my sister try it on when we were prom shopping for her just because I loved it so much and they didn't have it in my size.  Trust me, it's beyond awesome.  (Full disclosure, I might be biased by the hi-lo hem that I am moderately obsessed with.)

$498 on sale for $348.60.

$358 on sale for $250.60.

This lovely gown looks like a whole lot of trumpet bridal gowns out there, and for $598, it's a steal, but on sale it's only $418.60!

This one I'd buy for myself in a hot second if they had it in my size.  Never mind what I'd wear it to, rehearsal dinner maybe.  Who knows?  In any event, it rocks.

$384 marked down to $174 (not on sale because it's final cut outlet).

And not to bring the conversation back to shoes or anything, but, in the case I am so picky about what shoes to wear, I end up picking something boring that needs some pizzaz.  At 18 bucks ($12.60 with the sale), these shoe clips seem like a worthwhile investment to me!

That said, the only thing I'm really sure I will be buying today is this baby.  Razzle, dazzle, indeed.

Happy Memorial Day sales to you and yours!

Everyone's feeling the squeeze

Times are apparently so tough that even world famous fashion designers are going budget.  Vera Wang announced recently that she'll be offering a line through dress chain David's Bridal starting next spring and that dresses will range from $600-$1500.  Personally, I'm curious as to whether the quality will be the same (obviously the fabrics won't be identical, but will they still be good quality).  To my mind, to maintain the design aesthetic, the dresses would still have to be produced by the same skilled designers and seamstresses and... uh... whatever the masculine form of seamstress is.  Time will only tell, I suppose.

Now, if only Oscar de la Renta would get on the bandwagon and offer cheaper versions of his wedding dresses.  I'm totally smitten with this perfect little bell-shaped taffeta puff of awesome.

OMG Shoes.

These shoes are so ridiculous I think I need them.

Mish Mosh of Awesomeness.

I think I need these guys to follow me around and play my theme song (TBD).  Especially you, totally awesome, overenthusiastic giant guitar player.  You can be my sidekick.

Image by Altura Studio via SMP.

This is the most adorable thing I have ever seen.  I need a dog and a cat that are best friends, stat!  I saw this the other day and have hesitated posting it.  I think it's because it feels so much like me and Ari.  "Tickle me!"  ::tickle tickle tickle stop::  "Who said you could stop?!"



Check out this crazy computer music video.  It's totally impossible to describe, but just trust me that it's fun and very cool.

Take a look at this really interesting article.  It's an excerpt from a book by Shenkar Vedantam about unconscious sex bias.  The article addresses an informal case study comparing the experiences of well known researchers and their experiences before and after their sex changes, with both male-to-female and female-to-male represented.  I may have to go out and read the whole book.  It was that good.  Thanks to web-goddess for the link on the last two items.

Eh, I've got more, but I'll save it, I guess.  Don't want to overload you now.  I'm off to read my newly purchased The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest after I hit up the gym.  Thanks, Nana and Pops, for the birthday gift!

An engagement session I can get behind.

When I first started reading wedding blogs, I thought the idea of engagement sessions was really cute.  You got a chance to work with your photographer before your wedding, some lovely photos of you and your chosen and a chance to practice in front of the camera.  Now though, I am sick of cutesy, overly adorable couples sitting on an old quilt in a woodsy area with a repainted antique bedside table, pretty, tiny flower arrangements, fruit and something (Scrabble tiles, a banner, a book, whatever) that says "love."  We get it.  You're pretty.  You love each other.  Your photographer likes sun flare.

But this, this is an engagement session I can really get behind.

Image by Carl Zoch.

Check out the details and the rest of this awesome, Delorean-filled engagement session here on Rock 'n Roll Bride.

Insta-cheer

I'm pretty sure that when I get my own little mod house with a bright yellow door, life will in fact be perfect and I won't be able to stop smiling.

Rollin' with the Jew Crew

Keeping with yesterday's paper theme, I thought I'd share with you the best greeting card I've seen in a really long time.  Not fancy, just funny.  Need to find a reason for it soon, cos baby, it's gotta come home with me.

You can get your paws on it too over here.  The lovely makers of the card have some other great ones and their printing is all totally wind powered.  Cool, huh?  So be sure to poke around and check out Old Tomfoolery.

P.S. Happy wedding day to my friend Adriana!  Hope everything is even more than you hoped, complete with well-behaved inlaws, delicious and spill free dinner, and a rockin' dance party.  Mazel tov!

