Category Archives: Eco Wedding

Eco Wedding, invitations, Thrifty Wedding

Invitations: Check

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When we decided to do e-vites I mourned the loss of pretty paper, the loss of receiving snail mail RSVP’s, and the loss of dwelling on tiny details like ribbons and stamps. To be honest, the period of mourning lasted for a long time. To be really honest, it only finally ended yesterday when we sent out our slightly tardy invitations. I just simply cannot be sad about the above losses when I see our final product. It makes me so happy.

So without futher ado I present you with the Veggie Wedding Invitation Video. Thus far, it is the crowning achievement of our brief cinematic career:

And of course our Paperless Post invitations:

I really wanted to embed the video on the actual invitation that people received in their in-box, but wasn’t able to find a company who could do that (definite business opportunity for some techno-savvy person out there). So we ended up embedding the video on the front page of our wedding website. Not ideal, but since people will need to go to the website to figure out their accommodations and to get directions, we figure everyone will see it at some point.

I am so happy with the way the video and e-vites turned out. I just couldn’t contain myself. The first thing I did when I got to the US (after sleeping for approximatel 13 hours) was iron out the final few details with our venue so that I could confidently send these puppies out. And guess what? Only 15 minutes after we sent out our invitations we got our first RSVP. One day later we’ve received 24 responses out of about 200. Oh my gosh. People are coming to our wedding. Like definitely coming. It’s all beginning to feel very real.

Eco Wedding, invitations

Paperless Post Preview

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Sorry I’ve been a bit absent on the blog front lately. T-minus six days until I fly to the U.S. for the summer of wedding-palooza and the past two weeks have been full of pre-trans-pacific events. Some of which included tying up loose ends with my job, seeing friends for the last time as a single lady, and… buying a house – if you can call a gutted 1910’s villa wth no kitchen and bathroom a house (yay!). And of course there has been heaps going on in wedding world as well. Some stressful, some fun.

One of the fun things has been the chance to test-drive Paperless Post, the medium through which we’ve decided to send our e-invitations. I wanted to play around with it and make sure it really worked before committing to it fully. I also wanted to send our moms something nice to invite them to be our officiants. Skype or email seemed to casual for such an important request, but snail mail was not an option since it would take over 2 weeks to arrive. Not sure whether the timing of it all was a factor there so much as my lack of patience.

Anyhow, I played and played for hours on the PP site and this is what I came up with for the moms.

Envelope Liner. Of course.

Front Side. Featuring the beautiful MIL Veggie and Mamma Veggie with us wee veggies.

Back Side.

Overall I was super pumped about the design I came up with. But, there were a few bumps in the design process. First is the fact that the PP site takes ages to load. Broadband hasn’t hit our part of the world yet, so I realize our connection is slower than most, but there must be a better way to run this site for faster loading. Also, despite the insane amounts of options when it comes to envelope liners, I was disappointed by the limited amount of fonts available. I love me a good font. They offer about 20 total, not nearly enough for me. But, having said that, I have come up with a creative way to usurp this font blockade for our actual wedding invitations (oooh… a cliffhanger).

I sent off the officiant invites to the two moms with high hopes and heard back from Mamma Veggie within two days. She loved it. Of course she would be our officiant. Hooray. After 3 days I still hadn’t head from MIL Veggie, so I sent her an email asking her what was up. Turns out she never received it. PP has some good systems set up for this kind of snafu, where you can track which invites were undeliverable, which ones got delivered but not opened, etc. It even resends unopened invited automatically every three days. But somehow, even though it was showing up as “delivered” it wasn’t showing up in MIL Veggie’s inbox. Lost in the mail? Not sure what was happening there.

I got another chance to preview PP a few days later when I got this in my inbox:

I was a bit overwhelmed. It was very sweet that my sisters and mom were throwing me a shower, and I felt loved just for that. But what really got me was the fact that they were trying to be as eco as possible while doing it. Not because its what they wanted, but because they knew it was what I would want. They used PP invites instead of paper, which showed huge restraint for Veggie Sis Kale who loves paper products. They also carefully worded an email to those who asked about gifts. This email was such a nice added extra touch because it showed us their appreciation and understanding of what we want our wedding to be about. In the email they wrote about our ethos as a couple, our budding non-profit, our feelings that gifts were unnecessary, and our need to transport any gifts many thousands of miles. They encouraged guests to keep those things in mind as they thought about gifts.

