3 Weeks Away!

Posted by Tasha

Alright, so you noticed it's been a while since we've updated last... yes, over 2 months without a post! We will do our best to catch you up! It's been a busy couple of months and I cannot wrap my mind around the fact that in exactly 3 weeks, I'll be married. And if I'm being completely honest, what I mean by that: in exactly 3 weeks, all the planning, worrying, and organizing will all melt into one day of awesomeness.

I CANNOT WAIT!

And I finally understand why brides-to-be get so anxious at the end of the planning and say "I wish it was my wedding day already." It's quite simple, actually, but I didn't really understand it until now. We want the planning to end. I can't believe there are people out there who are married wedding planners! How is that possible?

An update to catch you up: In the last few months, we've actually been able to finalize a few things.
-Food: both Indian and Russian - it's about time that it's confirmed
-Cake: taste testing was way more fun than I imagined - delicious and beautiful and confirmed
-DJ: he has our list of 'dos' and 'don'ts' and our schedule of events (speeches, first dance) confirmed
-Ceremony: script has been written and perfected. Officiant is confirmed
-Photographers: and photobooth - sure to be a hit at the wedding, sooo confirmed
-Rentals: plates, linens, lighting, draping, etc - expensive as hell, but confirmed
-Rehearsal dinner: Italian anyone? mmm confirmed
-Hair appointments: lets throw in the make-up too... confirmed
-Hotels: booked and of course: confirmed
-Wedding Bands: Tigritza's not home, so I'm wearing mine now! ssshhh... gorgeous and confirmed
-Alcohol: open bar with extra ... we can't run out, it's a Russian wedding! confirmed
-Flowers: all the jars collected and dropped off. very confirmed
-Seating chart: basically done (crazy fun doing this on PowerPoint), we have all our guests confirmed!
-Henna Party: thanks to Tigritza's sister, it's gonna be confirmed

So, what's left you ask?
-Best people clothing: there have been a few hiccups along the way, but we'll iron it all out for the big day. I have to make poetry out of this, otherwise where's the bliss? Tigritza, do not edit this out, or I will shout!
-String quartet for the ceremony: can't honestly put "confirmed" on this as they are a bunch of college kids who aren't so reliable, but they have been booked.
-Crafts: an ongoing project - we'll post about this separately. We had an INCREDIBLE craft day with some local friends - more details to come.
-First dance: we've moved the table in our living room so we have extra space to practice... it's going to be the best first dance EVER - as long as I don't fall! Tigritza, don't step on my toes!
-Huppah: Lucky to have my Dad build it and my friend decorate it. Can't wait to see how it comes together. Should see the final product in a week.
-And finally, find a place to put all the gifts that have been coming in!

Doesn't seem so bad huh?

Stay tuned, we've deprived you from our posts, so you're about to experience posting overdose in the next 3 weeks :)

From Fiancee to Wife

Posted by Tigritza

Happy New Year! As 2012 kicks in, it's strange to realize that for a full calendar year I've had the honor of calling Tasha my fiancee. But as wonderful as that's been, I'm really looking forward to leaving the word "fiancee" behind, come April.

So here are my Top 5 Things about switching from "Fiancee" to "Wife":

5. No More Incorrect Spelling! This is a huge pet peeve of mine. Things like "head over heals" or "your wonderful" have always sent a shiver down my spine. So the word "fiancee", which should actually have an acute accent over the first "e", is a distinct source of discomfort for me. It basically means that every time I type out the word, I get a little uneasy and a tiny bit stressed out. Dorky as it sounds (hey, I've got nothing to hide!) I'm literally excited about switching to the much simpler W-I-F-E.

