More wedding planning

[liv]

I'd really like to involve lots of our friends in the wedding, rather than inviting people to a staged show where they would be the audience. Obviously there are arguments for and against doing it this way. I am pretty sure I'm not going to turn into Bridezilla, but I'm sure everyone thinks that, and I'm open to the argument that it would put too much strain on friendships and it's better to just pay professionals to do everything.

So here comes a poll. I'm mainly just canvassing opinion at this point, so don't feel you're committing yourself to anything. Obviously we don't even know who is going to be able to come at this stage!

Poll #7430 wedding planning

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Access List, participants: 22

If we asked you to help out with the wedding, you would feel:

Flattered to be included
17 (77.3%)

Uncomfortable because I don't know you well enough to be part of your celebration
2 (9.1%)

Annoyed at being asked for a contribution instead of being honoured as a guest
0 (0.0%)

In principle happy, but practical considerations mean it's unlikely I'd be able to help
5 (22.7%)

Neutral but generally ok
1 (4.5%)

Specifically, would you be willing to take on a role in the ceremony eg reading, singing, witnessing, etc?

I'd love to do that
10 (50.0%)

I'd like to do that for someone I knew well, but not really for a random person from the internet
1 (5.0%)

I don't really like doing anything public facing
1 (5.0%)

I would object on principle
0 (0.0%)

It's a good idea to ask friends to be involved, but I personally am not interested
3 (15.0%)

I would be happy to do something small but not take a major role
9 (45.0%)

I would love to have an important role in the ceremony
2 (10.0%)

Would you be willing to take on a practical role during the wedding and reception, eg ushering, tech support, liaising with venue staff etc?

I'd love to do that
9 (56.2%)

I'd like to do that for someone I knew well, but not really for a random person from the internet
1 (6.2%)

I don't really like organizing jobs
4 (25.0%)

I would object on principle
0 (0.0%)

It's a good idea to ask friends for support, but I personally am not interested
3 (18.8%)

Would you be willing to provide creative input to help make the wedding lovely, eg writing a song, designing stationery etc?

I'd love to do that
7 (35.0%)

I'd like to do that for someone I knew well, but not really for a random person from the internet
1 (5.0%)

I don't have any relevant skills
6 (30.0%)

I would object on principle
0 (0.0%)

I would be honoured to make a contribution as a gift to you
12 (60.0%)

I would be willing to do it if I could be paid for materials and reasonable expenses for the time
2 (10.0%)

I would be willing to do it if you paid me commercial rates for a professional skill
0 (0.0%)

I would be happy to help but insulted if you offered me money
1 (5.0%)

It's a good idea to ask friends for input, but I personally am not interested
1 (5.0%)

I would be willing to do something small that would take only a few hours of work
9 (45.0%)

I would be willing to contribute a major project
3 (15.0%)

I haven't put any textboxes in for you to specify which parts you'd most like to do, if you do want to help out. But I think that's probably better for the comments, along with pedantry about why my poll is wrong and ambiguously phrased and I'm an insensitive clod. I should add that all your advice about ceremonies and rings and clothes and everything else has been very much appreciated so far; you are collectively wonderful already, so don't at all feel you have to do more!

Comments

[simont]

For the last question I kind of wanted to write "almost" beside the "no relevant skills" box. I can't really claim to have no creative skills, but the ones I do have tend to point in rather random directions (e.g. choreographing animated fractals) rather than falling into any well-known existing niche such as songwriting. It's therefore not immediately clear to me that I'd be the natural choice to do anything that fitted particularly well into a weddingy context, but if something does occur to you, I'll be fascinated to hear it :-)

[wildeabandon]

I was going to say something a bit like this, and then I remembered that the way I'm best at being creative is in the kitchen, and that might in fact be of some use...

[liv]

Thanks for offering! I think the food is mostly covered; my sister, a professional chef, is making the cake, and our local deli is doing the lunch, and my mother is making special meals for people with complicated dietary requirements who can't get away with eating from a buffet where people will mix utensils.