Which brings me to my next post. Gift registry. Or the lack there of.

décor, DIY, Eco Wedding, lighting, Thrifty Wedding

Eco-Thrifty Lamp

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When I first decided to blog about our wedding I titled my blog Eco-Thrifty Bride. Lately I’ve been despairing about why it is so hard to find products, services, and vendors that can accomplish both. Just like “wedding”; “eco”, “organic”, and “green” are words that, once mentioned, throw up a red flag that signals a substantial price increase is impending, whether it is warranted or not. These price increases stem from a classist, elitist sentiment that “eco” products are desired by and produced for the wealthy. An assumption that self-perpetuates when such products are priced at a premium, thus denying a vast segment of the population access to products and services that healthy for both people and planet.

Well let me tell you a secret hive. You don’t have to be rich to be green. You just need to be a little creative.

Case in point: lighting for our venue.

What I was after was unique and beautiful lighting option. I found Eco (at a cost of $379 NZD) and Thrifty (made of plastic and shipped many miles).

Eco v. Thrifty

And then I thought to myself. “Veggie. You have a lot of time. You know creative people. Let’s see what you can come up with”. And I gathered some amigos and got to work.

I looked at a picture of the David Truebridge design I most admired and made a template for one of the pieces. The trickiest part of this was knowing how big to make it. I guessed 16cm, about 6 inches. Why? I dont know. It just seemed to look pretty good. The next trickiest part was knowing how many to cut. We thought it looked like it was made up of two halves, each comprised of one central flower, surrounded by five other flowers. After careful deliberation we decided on 60, 12 flowers of 5 petals each.

Teresa looks happy, but really she is grinning in the sheer agony of the hand cramps that ensue after cutting 30 flower petals out of corrugated cardboard.

It was a lot of tracing and a lot of cutting. Which brings me to another point. The Truebridge lamps are made of wood, but not possessing the skills to cut wood, nor an eco-friendly supply, we chose to work with a slightly more availble and maleable material, cardboard.

Dang. That was a lot of cutting. I hope 60 was enough.

After we had cut all of our pieces, we assembled them into 12 flowers, and sat and looked at the picture again.

Juan is an engineer. Even he was confused. Mr. Veggie is laughing because we got him to say “cinco”. Don’t know why that’s funny? Ask a friend from Spain to tell you the rhyme they say when someone says “cinco”.

We persisted and eventually the globe started to take shape.

Here we are celebrating the realization that 60 was in fact enough petals, and we don’t have to cut any more. Mr. Veggie is not as excited as we were. He obviously was not involved in the cutting of the petals.

And then we were done.

Hooray! Que Guay!

Here is our final product in action:
From CFL to OMG.

I love how our prototype turned out. There are a few things that I might do differently in the next edition, but overall this project was a win! Total cost was $10 NZD for a package of brads (those gold little attachment thingies) and about 3 hours of our time. Eco thrifty success.
Eco Wedding, invitations, Save The Date, Thrifty Wedding

We’re Not Sending Invitations?!?! *gasp*

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Too dramatic? OK let’s try again.

We’re not sending invitations.

We’ve been thinking along these lines for a while. But I haven’t really discussed it with anyone fully besides Mr. Veggie. I guess I was a bit afraid of people’s reactions.

Will they be shocked at our lack of decorum?

Confused at why we would forgo such an important detail?

Disapproving of our decision?

Source

Well, Willis, this is what we’re talking about. Tough choices.

We have a strict budget, financially and ecologically. When we decided to splurge on a photographer we knew there would be other things that we would have to cut out. And, when we looked at all of the components of a wedding, invites just seemed to make the most sense to us, ecologically and financially.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting mail. I love the idea of people opening our invites all over the world and getting excited for our big day. I would love getting back RSVP cards. I love envelope liners. I love twine. I love wood block carvings. I love letterpress.
I love this set of invites:
And this one:

And this one:

And this one:

While I swooned over our Save The Dates design, I didn’t like that they arrived in the form of an attachment on an email. Where’s the fun in that? No one gets excited over receiving a mass email. Verdana font on a computer screen just can’t compete with letterpress swirls and twirls. And the second it takes you to click on an attachment hardly holds the anticipation and glee of opening an envelope.

And that’s why my heart broke a little the day I realized that paper invitations were not in our future.