4. No More Legal Justification (to the average person, anyway)! When people first find out my fiancee is a woman, I often get something along the lines of: *excited look* "that's great!" followed by *concerned look* "Oooh, so where are you guys going to do it? Isn't it not legal in pennsylvania? Are you going to do it in New York?"
--- Now before I complain about this, believe me, I'd much much rather have this reaction than the awkward or hostile reaction I may expect to get in some more homophobic parts of the country. People who ask me this are likely just curious, or want to show that they are well-informed and truly care about us and the legal issues we're facing. But man, it's frustrating! The more I try to explain the intricacies of the law - like why getting married in a particular state is irrelevant to us when federal recognition is still blocked by DOMA, or like which states can merely recognize vs. actually perform our marriage - the more I feel like I'm justifying to them why my marriage will still truly be a real marriage regardless of who recognizes it. I've begun just responding "yep, New York" to avoid saying anything more. I understand that the more I explain it, the more I'm spreading awareness, which is a good thing - but at this point I'm so excited for the question itself to just disappear. When I introduce my wife, there will be no such legal planning to explain. "Wife" means it's done. We're already married. And if I ever get the question "so where are you guys legally married?" I plan to respond - "everywhere". Our physical location will never define the status of our relationship. The only people who can define that - is us.

3. No More Gender Ambiguity! This may be a case of "be careful what you wish for." When we first got engaged, I was excited about this! I was sick of saying "girlfriend" and having people think I meant "friend who is a girl." The word fiancee, I thought, always meant fiancee: there was no longer any Relationship Ambiguity. And, even cooler, there was Gender Ambiguity. I could say "my fiancee", and let people make their own assumptions about my fiancee's gender. I felt a weird sense of freedom - after all, why should there be a need to share with a new acquaintance whether my fiancee was a man or a woman? Love is love. I get to say "fiancee", and people always know what I mean. BUT, as I soon discovered, Gender Ambiguity sucks. Nothing is more awkward than someone then saying to me "so your fiance - does he live in Philadelphia too?" At this point, I have two choices:

a) Ignore the mistake, push on. "Yes, SHE lives in Philadelphia" *insert painfully awkward moment when friend is embarrassed for having made the assumption*

or

b) Address the mistake. "Actually, my fiancee's a woman. Yes, she lives...etc" -- *between "woman" and "Yes", insert painfully awkward moment when friend is embarrassed for having made the assumption, and worse, their equally awkward "ah, that's nice" head nod of approval in response to my first sentence.*

Using the word "wife", I get to come out with explicit Relationship Non-Ambiguity and explicit Gender Non-Ambiguity at first mention of her existence! I mean, "wife" is pretty damn clear. Even I have trouble saying it! This is going to be fun. :)

2. No More Congratulations! This happens almost every time I meet someone new. And at business school, I meet someone new almost every day. We're having a regular conversation - maybe I'm talking about what I did that weekend - and I say something like "and on Sunday my fiancee and I went to..." Before I can get any further, the listener cuts me off "Oh, CONGRATULATIONS!!!!" I used to love this...back in December 2010, when we first got engaged. Now, it feels like getting a congratulations for an A+ in high school math. It happened sooo long ago!! And we were MID-conversation about something totally unrelated to my engagement or wedding. Worst of all are the unenthusiastic congratulators. It seems like they are as annoyed by it as I am, but they still say it. Why do people feel compelled to interrupt with "congratulations" when I say the word fiancee? Either way, I am excited to transition to "wife". Although, who knows what interruption-reactions that word will bring!

and the #1 thing about switching from Fiancee to Wife:

1. Tasha's finally gonna be my wife!!!!!!!

Table Decor and Names

Posted by Tasha

We're closing in on almost 4 months now and we're still trying to figure out table names (read: we need your help yet again!) Last week before Thanksgiving, Tigritza and I met with our wedding coordinator at our venue and were able to see a sample dinner table set with our chosen plates and utensils and glasses and bowls and chairs, etc!!! It really made it come alive. We decided on table size - seating 8 per table since it is family style dining and it will be cozy and easier to pass food. We also chose our serving dishes and estimated how everything would fit on the tables - we left some room for the centerpieces!
Below are some photos of what the tables will look like - without one element: instead of off-white tablecloths, we'll put red, orange, and yellow patterned saris on the tables to add color! It will make the white plates pop and look fantastic!

And, we also set up the head table. It is seriously the coolest table ever! It's called the "serpentine" and actually it's 3 tables put together - at the head table Tigritza and I will be in the middle surrounded by family - 4 on each side. Meeting with Hannah, our coordinator, gave us so much energy and made me personally jump around like a little animal - saying I was excited was just not enough! I was skipping around the venue and sitting at the head table - where I will be sitting in just over 4 months with my wife.

