Last summer, we met the fabulous Jorge Perez at the Wedgwood blogger event, and I fell in love, immediately. He’s bubbly and vivacious and funny and stylish, with a cuban spunk and a contagious passion for entertaining… he is a total force to be reckoned with when touting the virtues of the quality and history behind the china and crystal for which Wedgwood, Waterford and Royal Doulton are known.
See the cheese and crackers down there? (mmm, cheese and crackers…..) He put them in a butter dish and it’s cover. Bonus use!
Before hearing his presentation, I was definitely had an Armisen-doing-Joy-Behar-on-The-View type of perspective on china and crystal. You know….
I had dismissed it was old-fashioned and didn’t know much about it… but by the end of the day, Jorge had me fully converted and wishing we had known this before we registered. My favorite part of his presentation displayed all sorts of outside-the-box, alternative uses for their pieces, and I thought, as outside-the-box, creative brides… you all would love it too. So I begged him for a video to share, and he hooked me up!
At around the 3:13 part he gets to the multi-purpose goodness, but check out all of his tips on entertaining and learn a thing or two about fine bone china and crystal while you’re at it! And mostly, enjoy Jorge’s fabulousness.
Oh, he also designed a line of simply stunning wedding gowns, which you can find in stores all over the US: Jorge Perez de la Habana. Gorgeous stuff.
How many of you are including fine bone china and crystal in your registry? Do you have any unique uses for your entertaining gear?
Here’s something no one tells you about getting engaged: your engagement is a period of several months where you cannot, in good conscience, buy any home goods for yourself.
You’ve got this gift registry, and after much suffering you’ve put on that list every single small kitchen appliance and home linen and handheld power tool you can possibly imagine—and some you can’t. ["What is a garlic wheel?" "$10.99." "Add it!"] You’ve theoretically got this whole bounty of home goods coming to you. So buying anything you could register for before the wedding feels self-defeating.
And there’s the small(ish?) matter of all the money you’ve set aside for the wedding—it tends to leave the “new vacuum” fund a little shrunken.
If I were an optimist, I’d talk about how your engagement is a wonderful time for your home goods to break because replacements are on their way in the form of wedding presents. But I am a big old grump, so when our vacuum started to suck in the wrong sense of the word, I thought, “Well now what am I supposed to do until my wedding? Haul our living room rug out to the front porch and beat the cat hair off with a wooden stick?” Puh-lease.
And then there are the things you don’t even remotely need, but want, NOW. Collin decided he couldn’t wait until July for a pasta machine. I lamented losing an item from our registry, but got over it the first time he made fresh lasagna noodles (YUM!). But when he started to buy pasta-making accessories that I’d put on the registry, I had to draw the line. “If my Aunt Kathy can’t buy us a gnocchi board she might not come to the wedding in protest!” “Robin, you’re being irrational.” “I’M being irrational!? You bought a pasta machine six months before our wedding! That’s like if I had bought myself a diamond ring a week before you proposed!”
In the wake of the Pasta Machine Incident, Collin got on board with the Stuff Freeze. Sort of. The compromise we’ve worked out is to patch up what we can (buying a new filter for our vacuum cleaner to give it a few months more “effectiveness”) and to buy cheap temporary place-holders for the new stuff we can’t wait for. Like when we got tired of bickering over Collin’s running clothes getting mixed in with my dry-clean-only sweaters, we ordered me a separate laundry basket, a little plastic number that ran us less than $3. When it arrived we found out it was comically small, but it will hold (a tiny amount of laundry) until July. And we can leave our luxurious $30 hampers on the registry. Everyone wins!
So an unexpected side-effect of the Engagement Period Stuff Freeze is that it is good training for broke-ass living, even when there isn’t a wedding in the picture. Isn’t it ironic that expecting dozens of gifts is helping cure us of our irrepressible American consumerism? At least Morrisette-onic?
Have you suffered from the frustrations of the Stuff Freeze since getting engaged? Do you have any other strategies for hanging in there until that glorious day when UPS shows up on your doorstep with a stand mixer? Is this the easiest problem that comes about from planning a wedding?