Yummy paper

If you tried to tell me this wasn't one of the most badass things you'd ever seen, I'm pretty sure you'd be lying.  It's a technique called quilling, and really, I've never seen it come close to this.  So freaking cool.  You can check out the project details (from the festival poster) here and more of Yulia Brodskaya's work (including the second and third images) here.

Shame on you, J. Crew.

Since getting engaged I have had the good fortune to make some incredible internet friends.  (Shout out to Adriana who's getting married in two days!)  One of my new, lovely friends, has had a really bad experience that I wanted to share with you.  Like many other brides looking for something simple, elegant and not outrageously priced, she found her wedding dress at J. Crew.  She paid in full when she ordered it (plus, a dress for her shower, two pairs of wedding shoes and her five bridesmaids bought there as well). When it came in, she went to pick it up, a sales person told her they store it for free and suggested she leave it.  My friend lives in a small apartment and agreed.  When a bridesmaid cleaned out a closet and had room for her dress she went to pick it up and was given the same advice.

About a month before her wedding she went to pick up her dress, and get this, they had lost it!  Her wedding dress!  That they told her to leave there!  In her words:

"They sent it back to the factory. They called it unclaimed property. They said they didn’t know they had to get in touch with me. They didn’t have my phone number. It wasn’t their fault. They offered me a $25 gift card for my troubles.

I threw an epic tantrum in the middle of the store. A bridesmaid came down and held my hand. The staff promised me the dress would be in the next day by noon.

I take the next day off work. [My fiance] takes the day off work. We sit in the J. Crew and wait. And wait. Noon passes: NO DRESS.

The dress finally arrives about 2:30 in the afternoon. I got a discount on the dress (not yet applied to my debit card yet); my bridesmaids got a discount on their dresses and I got a $50 gift card. The kicker? When the new dress arrived I would have to PURCHASE THIS NEW DRESS and they WOULD REFUND THE EARLIER DRESS. The first dress got sent back and they never even bothered to see if someone might be out SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS."

 That was last week.  This week, rather than refunding her (because they charged her again when the replacement came in), they charged her card AGAIN.  She ended up paying THREE TIMES for her dress and is currently in the process of reporting them to her bank, Consumerist and the BBB.

I've got to say, I had kinda been a J. Crew fan.  If their stuff if your style, it really works.  But this kind of customer service?  They're opening up their first dedicated bridal salon in Manhattan next week and I'm just worried for all the people who could fall victim to their lack of coordination and apparently terrible accounting and customer service.  It all makes me very glass I picked out and took home my dress all in one go.

Please exercise caution if you're considering or planning to order your wedding gown (or anything else, for that matter) from J. Crew.

This is a party I wanna get in on.

Not only because these three guys are awesome, but because I'm sure I would learn so much from whatever photographer took that photo that my mind might explode.

To-do list checking and celebrity sightings: Part III

Where did we leave off last time?  OK, travel hell, met a PC, bought jewelry from a guy who clearly needed more cowbell and spied a guy who's been in some weird movies and an awesome band.

A bit later we moseyed (yes, we moseyed) back to the movie theater and saw a movie I have been dying to see since I knew about and was SO EXCITED for.  Let me start by saying that I am a HUGE fan of the late, great, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I have the whole series on DVD, Angel too.  Hell, I even have the crappy original movie.  I have Buffy friends online.  You'd be well within your rights to say that I'm obsessed.  I love everything Joss Whedon or any of the other Buffy alumni get their hands on so when I heard that Emma Caulfield (Anya) had a new movie out and it was doing limited, week-long runs in LA and NYC and that I'd be in town for the NY dates I was over the moon!

TiMER, the film, is a movie set in a parallel present-day LA where the major difference is a scientific breakthrough, called a timer.  Your timer is implanted into your wrist and counts down to the day that you meet your "one."  It's a really delightful romantic comedy with a bit of a sci-fi twist.  Thankfully though, unlike the usual fluff you see in rom-coms, TiMER is thought provoking, compelling you consider the ramifications of such a device.  I had a whole bit here where I talked about the plot, but it's so good, I really don't want to give it away.  Just trust me when I say it was beyond awesome, one of the best movies I've seen in a long while.  Emma is a joy to watch, and the rest of the cast is quite good as well.