But then I found Paperless Post and the skies began to clear. They have solved the excitement v. eco, pretty v. functional, paper v. e- dilemmas. When you send an invitation through them they send a personalized envelope to each recipient’s email, which they can click on to “open” the invitation. The invitation they open is created by you using one of PP’s gorgeous templates, which are designed to look like letterpress. They can click on the invitation to RSVP. Genius.

And then I saw this video… and I swear I heard a choir of angels.

I began to realize that there are some advantages that e-invites have over their paper counterparts. Not only could we do a rad video, but depending on what company we use, we can also link directly to our website and registry, manage our RSVP’s, link to a mapquest or google map, and even allow people to add our wedding as an event to their blackberries.

So what I’m imagining now is a Paperless Post-type e-invite where the email guests receive will have a personalized envelope. But instead of opening up to a beautiful one-page invite, it will open to a multiple page invite. The first page will contain our video, the second will look like a traditional invite, and the third will link to our wedding website where guests can RSVP, check out maps, registries, etc.

Ok bees, so here’s my question to you. How do I make this happen? Paperless Post says that their system is only set up to do one-page invites. Any ideas?

Bridesmaids, Colors, Eco Wedding, Family

Dressing the Ladies

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Part of having a low eco-footprint wedding was figuring out what to do about dresses for our four bridesmaids, groomsmaid, and three moms of honor.

Here is the ideal situation as it played out in my head:
I send out an email inviting all of the veggie sisters to be bridesmaids. I send them a brief email explaining the concept of mismatched bridesmaids dresses. They talk amongst themselves, the groomsmaid, and the veggie moms and discover that all of them already own dresses made from eco-friendly materials and purchased from companies that support fair trade practices. And what luck! These dresses happen to be in colors that don’t clash with each other and fall within our wedding color scheme. On our big day they pull said dresses out of their closets. They look gorgeous. Since the dresses are already a part of their clothing artillery, they are used many more times and loved thoroughly.

Reality Check:
I email the veggie sisters giving a less-than-clear idea of what I am looking for. They talk amongst themselves and finally tell my mom that they have no idea what I want. We go back and forth. I make several inspiration boards that include yellow and brown mismatching dresses. After several email and phone conversations my sisters remind me that we are all very pale, and my idea of yellow and brown dresses eventually morphs into earthtones, and then into taupe/grey. Oldest Veggie Sis Kale decides that I am entirely too laid back about the whole affair, takes charge, makes a powerpoint with dress options, and gives the girls a kick in the butt. They all (including the veggie moms) run to their nearest mall or favorite online store and purchase new dresses.

To be fair, they all had a hearty dig through their closets before heading out to purchase something new, and have all assured me that they will definitely reuse the dresses they bought. So far, this is how it stands with one mom, one groomsmaid, and one veggie sis still yet to purchase their dresses.

Bridesmaids:Sources: Veggie Sis Eggplant: J. Crew, Veggie Sis Kale: Calypso, Veggie Sis Tomato: Anthropologie

Moms of Honor:

Sources: FMIL Veggie: Nordstrom’s, Momma Veggie: Lord and Taylor

I don’t feel great about the eco impact of this part of our wedding, but I am happy with their choices and am glad that they’ve all found dresses that they will use again. What do you think? What direction should I steer my last three ladies in to pull the look together?

Eco Wedding, the dress

Dress Dilemma: Over

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I bought a dress today. (Insert girly shriek here. OK- I’m done now. No I’m not. eeeee!).

The story starts in December:
After drawing out the dress saga for many months I turned to the wedding bee for help. I had settled on buying used and even had an idea of the specific dress I was looking for. After dwelling on the Nicole Miller HG0013 for a few weeks I found the IK0004 online and just kept coming back to it. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It’s just so pretty without being too formal, and comes pre-wrinkled! I looked online at the pre-owned websites, but even a used IK0004 was well out of our budget. It also seemed to be a pretty in-demand dress, only a few out there and many brides wanting it. I thought I’d throw it out there to the hive to see if anyone had any ideas.

So, my pre-bee self posted a question to the boards. “Anyone have a used IK0004?”. I didn’t have high hopes.

But a few days later, this:

After a few emails it turns out that she had gotten the dress from another bee (who also maybe got it used?). Wait pre-pre-used? That’s even better than pre-used. And since this dress is in it’s third (or is it fourth) generation as a gown, she offered it to me for a great deal. A hmm..-I-can-actually-afford-this-dress-now deal. Yes, yes, yes.

All I had to do was wait until she got married at the end of February.