Check out the photo -

So now, you can picture this, right? Here's were we need your help: Table Names. (Instead of Table Numbers - "you're at table number 8" we wanted to give name each table, under a particular theme. The question is, what's the theme?)
At first I really liked the idea of languages: naming each table after a language... and we listed about 10 that represented places we lived in or had a significant relationship to,  but the idea now doesn't seem as awesome as when I originally thought of it.
Plus, since we're now only seating 8 people per table, we now have 14 tables and need at least that many names. Of course, we can go simple and just number them. Or, we can do cities we lived in or visited, but that's been done before by others members of our family, so we want to change it up... We don't have a wedding 'theme' aside from glass bottles (vodka bottles as you see from the post below and the wine corks as place cards... and, little glass bottles that the flowers will be in) but we're not really vodka or wine buffs so having names of alcohol doesn't seem to fit. What do you think?

Also, keep in mind we want something that can run through the theme of the wedding  - and since we were playing with the idea of having a typewriter as a guestbook, we can do typewriter theme (but we haven't completely settled on that yet)...  Thoughts? For a guestbook and table names and a general theme that you think will go with our bright (red, orange, yellow) wedding?

Place Cards - how to find your table

Posted by Tigritza

SO - I wanted to couch this in another post, but am pretty excited about this little project. Tasha's dad, a true Russian, makes wine and vodka at home. That's right - HOMEMADE VODKA. It's delicious, and for the wedding he's agreed to make some classic Russian 'Horseradish Vodka.' I know what you're thinking - HOW am I going to drink that? Trust me, it goes down pretty smoothly. And, as it turns out, it adds a really nice personal touch to the wedding.

You know how at weddings you need to have a table that has everyone's name on it, and their table number? So that they can figure out where they're going to sit? Well, we're going to make it a table of little bottles, one for each guest.

Each bottle will:
- be filled with homemade vodka, and have a handwritten label on it (handwritten by yours truly... this should be a fun project)
- be sealed with a CORK (fun!!).
- have a little coloured tag on the neck, tied to the bottle with a piece of twine, saying the guest's name and table. Again, probably handwritten by yours truly.

We attempted to 'design' the label yesterday (below) - probably needs way less text. I'm excited to see what it looks like with the cork and the twine-tied-tag around the neck!

Then, on the TABLES themselves, place cards (also handwritten) will be at each seat with the name of the guest. We're going to make cork place card holders like so:

(Picture taken from here)

So if you live in Philly, please start saving your BYOB corks for us!!

Lots of love, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Save The Date!

Posted by Tigritza

...By now, you've all hopefully received the save-the-dates! So, we're safe to finally post about them. This was, by far, the most exciting wedding project so far! And certainly the most time-intensive. We started off with a noble idea: Let's hand-make the save-the-dates to save money. What ended up happenning? It was just as expensive as it would have been to print fancy custom save-the-dates in the store...but they're cute as hell and we love them!

First, we got the idea from a DIY book. I can't find the exact project online, but it looked something like this.

So if you took a look at the link above, you'll see there were a lot of moving parts here. First, the front and the back of the card. We opened a Powerpoint file and set to work - using our theme colors (red, orange, yellow), we came up with a design that was simple and, we thought, fun. We tried the printer at home, but lesson learned: if your printer came free with your computer purchase, it's probably not a very good printer. So Tasha spent hours searching our neighborhood for the cheapest printing shop that could do our job! We finally found it: Taws was fantastic! They worked with us to get the right paper and negotiate a price for printing AND cutting the rectangular front and back of the card! Score.

Next, the wheel - how were we going to do this? Tasha (she is awesome isn't she) found a cheap circle-cutter online, and used it to cut wheels out of the same paper we used for the card front and back. It was a ton of work, and turns out it's actually really hard to get the wheel perfectly cut (to get your starting cut to meet your ending cut, resulting in a perfect circle). Picture below. We also bought tiny little gold brads to hold the wheel to the front rectangle of the card.

We also had to use the circle cutter to cut a hole in the front of the card, to create a window through which you could see the images on the wheel! DISASTER. We lost about 10% of our cards this way...it is VERY hard to cut a small circle with this circle cutter. Oh well - Taws was nice enough to print a few extra for us (wisely anticipating such disasters) so we literally ended up with JUST the right amount of printed cards with useable circle-windows!

