thorfinn

...

I'm not sleepy yet, so I'm going to post random stuff about the wedding, in mostly chronological order.

Outfits

Most of my outfit was from Anton's Melbourne, barring the hat, a wonderful present from frou_frou. seedy_girl's jacket was also from Anton's. Her corset was from Natalya Zwitsa. Vintage skirt pattern by Vogue (actually the lower half of a dress pattern), and beautifully recommended and made by Anne of Ripping Yarns (herself recommended by frou_frou. Fabric from Anton's for the brocade and my suit material, the rest of it all from Bloom's. Jewelry all by seedy_girl herself, including the hairpiece.

Checkin

Checkin at The Hotel Windsor around 15:00 on Friday... By myself, seedy_girl having headed off to acquire a manicure along with Sarah (the Matron of Honour). Wrote vows, ran off to print some documents, including my laminated card with my vows on it. Yes, paula_angela, next time, at least 16pt, not the default 10pt produced by TextEdit. I was in a rush. :-) Meet up with seedy_girl and Sarah, chase around last minute acquiring final necessary items (including the tray for the tea ceremony: AUD30, Bamboo tray by Avanti, purchased at House, and the bag for the bindings from Spellbox, of course, after my hindbrain prompted me to get us to walk through the Block Arcade).

Three Gorges

Then straight up to the pre wedding dinner for people involved in wedding organisation was at Three Gorges at 18:30 - great Chinese restaurant on Exhibition St. People there kirmish (both of them), mordwen, Sarah, crystal_storm. steam_punk was working, poor boy, and raven_ didn't get the notification early enough to be able to make it. there to meet each other before the day, and to run through the plan after dinner and subsequently at the hotel, to ensure that it was going to work, nail down final details that hadn't been worked out yet, etc. Caught glimpses of kirmish (K part) generating a scary looking checklist on an A4 sheet for the day.

The Windsor Hotel - Friday night, Saturday Morning

Dropped back in there for final chats with the group and plan working-out. sjkasabi dropped in before she and mordwen went off somewhere dancing... seedy_girl got an early-ish night around 23:00 after fiddling with jewelry and other stuff. I stayed up to about 01:00 fiddling with playlists, burning music to audio and data CDs in case of computer issues, working out instructions for the playlists and when to fit them into the running plan for the reception, emailing them off, burning to another data CD, etc.

Breakfast that morning was lovely... Sausages and poached eggs for me, fruit bowl for seedy_girl. Sarah arrived as we were finishing off coffee, in time to sit around and chat for a few minutes before we headed off to do the legal bit.

Registry Office - Old Treasury Building

Quickie 5 minute ceremony at 10:30 in the Registry Office. Much kudos to the celebrant there for understanding and happily proceeding with the ultra short form ceremony. We signed, our mothers witnessed the certificate, our fathers (and my father's partner) sat looking on proudly, my grandmother smiled lots, Sarah (the mat frou_frou and drzero also attended this bit, as they could not attend the afternoon ceremony, and looked fabulous as representatives of our friends.

I didn't expect to be much affected by this bit... but this was the start of a fairly serious wave of emotional high that didn't stop all day. Standing back from the group, pointing at seedy_girl and whispering "That's my wife!" in amazed tones for the first time... Kept doing that all day. Still doing it. :-)

Windsor Hotel - Saturday midday plus-minus some

Back to the hotel with the group from the Registry Office, mainly to show off the room, then booting them all out when Concierge Desk rang to let us know that Kelly (our hair artist) had arrived.