Fast Forward to March 1:She said she was getting married at the end of February, would it be too early to email her? I better wait a bit.

March 2:
Um, hi. Is my dress (I mean your dress), ready yet? Oh it is? Hooray! Oh you have pictures from your wedding? Do share!

Without further ado, OUR dress, as worn by the beautiful Adriana in her February wedding. It was shipped out last Thursday and is making its way across the Pacific as we speak. I suspect it could be here as early as Monday. (eeeeek!)

OK, enough of the girliness, lets get down to business. Because, for me, more important than getting a specific dress, was getting an ethical dress with a small eco footprint. So how does mine stack up?

– Sweatshop free? Yes. Nicole Miller is an advocate of fair labor practices.
– Eco-fabric? No. Metal taffeta does not sound even remotely eco, but I feel better because…
-Re-used? Yes. In at least 2 other weddings. Hooray!
-Low price? Eh. Low for a designer wedding dress, yes. But still way more money than I’ve ever spent on a single piece of clothing before. But the price is within our budget, and is a number I feel comfortable with. Plus, since the dress is in demand, I think I’ll be able to resell it and pass it onto yet another bride (Assuming I don’t spill red wine down the front ).

Eco Wedding, the dress

Dress Dilemma- Chapter Three: New Zealand (Again)

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When we last left off I had gotten over my painful breakup with Adele Wechsler by trying on some pretties by Nicole Miller. But I still wasn’t sure that a brand new dress was right for me.

A few weeks later, after visiting several bridal shops in the U.S., I went back home to New Zealand empty handed with a picture of Nicole Miller HG0013 firmly positioned on the desktop of my computer and a better idea of what I was looking for in a dress. I had bookmarked the websites of a few used-dress websites and checked them daily, ok, more like hourly to see what was on offer. Turns out there were more used dress options than I knew existed. They were gorgeous, reasonably priced, and reused. I was sold. This was definitely the route I was going to take.

But then, one day while killing a few hours in Hamilton waiting for Mr. Veggie something caught my eye. How could I have not seen this store before? It’s only two doors down from the Salvation Army (a must-visit whenever I’m in the big city). And look at this pretty little number. Pay no attention to my angry looking face or body language, I was actually very happy. Note to self: no hands on hips on the big day.

Yeah, I know its blue. Just ignore that for a minute. This is the Didion Rose dress made by Annah Stretton. She is a Kiwi designer that uses kiwi fabrics.

My thought line here is this: buying kiwi-made supports our local economy. It also saves me from having to ship an American bought dress over to NZ for alterations, thus lowering the carbon footprint of the dress. And, although it is a fairly expensive dress, it is still under $1000 kiwi, which with the exchange rate comes in way under the price of any American dress I found.

But local doesn’t necessarily mean eco. And, this is still a new dress that would be made for me for just one day.

So I did what any sensible girl would do. I went to try it on three more times with various girlfriends. The third time they had the ivory color in stock, so I took some more pictures (with a cell phone, sorry), so I could truly deliberate.

In the end I decided that I liked it, but didn’t love it. The shape wasn’t the most flattering (hello hips). Neither the eco footprint or the pricetag were low enough to justify me buying a brand new dress. Goodbye Annah Stretton. You really are fabulous. Maybe we’ll meet again some day.

By this point the dress hunt was making my brain hurt. Local or not? Eco fabrics or conventional? Used or new? What size, what style, what color? Sanity gone. I need a break from all this dressing.

Was your dress hunt stressful? Please tell me I’m not the only one. What were you most worried about? Any thoughts on how I should proceed?

Eco Wedding, the dress

Dress Dilemma – Chapter Two: New Jersey

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When I last left off I was sitting in a puddle of my own drool admiring the Adele Wechsler EcoCouture collections. Well, reality check time. Those gorgeous frocks are way out of my price league. I mean way out. Like half of our total budget out.

We run a non-profit organization and have dedicated our lives to living simply. While financially it would be possible for me to get one of those dresses with a ton of scrimping and saving, I just cannot justify spending that much money on a dress I will wear for one day. I understand that some brides work really hard to find ways to buy their dream dress, and I appreciate that, but that’s just not me. Honestly, (please don’t kick me out of the bride club), its not that important to me. When I walk down the aisle I want to be feeling my absolute best, which means knowing that I am wearing an ethical dress from an ecological standpoint, but also a social one. Spending thousands on a dress is not a responsible decision for me to make right now.

Having said that…. I want to look pretty on my big day! Small tantrum over. I promise.