Then, as a special treat, there was a Q&A session with the writer/director Jac Schaeffer and producer Ricki Jarrett.  They were some lovely women who had some really insightful things to say about life, love and the making of their movie.  I would love nothing more than to be friends with these girls, they're that awesome.  Ricki said that although Kali Rocha was is Buffy "we didn't hire her because of the Buffy connection, though that was nice, we hired her because she's freaking awesome!"  I think it's apparent why I like them.  Plus they gave me a sweet little TiMER keychain of my own (169 days, Ari wasn't thrilled)!

You can pre-order the DVD from amazon here or you can stream it using video on demand here.

So, if you could count down until you met your one, would you do it?

To-do list checking and celebrity sightings: Part II

When last we saw our heroine, she had schlepped all over Brooklyn and seen a PC.

The next day Ari was wonderful and didn't complain a bit about schlepping through the diamond district in a seemingly unending quest to find our (well, mostly mine, he was pretty easy) wedding bands.  They're pretty awesome.  Mine looks similar to this band.

 The couple who sold it to us was lovely and the guy sounded like Christopher Walken (like, exactly).

Once that ordeal was over we took a cab downtown and bought movie tickets.  While walking around 2nd Avenue looking for somewhere to eat I had celebrity sighting 2.5 of 2 days (Herman wasn't Christopher Walken but he sounded just like him).  I was making a beeline for Urban Outfitters and lo and behold, who's walking by wearing a weird longish jacket that looks like a tweed lab coat six sizes too big?  Jason Schwartzman, that's who.  I was on a freaking roll.  After my latest brush with fame we met up with my dad and literally inhaled a chicken and broccoli pizza.  (For the record, it was delicious and that's why I was scarfing.)

To-do list checking and celebrity sightings: Part I

Sorry for being MIA this last week, guess I wasn't feeling the blog.  Ari surprised me by coming home at lunch and spending the afternoon with me on my birthday.  It was really fun.  He bought me flowers and didn't complain when I wanted to go purse shopping at TJ Maxx (I love my new purse, been using it nonstop). 

Wednesday we skipped out on dance class (we're taking a salsa/cha cha class through the community college so we aren't hopeless come the wedding) and hopped a plane.  There was all sorts of weather out of in Chicago, so after our fourth rebooking on as many airlines we ended up in St. Paul for the night and on to Newark the next morning (at the ass-crack of dawn).  Dad was a champ and picked us up in Jersey.  Once we made it to Brooklyn, we had three rapid-fire meetings; first the rabbi (delightful), then the photographer (signed the contract), and then the baker (delicious!).  All in all, incredibly productive.  Oh, and sitting outside we saw John Hodgman of the Daily Show and the "I'm a Mac" commercials (he's the PC).  It was pretty exciting.

Twenty-four.

Today is my birthday.  Today I am 24.  Recently, I've been worried that 24 will feel old.  I think I was just freaking out.  In my crazy don't-say-it-out-loud math, the combination between 23 being the last age I'll be in school, and 24 being the year I get married, being 24 makes me a real, full-fledged adult.  Now that it's here, I'm not so sure.  And true or not, it's a little less scary.  What can I say, I may have woken up today to thunder and pouring rain, but at least I'm being zen about it.  No reading outside in the sunshine?  Blogging inside and maybe a new purse in my future.  Who knows, maybe I'm go all crazy and head down to the yarn store.  If there's any excuse to go get my hands on enough cashmere for a small project or as little Misti as I can convince myself to buy, it's a birthday, right?  And I do love birthdays.

Next year, the Legal Wedding Fair, I hope.

Popping in with a bit more gay-friendly wedding love.  It's the Illegal Wedding Fair!

White For Less Green

I'm not sure what compels me keep looking at dresses online, I love mine, I guess the hunt is too much fun.  An online excursion recently turned up this beauty:

I think for a real modern wedding, this dress would be a total knockout.  Plus, it's pretty impossible to beat $178.

As for stuff I might actually be able to wear, I've been after a white cotton eyelet dress for about two years with no luck.  They pretty much universally make me look country and chubby.  So the search continues.  One of these might work, though.

I was thinking something like this first one as a "getaway" dress or the second as a rehearsal dinner outfit, though that's likely going to just be people in the wedding party, not out of towners (at least 2/3 of our guest list is from out of town), so it might be a little dressy, but who knows.  I think it's pretty clear that I need to hit Nordy's in real life!

Yeah, that just happened.

Plus, last chance to win a seat to Love Affair Workshop.  Read details and sign up to join in on the fun!

Yes yes yes.