Kelly arrived as everyone was leaving, blinked at the large crowd, looked relieved when we told her they were all leaving. :-) Sue (makeup artist) arrived shortly after. SMS exchanges with mordwen, who assured me she was on the tram and had the rings, and true enough, she arrived shortly thereafter. Various hair and makeup doings ensued. The photographer, from Simply Stunning, Trish arrived (beautiful herself at 5 months pregnant) to capture some of the final getting ready stages, and there was amazed commentary from both Sue and Kelly as various outfits got put on and they really fully understood what we were aiming for in look and style. One of the constant refrains through this whole production has come from the various wedding industry professionals, who have all said that it's very nice to see people doing things their own way... That's very pleasing to hear. :-)

raven_ arrived to pick us up with Quoth, her beautifully washed and buffed up black vintage valiant with red interior. Wandered out to climb into the car, but were interrupted by Concierge staff telling us to come back inside whilst they rolled out the red carpet. :-) Carpet was rolled out, we strolled out slowly, to an ogling public. Climbed into the car and drove off.

Fairfield Amphitheatre

Climb out of Quoth, a few shots of that, a few shots of heading down to the amphitheatre... More ogling public... Approaching the amphitheatre and hearing strains of choral music drift up and out... I felt pretty awed. I think the clouds went away sometime around there, but I think I didn't really notice at the time, being too caught up in staring at seedy_girl in a kind of hazy glowy oh my what ooer wow way. Stopped at the top, caught the visual of the crowd and the setup in the Amphitheatre... and, well, I was impressed, and the phrase "looks like a movie shot" popped into my head briefly, then flitted away as I looked over at seedy_girl at the top of her stairway.

The rest of the ceremony was amazing and crystal_storm's words at the start blew us away (we hadn't heard them before). Yes, we snuck the rings on whilst everyone's eyes were closed (well, almost everyone - I'm told there were some peekers) at the end of the ceremony.

One big group shot from Trish, then the congratulations-mobbing we had been warned about ensued. Organised shots with relatives done. Various impromptu 1930's ganster photographs with friends occurred, and Trish then took over, with mordwen and Sarah along to be photographed as well and provide advice, immoral support and moral support. Trish kept telling us to get into various poses, and we'd oblige, snuggling up appropriately and slow-mo canoodling, resulting in various exclamations from Trish of "hey, no kissing yet", and "hrm, you guys have done this before!" seedy_girl's theory is that we've got a lot of exposure to Cheesecake and other fetish porn, so we really know how to pose it up from that. My theory is that we're both performance trained. My second theory is that we're both goths. My third theory is that it's all of the above.

Final shots in one of the boats, feeding each other scones (wonderfully delivered just as we were getting peckish by kirmish (H. part)), then off we went in raven_'s car again to the Centre Ivanhoe.

The Centre Ivanhoe

Get to the centre, send off mordwen and Sarah to join the party. Sneak into the reception briefly to get "mock cake cutting" shots with Trish, then sneak back out to get other shots in and around the Centre itself. Wave goodbye to Trish, thank her immensely for a great afternoon.

Sneak upstairs into the private bridal room, rest our feet, wolf down some canapes, get some coffee, get some rest. Come back downstairs and bounce through the couple intro and cake cutting. I intended for us to sit down for a lot of this bit... no such chance. We spent the whole night wandering around talking to a zillion people. Ate a bit, drank a bit, talked a vast amount... kirmish (K. part) was awesome in her powers of keeping us reassured and cool and dealing with the Centre staff and cueing steam_punk to make announcements at the right points, making sure she had all the information she needed to run the show, and making sure we knew that was all under control. All we had to do was wander around, and be told what we were doing when.

So, events. Tea Ceremony. To explain a little, the point of that ceremony is a welcoming into each other's families. The couple pours tea for their elders, in order of seniority, who then return welcome and gift (in the form of red packets), aided by their "Lucky Women". In our case, we had arranged dancingnat to make the tea for us, as (a) the person in community who is crazy about tea the way I'm crazy about coffee, (b) an anthropology nutcase who presumably would enjoy participating in a cultural ritual. Our respective sisters as our other "lucky women", aided us by carrying the tea tray from the table to us and holding it whilst we poured.

Speeches. Awesome speeches from both our fathers, Sarah, and mordwen. I was nearly brought to tears several times (and yes, my father is ex-Malaysian Navy, so wind and sails metaphor from him was very cool). I'm very thankful that seedy_girl has a mind of cogs, because I think my switches and dials were all on overload. I'd just like to repeat... "Ain't she great?" Anyway. :-) I have no idea why we thought we should extemporise our response to speeches, but ah well. I think it worked out fine anyway.