Stuff you might know about, though: we haven't really covered drinks, and the default assumption is cases of wine. You probably have better taste in fine wine than I do; do you know of a non-obvious retailer who might do something a bit more special than just whatever happens to be available at Tesco or Oddbins? Also you're one of the best dressed men I know, and I'd really like to pick your brains about options for a suit for jack. I don't like the sexist tradition that the bride spends months of effort and thousands of pounds on a stunning dress, and the groom just hires whatever generic morning suit. Would you be willing to help with that? It doesn't exactly come under any of the headings in the poll, but it would definitely make the wedding better!

[emma]

Random wine recommendation: http://www.bibendum-wine.co.uk! One of our clients so I've been there a few times to do their IT, nice people, nice wine. I'm not a huge wine aficionado but their website might be worth a look :)

[liv]

Ironically enough their website is down just now. But thanks for the rec, it's sort of pleasing that working in IT gives you useful contacts with companies!

[emperor]

FWIW, we get our wine from http://www.sundaytimeswineclub.co.uk/ who have always been very good and helpful.

[wildeabandon]

Hello!

Sorry for taking an age to reply to this - I was trying to think of good answers. We get nearly all of our wine from waitrose/ocado, and that's more just out of habit than because I think it's necessarily better than Tesco. However, one thing I did shortly before another friends' wedding last year was go to a couple of tastings with him and his then-fiance, and although he actually knows a lot more about wine than me, having a couple of people to bounce ideas off is quite helpful. I was reminded of this when I got an email offering discount tickets to The Wine Show which is happening later this year, and has in the past had a lot of good wines across a range of budgets. It's a little way off now - mid November, but I could pick up tickets for the three of us and see if we could find something you like.

I'm not sure that I have any brilliant ideas for suits, but in the past when I've been bemoaning my inability to afford something bespoke from Saville Row I've been quite tempted by these people, who come over to the UK to do the measurements, and then make the suits in Hong Kong, for a somewhat moer affordable figure.

Alternatively, and I don't know Jack well enough to be sure whether it would appeal, another option might be to look for period clothing (whether actual vintage, or made in a similar style). I haven't bought or worn period clothing in a while, but if that appeals I could have a poke around.

[liv]

I bet if we did ask you to design, say, a decoration scheme you'd do a fantastic job at it, but it's probably still not the most sensible allocation of tasks! I do like your animated fractals, though.

Here's a thing you're good at: thinking of original, witty ideas. We are trying to commission a cake from my sister, and she wants to decorate it in a way that symbolizes biology and maths. Can you think of any recognizable mathsy thing that would be reasonable to put on a cake? I mean, most of maths is either just a bunch of numbers and letters, which doesn't make for very interesting cake decoration, or else it's incredibly fiddly (eg the aforementioned fractals, or stuff in more than three dimensions), which is basically impossible to represent in cake form.

[simont]

Hmm, yes. So you want something that's basically visual in nature, but simple enough that it could be drawn on a cake without an absurd amount of work or precision or both.

Well, as a starting point, here are some random ideas I came up with by going through various fields of maths and thinking of a reasonably well known visual illustration of each one.

• Calculus: a graph of a wavy line with an area under it shaded, like the one in this Wikipedia article
• Geometry: a right-angled triangle with a square on each side illustrating Pythagoras's theorem. (Here's one, and further down there are some diagrammatic proofs too.)
• Geometry again: if Pythagoras is too clichéd, there are any number of other pretty things involving triangles, such as the nine-point circle.
• Geometry once more: if 2-D is too boring, there are no end of gorgeous polyhedra, including spiky stellated ones
• Graph theory: an illustration of the Königsberg bridge problem (need not include a realistic map :-)
• Topology: there are quite a few pretty objects which are topologically significant, but two that spring readily to mind are a Möbius strip and a set of Borromean rings.
• Set theory: a Venn diagram, perhaps?
• Game theory: a board showing a partially completed game of Hex
• Number theory: there might be scope here for a diagrammatic proof of some theorem involving sums, by drawing a square of points and subdividing them. The one that springs particularly to my mind is the beautiful visual proof that the sum of the first n cubes is the square of the sum of the first n integers, as seen here
• Not quite sure what field to file this under, but a tiling of a rectangle with pentominoes? (Might count as combinatorics, perhaps.)
• eta: Probability: a normal distribution curve, perhaps with the area under it shaded up to some point. (Bah, I racked my brain for ages for a probability one and now I feel silly for missing it.)