Admit it: limiting your wedding registry to one big store is just that… limiting. Well now you can put any item from any store into one convenient registry, thanks to SimpleRegistry! AND – in the event that you should end up with the dreaded double-toaster conundrum, you can redeem that redundant toaster (or ANY gift) as cash…. without having to ask for cash. SWEET ACTION for the broke-ass bride! Will you be using an online registry?
This week, Collin and I finally tackled a wedding task we’ve been putting off: creating a wedding gift registry.
Why do we dread the registry? Who doesn’t love presents? Shouldn’t a broke-ass couple be even more excited to get a bunch of free stuff?
Maybe for some lucky folks, but we’ve been finding our broke-ass lifestyle complicates registering for gifts in several ways:
[the HitchDied dish cabinet]
“We already have that.”
Like many engaged couples, Collin and I live in sin. We already have a kitchen filled with all of those kitcheny things that populate the traditional wedding registry. Things we had to budget for, and spend money on. Things it feels incredibly wasteful to throw away just because the world tells us that people getting married need things made out of glass and china. But relenting to the demands of wedding culture, preparing to donate what we have to Goodwill and using the wedding registry an opportunity to upgrayedd our home goods.
But even though upgrayedd is fun to say (we like to stretch it out with a bunch of a’s. “Upgraaaaaaaaayedd!“) it doesn’t solve all our wedding registry angst. Because it is hard to ask your wedding guests to buy you something you wouldn’t buy for yourself because it is too expensive. I mean, sure, I want chef’s knife that can actually chop through an onion without sawing, but I’ve been sawing with our cheap cutlery for years and it hasn’t bothered me enough to buy a new knife, even a reasonably-priced one, so where do I get off putting a $300 knife block on my registry? I try to make myself feel better by noting there single knives that cost $500 on Amazon.com, but if all your friends are jumping off a bridge, should you jump off a roof?
You know what’s great about having inexpensive stuff? It’s ok to destroy it. It’s ok to use your $6 kitchen shears on paper when you can’t find regular ones and had to be at that birthday party twenty minutes ago. $60 kitchen shears need to be treated with respect. But years of broke-ass living have ingrained impetuous, just-get-it-done treatment of my inexpensive things. Can I be grown up enough to take care of these pricey gifts? Do I really want those Reidel wine glasses when I see a set of six as a half-dozen future moments of frustration when I inevitably break them? Aren’t my $2-a-piece IKEA glasses good enough to drink from, with the bonus that they are easily replaced when I bust ‘em.
When you live life on a budget, you develop a habit of limiting yourself to the things you really need. Wedding registries are all about the unnecessary. Especially when you’re inviting 200 guests to your wedding. It’s hard to come up with 200 things, even when you can ask for duplicates of things like place settings.
So we find ourselves registering for things we don’t need. Things no one needs, like miniature pie plates (that was the first thing I put on the registry. I’ve wanted those for years), twodifferent mortar and pestle sets, and the above-pictured gravy boat we’ll use one time a year. And while it can be a lark—”Yay! Maybe I will finally have those mini pie plates I’ve wanted for so long!”—it is also a struggle, because it is so contrary to my normal practical, penny-pinching practices.
But we’ve got to fill out our registry, so I try to dream a little bigger and ask for things I don’t need but will nevertheless enjoy having. And I pat myself on the back for turning down some suggested items that are truly inessential:
Registering is fun. We can all agree on this, yes? But what can be hard is picking just one or two stores at which to commit your whole nesting phase! Enter SimpleRegistry, which allows you to add anything, from anywhere to your online registry. Their features allow you to split expensive gifts into manageable pieces, choose your own custom web address, and they accept all major credit cards, making checkout for friends and family is as easy as a simple click! So check out SimpleRegistry today, and kiss your registering headaches goodbye.
Soooo…. about the newsletter which was supposed to launch today and break the news we’ve been dying to share. Well, its sort of being held hostage by internet pirates, who hijacked us, and swashbuckled their way into our computer, snatching the booty they craved and leaving us helpless in their wake! (…hehe, I said booty).
Oh alright. Maybe its just ordinary technical difficulties holding us up. Hang in there, we’re hoping to have it sorted out all pronto-like. And hopefully, I’ll have a little hair left on my head at the end of the ordeal. Right now, I’m ’bout to start pulling it out.