Today, I get up and start looking through my never-ending blog roll.  A day like any other it seems.  When I first started reading wedding blogs (maybe 8 months ago?) Style Me Pretty was pretty much the best thing going, the one really chock-a-block full of gorgeous wedding inspiration.  In recent months, however, other blogs have begun to assert their place on the forefront.  Let me tell you, today SMP has won me back.  Last month (?) they began a new feature called "From Inspiration to Reality" where they take inspirational images collaged by readers and transform them into admittedly awesome photo shoots from their sponsoring vendors.  Usually, I'm underwhelmed, simply because these orchestrated images are editorial and essentially digital magazine features.

Today was different.  Today's fantasy wedding shoot featured two brides... marrying each other.  I have seem same-sex couples getting married on other sites and it warmed my heart, but this was a situation where a main stream media with a lot of conservative subscribes intentionally chose to use a same sex couple because they could, and because, I hope, they wanted to represent a highly underserved but very real segment of the population.  (And hot damn!  Are these ladies sexy!)

SMP, I'm proud of you.

This new turn in wedding media is not totally unique.  Martha Stewart recently featured her first same-sex couple in her magazine, Martha Stewart Weddings.  There was no fanfare, just the same treatment as any other couple.

And of course, the New York Times have been doing it for ages.  This week there was R. Douglas Arnold and Alexander Michael Quinn, and that's just online.  I'd be mighty surprised if that was all there was in the physical paper as well.

In the insanity that is wedding planning, it becomes really easy to lose sight of why you're doing it in the first place.  A lasting, public and official declaration of love to the one person who means more than everything else.  That's why.  And everyone (lucky enough) feels that.  They deserve to get married regardless of their gender and the gender of the person they love.  Love is love.  It means something different to everyone, but it's always worth fighting for.


I haven't quite figured out how or when, but at my wedding I'd like to acknowledge all those who are still legally forbidden to marry the person they love the most.  When I think of being in their shoes, it makes my heart twist.  I am proud that the value of my marriage will only increase as same-sex couples are allowed in increasing numbers to wed across this country that loves its universal freedom and acceptance.


Photo credits: from Style Me Pretty, Carla Ten Eyck; from Martha Stewart Weddings, Jaclyn Greenberg and Chris Brown of JAG Studios; from the New York Times, uncredited online but if I can check from a paper copy and let you know, I will!

A lovely weekend

Ari and I have had a really lovely weekend so far.  Thursday (what?  It still counts.  It was almost the weekend!) we had dinner downtown at our favorite Indian restaurant.  Ari met me after work, but I went down to play with my new camera a bit.  There's a train yard right downtown, with some really great brightly colored cars that stay there all the time.  Here's some of my favorites.

Then, this morning, Ari and I got out early (for a Saturday, and for us, at least) and headed over to the first farmer's market of the year.  Turnout from both vendors and attendees was better than in past years, but the offerings weren't astoundingly special.  Our best purchase was an awesome but too small for the six bucks we paid for it barbacoa quesadilla that we shared for breakfast.  On the upside, lots of people to shoot!  My favorites (unsuprisingly) are of people eating their lunch from the same place we did!

After the Farmer's Market, we went to pick up Ari's car from the shop (little baby had to have it's 15,000 mile check-up.  I periodically remind him he loves me more than the car.  He knows, sometimes he just needs to remember. ;o).  From there we decided to check out Sam's Club.  Verdict?  Decidedly less awesome than Costco.  Almost as sad inside as Wal-Mart.  Only thing it had over pretty much everywhere else - free Cuervo Margarita samples.  Now, I'm not a margarita kinda gal (I pretty much hate them), but nor am I the type of gal to turn down free booze.  Especially from the top shelf.  Anyhow, I ended up getting myself the sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (which was INCREDIBLE.  Let's just say I won't miss Ari when he goes to work Monday, because I'll be up to my elbows in an awesome novel.), The Girl Who Played With Fire.  I got tired of waiting to get of the list at the library.  The only bummer is that Larsson died shortly after delivering the three manuscripts (Dragon Tattoo, Fire, and the third book in the series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), no more from him once it's over.

Well, that was a tangent I hadn't planned on.  Oh well.  Go with it.  The other thing I got was a nice bunch of these cute pink flowers (no idea what they're called, the sticker just said "filler flowers") that I arranged in the 5 vintage vases from Goodwill last month.  I think they came out pretty well.  This whole flower arranging thing isn't too hard.  ::runs off to knock various wooden things::  If you're beginning to sense a theme, you're a sharp cookie, you.  I photographed the flowers too.  But that's it.  No more... for tonight at least.

Hope you're having a lovely weekend too!