Fast forward a few weeks and I was home in the U.S. visiting with Veggie Sis K (for Kale?). (There are 4 Veggie Sisters, E-Eggplant, T-Tomato, and C-Carrot, will also make appearances). Sis Kale got married in 2005 and still had a surprisingly large stash of bridal magazines. Knowing that I wouldn’t buy these for myself, she had them waiting for me upon my arrival. I promptly dug in.

Wait. What’s this beauty?Source

It looks so airy and light. Elegant without being stuffy.

Me: Who makes this?
Veggie Sis Kale: Nicole Miller.
Me: Isn’t she the one who does those funny fabrics with prints of sunglasses and wine bottles?
Veggie Sis Kale: Umm… yeah, in 1992. Welcome back to the world of fashion.

A few weeks later Mamma Veggie, Veggie Sis Kale, and Veggie Sis Eggplant brought me to the Nicole Miller Boutique for our bridal appointment. The consultant was fantastic, if a little confused by my wedding-day wishlist. I surely didn’t help the matter by being a bridal dunce. I wore the wrong undies, the wrong bra, and didn’t know anything about what I was looking for. Luckily Veggie Sis Kale took control of the situation. I ended up finding a few Nicole Miller dresses that I liked, although my top choice was still the HG0013. Could it be the one?

I went home and did some research. (Pro) The price was better, (Con) but at retail value, still a lot. (Pro) Nicole Miller is sweat-shop free and made in the USA, they also support animal rights. (Con) The dress is made out of metal-tafetta, surely not an eco-fabric. (Con) It is still a brand new dress made just for me for one night.

Best to sit and think on it a bit more.

Eco Wedding, the dress

Dress Dilemma – Chapter One: New Zealand

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I’ve talked about Mr. Veggie’s outfit, the veggie dudes, and the bridesmaids. I’ve posted about the veggie sprouts. But, I haven’t talked much yet about my dress. Maybe I’ve been avoiding the subject because it is steeped in inner conflict. Let me set the scene.

A well-intentioned me sits at my computer surfing the web for wedding ideas. On one of my shoulders (shall we say the left shoulder) sits a beautiful eco angel. She whispers encouraging words in my ear and fills my head with lovely wedding-day dreams. A petroleum-covered slug sits on the other. The eco angel is winning the battle. She is armed with our electronic save-the-dates, our local and organic inspired menu, and our beautiful travel-minimizing venue. But the petro-slug isn’t done yet. He has an armament too. What card could he possibly hold that might pull me out of my eco wedding bliss?

He has Lazaro LZ3700.

And LianCarlo 2891.

Oh and Sposo Di Gio (style #?).

Oooh. Pretty. So very, very pretty.

But eco angel, you have your own armament of eco-friendly wedding dresses, right? Please tell me you do.

Hmm..

Uh-huh.

Note to designers: not all hippies want fairies and toadstools on their wedding gowns. Some do, but I don’t. And, not all eco brides want to turn their wedding into the rennessaince festival. And furthermore, I appreciate that many eco-friendly brides are going for a casual look. And, usually I would be right there with them. But this is my one and only day to leave the Birkenstocks behind and feel all glammed up. And I want to go for it. Isn’t there any designer who understands that eco doesn’t have to mean hippie-casual? Is there any eco designer who has braved the elegant couture bridal scene? Can I have eco and elegant?

Yes. Says Adele Wechsler.
The Sunray.

The Haze.

The Magnolia.

Swoon. Let me try one of those puppies on. Stat.
Oh yeah, we live in New Zealand. No such luck.

Eco Wedding, Save The Date, Thrifty Wedding

E-STD’s

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Things to be aware of when sending out electronic save the dates:

1) If the file name attached to your email includes “STD”, non-wedding-savvy folks on the guest list may be a bit hesitant to open it. And you will be the butt of many family jokes.

2) Yahoo will actually freeze your account for a few hours if you try to send an email to too many people (apparently 300 is too many).

We hemmmed and hawed about sending e-STD’s, but in the end it fit with the overall feel of our wedding. No frills, budget-friendly, and most important, a low environmental footprint.

Our STD’s were designed by our good friend Shari Amos, a graphic designer who does wedding invites (lucky us!). I am in love with them. I couldn’t fall asleep last night because the 18hr time difference meant that people might open our email as early as 1am our time. I might even sacrafice a small tree and print a few up as keepsakes… that’s how much I love them.