As I mentioned in the first post of this series, my chief goal in wedding planning was to get the best deal. Bargain hunting is an art, not a science; in our interdisciplinary household, it is a task that falls to me. The expert bargain hunter, like an English grad student, knows that ideality is a moving target: finding the Platonic Deal* involves continually renegotiating the relative values of cost, quality, time, and ease. While planning my wedding, I completely and utterly failed at taking the last criterion into account. Sure, I saved the approximate price of a year at a private college (or, to put it in a more depressing light, the medical emergency that immediately followed my marriage), but not without spending freely from my rapidly diminishing stores of health and sanity.
Was saving $60 worth the misery of, say, dragging myself to the copy shop in downtown Berkeley, braving crowds of Francophilic hipsters who mistook their cigarettes for Carla Bruni’s lips, when smoke made me feel like I had been huffing sea urchins? Probably not.
Other projects were definitely worth the time and effort. For the benefit of other thrifty wedding planners, I will determine each project’s worth the same way society determines yours: by determining its hourly wage. Note, if it even needs saying: results not scientific.
Make Your Own Veil
Price: $6-$10 (versus $100+)
Hours spent: 20
Hours I should have spent: 2
My wage: $8.25/hour
Your wage: $50+/hour
Really, how hard could it be to make a tutu for your head?
Not very, if you follow the advice here or here.
Very, if you, like me, see a $175 veil in a bridal shop, think “If I make that one instead of the $100 one, it’s like I’m saving an extra $75,” and determine to make a double cascade veil with an intricate beaded edge (once you let wedding terminology worm its way into your skull, it can never be unlearned). Making such a veil involves taping tulle to the kitchen wall, holding the measuring tape with your foot and a charcoal pencil with your teeth, and cutting at the wrong angle so that you have to start all over again. It also involves counting all the tiny hexagons from which tulle is formed, five at a time, until you inevitably make a mistake and have to undo an hour’s worth of beading.
Yes, the beading matched the beading on my dress. No, no one noticed.
Verdict: Yes, make your own veil. No, don’t make mine.
Make Your Own Bouquet and Flower Arrangements
Price: $100 (versus $1000+)
Hours Spent: 5 (it would have been more had I not noticed that the flowers my mom was randomly stuffing into vases looked just as good as the ones I was artfully arranging)
Wage: $180/hr
This is most definitely worth the savings. You don’t even have to be particularly artistic if you just buy large bunches of the same kind of flower. Who’s going to notice? Actually, one of my photographically inclined friends captured an aunt giving my bouquet the side-eye, but that picture is amusing enough to count as a benefit rather than a drawback.
I got my flowers at the San Francisco Flower Mart, which I highly recommend. It’s very San Francisco. By that I mean that I got about $25 worth of free flowers because a vendor liked my unkempt toenails. His explanation? “A real lady doesn’t paint her nails, just as a real pianist doesn’t keep books on his piano.”
Verdict: Yes, buy your own flowers. Bonus points if you wear open-toed shoes.
Buy Your Dress Off the Rack
Price: $250 + $80 in alterations (versus your life savings)
Hours Spent: 8
Wage: Hard to determine
This doesn’t work for everyone; you have to be within range of at least one store’s sample size. I say “within range” because I ended up buying a dress that was four sizes too large. To compensate, my mom pulled the laces so tight that I would have fit right in at the court of the Sun King. Sure, by the end of the wedding the laces had loosened, giving me the cloth-to-bosom ratio of a cast member on Jersey Shore, but by then, our wiffle ball reception had already smashed the metaphorical car window of decorum to smithereens.
Conceivably, dress hunting could have taken an hour or two; the extra time was wasted being wishy-washy. The wedding industry, which temporarily abducts the recently engaged and subjects them to extra-terrestrial mind control tactics,† had drilled too many questions into me. How would the dress photograph? How would it look on the mantel? What would my inevitable offspring think? You can avoid similar delays by realizing that any dress you choose will look dated in ten years but charming after twenty. Unless you got married in the 80s. Then you’re out of luck.
Verdict: Possibly worth it.
*I don’t mean a deal that doesn’t have sex, but what I do mean has been debated by fellow humanists for centuries.
†They obtained knowledge of these tactics by offering aliens free engagement shoots. “I’m soooo excited to share photos from Zork and Pwxv4sh’s beautiful session at the Japanese Tea Garden!”
The love between Zork and Pwxv4sh was amazing to witness. Working with them was an absolute delight!