Main courses, mostly-not dancing half... Spent this time running around chatting to a lot of people, avoiding questions about when the couple dance was going to be, and being nervous about actually trying to remember the moves themselves. tyggerjai and nikkicat13 snuck in an awesome display of ballroom dancing somewhere in there, which was pretty cool. Glad it was ballroom, not swing! *grin*

The Wedding Swing dance (specifically, the 8 beat lindy hop). Well. We've been doing Swing dancing classes on Thursdays at CBD with Swing Patrol once a week for about two months. We've had 3 private lessons with John Tenaglia, and one with Shob... and that's it. There was no fixed routine - we had the basic 8 beat sequences down pat, and a small set of "cool moves" to insert at semi-random points, as one would in "social dancing", and a small finisher routine to end the whole sequence. Scary, but fun. Technical execution from me was, well, less than perfect on the footwork due to tiredness and insufficient muscle memory, but as is true always, the crowd is watching the girl, not the boy. :-) seedy_girl was brilliant, I mostly managed to give reasonably clear leads, the crowd loved it and that's what counts. Anyway, I highly recommend Swing Patrol... They're great, and we'll certainly be continuing to do stuff with them!

Main courses, dancing half. Much more relaxed after the dance was over... Managed to get in some random dancing myself (although I really must do something about my tendency to do the 40s Charleston to everything), and spent the rest of the night catching up with people I hadn't yet managed to catch up with. I'm sure I didn't get everyone, but I think I got to a pretty high proportion.

This is a list of all the music that was on the original playlists for the reception... I'm pretty sure Benno threw in some extra tracks and fiddled with the order quite a large amount, to make it play well without any crazy transitions. Great job on the night from him, fiddling with the tech. Sound gear (mixer and speakers) provided by Carlos of Monaco Sound. And no, he was Hispanic, I'm pretty sure, so I don't think he was "fully sick mate". I think his boss, Mario, was definitely "fully sick mate" though.

( ...playlist behind cut for length... )

Avenue of Honour of waving arms, hat being dropped back on my head as I passed the_tao Exit, on cue... sort-of. We actually exited upstairs to the bridal room, where we proceeded to collapse into chairs and deconstruct the day between us, whilst eating a cheese and fruit platter rustled up for us by the Centre staff, when it became apparent that our taxi was taking a long time because someone (presumably from the other functions) had nicked our cab. In a way, it was actually good - we had a chance to talk over the day whilst sitting there, whereas if we'd gone straight back to the hotel, we'd just have fallen asleep.

Windsor Hotel - Saturday night, Sunday Morning

Fell into bed, slept. This is, judging by comments both before and after the event, the usual order of proceedings. Both woke up around 10:00... rushed around madly packing stuff up, ordered coffee, and rushed off for post wedding yum-cha with the family members that hadn't rushed off to catch planes and suchlike, plus a few extras. We wanted more people there than just family, but in the final mad rushes to organise stuff, I think we just didn't find time to invite many people apart from relatives.

Yum Cha - Sunday

Yum Cha was at Shark Fin House - 165 Little Bourke Street. Near to Russell Street. Best Yum Cha in Melbourne, IMO. Was good, and spent more time catching up with relatives that I hadn't had a chance to catch up with yet.

kirmish's place

Post yum-cha, we stopped off at kirmish's place for a bit of tea before heading home to crash out.

Home

Have spent the afternoon at home pottering around, relaxing, having dinner, poking around LJ, and now am in bed making this post... Going to sleep after this, and we head off for our few days honeymoon in the Dandenongs at the Japanese Mountain Retreat tomorrow.

Thanks...

Thanks to everyone, really. Everyone who helped, everyone who came, everyone who's commented, just everyone. Could not have done it without you all - you're our community. We really wish we could have had more of you at the reception. Thank you all again.