Next, the circular pictures: when someone turns the wheel, and looks through the circular window, what pictures do they see? After looking through lots of wedding sites online, we loved the idea of using the words "She Said Yes!" ...especially since there are two of us, both "she". We also were really excited about our date, Friday April 13th 2012... especially since the last Friday April 13th was in 2007, the day we met! So, we came up with two awesome little "logos" - on Powerpoint again, of course. We wanted the "She Said Yes" to look a little old-school, and the "Friday April 13th" to look a little quirky. And this is how they turned out! (I knew all those years making PPT decks as a consultant would pay off one day!)

So, those would be two of the pictures on our wheel! But what about the other two? We wanted pictures of us. So one cool Saturday September morning, before catching a bolt-bus to New York to see Tasha's parents, we took my camera, a tripod and ourselves down to Rittenhouse square. I set up the tripod and put Tasha in front of it, and took a light-test shot. Wow. The light was perfect, and Tasha looked phenomenal. So that was it! We had an absolute blast. We used the self-timer and just took a bunch of shots. A lot of them were really funny, with Tasha laughing or giggling with that giant smile of hers. We processed them later that night, and picked the top two! (Another 3 of the photos went on an awesome magnet we made to accompany the Save-The-Date (also made in Powerpoint, and also printed at Taws).... but unfortunately there's absolutely no way to display that here on the blog anonymously, since our faces are all over it!)

Taws was able to print our circles on huge pieces of sticker paper. Tasha had bought a circle punch of the perfect size online, so I cut the stickers into strips...

and set to work punching them out one by one! Over 300 punches in total. Each punch required aligning the circle perfectly in the 1.25-inch circle punch, slipping a piece of foil under it (apparently this helps smooth the cut) and applying herculean force onto it to snap the circle out perfectly. My PALMS were bruised by the end of the day... so much so that holding onto the banister of our staircase hurt! Below is a pic of me working the circle punch on our coffee table.

...So, I wasn't the only one hurting. Turns out, Mr. Circle Punch wasn't too happy either. He decided to break down halfway through our operation. We called a bunch of craft stores in Philly, found one 10 miles away that carried the right size, and I biked all the way over there...only to be told they were mistaken, they didn't have the right size. So I biked all the way back home, near tears and extremely dejected, and we decided we had to make it work. Using masking tape, we assembled and stuck the punch back together and pushed on. We had to change the masking tape every 20 punches or so, but we finally got through it all! Et Voila - the bowls of circles finally added up!

And finally: Putting it all together. With double-sided tape from PaperSource (an incredible crafts store where we found a bunch of our supplies!) Tasha stuck the front and back of the card together after attaching the wheel. Then, exhausted, we created an assembly line: Tasha peeled off each sticker and I went through sticking them on the wheel of each card. DONE! Below are four shots, showing each of the four stickers in the 'window' as the wheel is turned. (Our names have been hidden, sorry!) You can click on the photo to magnify.

She Said Yes!

Yep, the last line is my favorite part...

Friday The 13th

Last photo -

THE BEST PART: Mailing them. Seriously. We bought Persimmon-colored envelopes from PaperSource, and printed each address individually using our printer at home. We were so psyched to see how far the Save-The-Dates were travelling. They went out to 38 cities: in the United States, South Africa, Russia, India, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Brazil, China, and Canada.

(My favorite was the Russian one, which actually had to be typed out in Russian. класс!)

So - THANK YOU for being so cool and living in so many places!!

[Again, sorry for the censoring but we had to do it. Click on the photo to enlarge - ]

...On a Saturday evening, we took our big bag of Save-The-Dates and dumped them in a mailbox on 19th and Chestnut. It was...strange.

Me: "Is it safe to just leave them here? What if someone breaks in?"

Tasha: "Breaks into a mailbox...and steals our save-the-dates. Really??"

Me: "It's starting to rain. Are mailboxes waterproof?! What if they get ruined???"
Tasha: "Let's go home." She took me by the hand and dragged me back to our apartment, stopping to buy me a Twix ice cream bar on the way. Yep, she's that good.

Save-The-Dates: check!