Or if your sister feels like overachieving, all of them on different sides of the cake! (And make it an appropriately polyhedral cake so it has enough sides. :-)

[mathcathy]

What about icing on one/many logarithmic spirals?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_spiral

It has mathematical significance because of Fibonacci and biological significance because the golden ratio is so abundant in nature.

The cake could be cut to a golden rectangle - or have tiers with different golden rectangles. They would be naturally beautiful because of Phi.

[angelofthenorth]

The mathematical bridge?

[ajnabieh]

I'm not answering the poll, because I am a random stranger from the internet who is in the wrong country, but I did have a wedding, and I did make people help at it! Here are some things people did: First, both our bridesmaids and my grad school friends escorted groups of non-NYC people on the bus to the reception site. Then, a friend of ours who had worked as a florist did all our flowers, which we bought at the farmer's market. And people from Meeting brought food for the post-ceremony, pre-reception party. My dad helped me make the mixtapes for the reception. And our four bridesmaids helped with schlepping things around, picking up the food for the reception and the decorations and doing hair and makeup the day of, etc etc etc. That's what I remember right now.

People were generally enthusiastic about helping, and excited. The one thing I will say is that, if you have any friends with delicate feelings who are prone to feeling slighted, make sure to make a big deal of their help and let them know you're not taking them for granted. Our florist friend was pissed she wasn't a bridesmaid (there was long drama about bridesmaid selection on my wife's side: I have only two friends, so that was easy!), and yet was asked to help, so we realized this halfway through the reception and then made her sit in one of the "wedding party shots" and did a big performance of thanking her--and that made her feel better.

Basically, I think getting friends to do things is awesome, and should be done! The end.

[ajnabieh]

OH: and my ex-girlfriend the professional wedding photographer did our photos. And asked for a really nominal fee (though I think if she were doing it now, she'd ask for more, given her current rates). And a member of Meeting made our wedding certificate (ketubah-analogue), and asked for a donation to the Meeting rather than payment (we offered to pay).

[liv]

Thank you so much for this. I didn't want to make the poll access only because my filters don't quite match the group of people I'm most aiming at, especially the ones who use OpenID from other sites. And I know what people are like with polls, some people want something to tick even if the poll is basically irrelevant to them! I have had so much good advice from "random strangers from the internet", it's quite amazing. The internet gets an acknowledgement in my PhD thesis cos random strangers gave me advice and emotional support, and I can see this is going to be no less true for the wedding.

I think the most natural people to help with this sort of thing are religious communities. Unfortunately my community isn't really in a position to get involved, for both political and practical reasons. So I'm turning to my community of friends-who-live-in-my-computer instead. So far you've turned up trumps.

I basically hadn't thought of flowers or music mixes, and I love the idea of getting a friend rather than a crazy hairdresser to do my hair. Thank you for those suggestions. I am hoping to avoid bridesmaid drama by asking my 4-year-old cousin. It's hard for an adult woman to be jealous of an adorable 4-year-old, and she's my only appropriately aged, female close cousin. But I do hope we would make sure to properly thank anyone who helped out!

[mair_in_grenderich]

At my sister's wedding my hair and makeup were done by one of her friends, her dress was made by one of her friends (paid, I think), her photos were taken by one of her friends (also paid, but a fairly nominal fee), another group of friends organised the decoration of the evening party hall while the family had afternoon tea, and two schoolteachery types got people into groups for the group photos...
She also had an ad-hoc choir (well, four or so people) leading the singing from the front, and someone managing the sound for their entrance song, and someone managing the music at the evening party (mostly a case of hooking a laptop with a 'cheesy dance' playlist up to a big speaker). Can't think what else. The survivors cleared up the hall at the end.

