Less than glamorous DIY

So we all think of DIY as an affordable and easy way to make something unique or personal for your wedding. We have an idea, gather supplies and then poof, magically those supplies turn into something adorable all in one post!

Well, not always. Sometimes there is a very ugly side to DIY Wedding Projects... and I call that ugly side Mondays at Mom's. For the time being, I have Mondays off, and I've been spending a number of those Mondays at my Mom's house working on the wedding projects that kinda suck. Mostly, the dishes.

Ah yes, my grand idea to have mis-matched blue and white dishes. I had seen it on some blogs and in a few magazines, but it was always in CA, where vendors are endless and they always have a ton of options available. Or at a wedding with only 50 guests - where between the MIL, Mom, Grammas, etc. you had enough place settings to not spend any money at all.

Well isn't that nice for them? My rental place in Maine did not have mismatched dishes... they didn't have any blue dishes come to think of it, and that is what I wanted. So I decided that I could go out and buy different blue and white dishes from tag sales and places like goodwill for around the same price I could rent the boring white china. That was April of 2010. By December, 2010 I had amassed the entire collection: enough for 120 place settings including dinner plate, salad plate, tea cup and saucer, and soup bowl. Not too shabby! Actually, it was a lot of fun and I would highly recommend it if you like to be on the hunt for things.

But then, the fun disappeared. And the beginning of the end started with me lugging all of those dishes to my Mom's house... down a flight of stairs from the attic, another flight to our main floor, 3 steps off the deck, across the 2 inch sheet of ice that was on my driveway in January (and February, and March) 15 miles to Columbia, across my Mom's sheet of ice and down another flight of stairs into her basement.

Then, because I am apparently a control freak, we went about matching each bowl to each plate to each dinner plate. And when all 120 were matched up nicely, we matched them up in sets of 8 so that they made sense on a table together... God, we are picky. As we successfully made one set of 8 after another, we labeled each setting so that the caterer would know exactly what dishes went together.

That process probably took us 3 days on it's own. But then we started doing some of the real ugly work: washing the dishes, sewing fabric "folders" so that they would stay clean and safe in their 7-8 month journey from my Mom's basement to the tables in Maine. I'm very fortunate that my Mom has been extremely helpful in this process. She has made a ridiculous amount of the fabric folders, washed the dishes and packaged them up in our white rubbermaids. AND - she has been planning my bridal shower. She's a 5-star Mom, I'll tell you that.

It's an ugly process, there's no doubt about that. But hopefully, the end results will have been well worth the effort.