[liv]

That's a really lovely concept. I think I don't want to ask a friend to make my dress, but the other stuff, yes, I would much rather that decorations and singing and crowd-herding happened informally than require everything to be perfectly choreographed.

[atreic]

I do not know your 4 year old cousin, and I'm sure you've thought about this, but my general rule at my wedding was to make sure there was one ept grownup member of the wedding party for every cute little person (so I had two big bridesmaids and two little bridesmaids) so when the little bridesmaids got shy / scared / bolshy /confused there was someone standing next to them who could deal with it who wasn't me. But I think at 4 they'll just run around looking pretty and go back to their family if they need anyone, so it'll be fine.

[hatam_soferet]

Dearest badger, you have only to ask.

[liv]

Did I say that part of the reason which led me to agree to get married rather than just make a private commitment to jack was that I wanted to commission some Jen art? Let's plot when you're here in a few weeks.

[hatam_soferet]

!!!!!!!!!

yay :)

[katieastrophe]

I could do designy things, like maybe a simple, informative website for guests and/or designing invitations/order of service. I ticked "small project" because I'm not sure what big project means to you and don't want to unwittingly throw myself in at the deep end :) in my head, each of those small projects that won't take up much of my time, you may see them as big ones.

I can also do usher-y organis-y things, though that relies on my being there on the day and not knowing what date it is off the top of my head and posting this from my mobile, I can't guarantee one way or t'other :)

[liv]

Thank you so much for offering! I hope we can manage the website, but we may end up asking for help or tips, because both of us have some related skills but web programming and design aren't in our main skillsets. The thing I particularly wanted to ask you about was corsets, actually. I am leaning more and more towards getting a really nice corset, either constructing a dress with a fancy corset as centrepiece, or getting a really good underwear corset which would make a non-structured dress look awesome. But I really don't know where to start and could do with some advice, if that seems like it would be more fun than effort for you.

[katieastrophe]

I can certainly try to help with that :)

[emma]

This is the place where I step in and recommend my friend Gerry, Morua Designs on the web and pitufina. I've never owned a corset and have only tried on two, ever, but I think they're beautiful and would quite like one, if I could afford it and get other things to wear with it. Gerry's made wedding dresses for a couple of friends as well as making beautiful corsets so I'd definitely recommend her in that realm.

[liv]

Ooh, those are nice. Those look like very much the kind of thing I'm looking for. Thanks so much for that rec; the only places I had so far that do the kind of custom dresses I had in mind do fantasy gowns and fairly serious period stuff. Which are both very cool, and I am tempted, but probably over-the-top for what I had in mind. Morua looks a lot more at the right level: gorgeous, really special custom-made stuff, but not completely outrageous in a way that I'm not sure I could afford or pull off.

[daharyn]

Well, I don't know you well enough to answer this poll, but may I just say that I think the idea of a dress with fancy corset suits what I do know of you better than any of the other options you've batted about? I vote Yes. ;)

[liv]

Well, thank you! If my own wedding isn't an excuse to commission a corset I'll probably never get round to it, so I am very much tempted.

[khalinche]

If I may elbow in here, What Katie Did and Kiss Me Deadly do very nice elaborate underwear of the kind which takes longer to put on than your actual clothes, as well as corsets. Isn't that kind of thing traditionally a part of a wedding trousseau?

[jesse_the_k]

We divvied out tasks, small and large, so that everyone at the wedding had a role to play. We thought it made the "community gathering" element explicit, and we got nothing but great feedback.

[liv]

That sounds like a seriously excellent plan. It's looking like this wedding is going to be big enough that that won't quite make sense, but I do like the idea of involving lots of people rather than just a specially chosen few. (Plus I adore your unicorn icon!)

[draigwen]

I could potentially do something like singing, although would prefer to be in a small group rather than solo (been far too long since I've done something solo). I can also ferry people back and forth if there's any need for that (although my car is only little, admittedly), or ushering, or things like that.

I'd offer to try to make you some wedding jewellery but I'm not sure how well I'll pull that off...

[kaberett]

... that's a good point: I thought I couldn't do anything, but actually I am a passable alto as part of a group, and indeed was part of the choir at my Grossmutti's funeral, so... yes: I could do that. Or indeed I'd be delighted to contribute other things you think I'd be good at, and I read well, so.

[liv]

Thank you very much for offering. Ferrying people may be useful, and we'll probably need a small army of people to volunteer to do that. Thank you for reminding me of that aspect!

Singing may or may not happen; I have this bad feeling there are going to be copyright issues. I do also have three very close friends who sing SAB, and have often sung together in the past, which may work better than trying to put together a choir of people who may not have met before the day. I'm racking my brains for suitable communal songs, too; we don't want Christian hymns or Jewish liturgical music which most guests wouldn't understand, so I'm not sure if it's even going to be possible.

[khalinche]

Singing is mostly what I had in mind when ticking the 'yes, I would love to do some kind of creative thing/play a part in the ceremony'. I also know Ewt doesn't really have time to read DW anymore but I feel confident in saying that finding something unconstrained by copyright or maybe composing something is a thing she would love doing. I'll ask her...

[ceb]

Organisational: I would be delighted to help with ushering or other on-the-day organisation, e.g. venue decoration/tidying up afterwards. I would also be delighted to help with organisation beforehand, though I find stuff that involves lots of talking to people stressful, so not venue liaison ;-). But e.g. sourcing flowers/decorations/favours, getting invitations and other stationery printed, generally organising stuff you need, I am happy to do these things.

Artistic: I make jewellery - I could show you some things I have made and if you like my style I would be delighted to make you some things as a present. I do a bit of dressmaking but am probably not up to wedding-dress-making, I may be able to help with smaller things though. I would also be happy to do bits of design; I am not nearly as good a 2d artist as other people you know but I can e.g. lay out text and pictures nicely.

[liv]

Wow, that is an incredibly kind offer, thank you! One thing that I might ask for help with from a hobbyist dressmaker is measuring me. If I had a really good, accurate set of measurements I could probably buy a semi-custom dress off the internet, and even for vintaging it's helpful. But I feel I'd do rather a bad job of measuring myself, and would rather ask someone who first of all isn't me, and secondly knows something about interpreting patterns and dress measurements. So would you be willing to thoroughly measure me some time when I happen to be in Cambridge?

[doseybat]

I would love to help out with anything I can.

[emperor]

I like reading things, and think I do a not-bad job of it :) In general, being geographically remote (and, I suspect, needing to drive home afterwards, were we invited) limits some of the organisational things I might be useful for; I think it's a cool idea to ask people to do specific things, especially if you manage to fit them to things people like doing, although there's a risk the person concerned will feel obliged to say yes?

[atreic]

Also, we can both turn music into nice pdfs for the service sheet via lilypond, although it sounds like you're not planning on having a big singsong for all the congregation.

[naath]

I'd love to help somehow...

I could come clothes shopping in person, or fabric shopping, or dress-maker shopping although I'm afraid I can't offer dressmaking because I'm Just Not That Good and also it'd make my head a'splode.

I'm quite good at organising THINGS but very bad at organising PEOPLE (especially complete strangers); so if you want transport logistics, or "how to move a cake across Cambridge given only 6 geeks and no cars" or something but I can't phone up venues or produce seating plans to please all your relatives.

Or I can do boring manual type tasks like moving chairs around until they look nice :-)

[jpallan]

I must say that I think I involved people exactly the right amount for us by having a wedding certificate. It wasn't a huge effort on anyone's part, but it allowed everyone to contribute in a very concrete way that they were there, that they were witness to our vows, that we were dependent upon the community.

Obviously, they don't need to be as formal in wording as ours was, and the site I linked to above gives lots of examples of wording. But for people who might be overwhelmed by travel, or familial obligations, or other such things, it gives them a very concrete way to say that they were there and they are contributing their support in favour of the new family and new life that you two are creating.