Ahem.
So, in the meantime…. our most recent Green-Ass Bride and Groom article has dropped, in the Fall issue of Eco-Beautiful Weddings E-zine, and this time we’re taking you to eco-funkytown on the Etsy train! So hop on over, turn to page 58 and check it out, its fun!
Just a little tease
And here’s a little something just to brighten your day. Caution: your heart may explode all over the screen.
We hope to resume with the debut of our newsletter and an exciting announcement, just as soon as we can!
Two weeks ago, I hopped over to Washington DC to attend the B-list Conference, and snap crackle pop was it ever a great time! I’m still kinda pinching myself over being included with a crew I find so inspiring – I mean, these are some of the best bloggers around – and I’m happy to report that they’re all just the sweetest gals evah!
We all got some seriously royal treatment over the weekend, which kicked off with a massive blowout meet and greet at The Torpedo Factory – an incredible artsy/lofty space in Old Town Alexandria. Vendors came from all over the country to attend, and the whole party was off the hook and so was the venue. It was fun bumping into old friends I haven’t seen in a while, and meeting some of my favorite bloggers for the first time. Let me tell you, I stumbled off that plane, changed into my dress in the airport bathroom, and rolled into this party 45 minutes later… rocking jetlag and airplane grogginess. But the buzz of being there carried me through the night, the party and the afterparty!
The Torpedo Factory was jam packed
Our lovely hosts: Anne (From I Will to I Do) & Vane (Brooklyn Bride)
Elan Artists tore the room up
They scrolled any tweets pertaining to the conference or party across a screen in real time, which would be a fun modern feature at an edgy-techie wedding. But one of my favorite features was the DIY prosecco station – which included fresh herbs, syrups, and other mixers that we could add to flavor our glass as much or as little as we liked. I got seriously addicted to a concoction involving fresh thyme and lavender syrup… that stuff was my jam!
Fresh Herbs and Prosecco? My new favorite!
Another adorable feature was Brooklyn Bride’s Pop Up Bar – showcasing items that POP… everything from various flavors of popcorn to pop tarts and pop rocks. I’d love to see something like this at a wedding instead of a candy buffet.
Once you pop, you can't stop.
They also decorated chalkboard vases with our names, which I loved. But the best was that they drew some chalk ass cheeks under our name See them in the lower left corner there?
Just grab some chalkboard paint and plywood to DIY your own!
Saturday was the official conference, which we spent at the historic Lloyd House in Old Town Alexandria. Sorry peeps, what we discuss at the conference stays at the conference, but I can share with you the freaking adorable lunch they put together for us… which was almost too cute to eat! Almost. Its theme was something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue, and it included embroidered cloth napkins, bamboo flatware, artisan root beer, and special ‘B’ shaped cookies.
Sunday morning, we trucked over to Williams Sonoma for a special brunch featuring some new registry trends, delicious tasty delights, and a fun cooking demonstration. Did you know some couples are registering for his and hers knife sets so couples that love to cook could each get the fit they want? As a gal with a culinary bent, that beats my drum for sure! Oh, PS – WS makes some crazydelicious frozen croissants that would be totally perf for a day-after brunch type event. You ain’t gotta tell no one that’s store bought (it can be our little secret). They are the yum!
WIlliams Sonoma put on quite a show for us!
And we all went our separate ways, toting our special swag bags… with full hearts and heads after such a rewarding weekend with the gals! Take a peek at the loot.
It was all such a blast. I’m so grateful to everyone who made it all possible, and feel blessed to be included in such an inspiring bunch of bloggers! And you know that’s saying something, since I managed to lose my wallet and get sick that weekend. Honestly though, the people at Dulles Airport couldn’t have been nicer about helping me through security without a photo ID. It’s so rare to experience great customer service when traveling, I have to shout-out their TSA department with a virtual high five. I felt very Blanche DuBois – relying on the kindness of strangers And then, the unthinkable… a week later my wallet was returned, completely intact!
I can’t wait for next year’s conference. Keep up with and learn more about The B-List in the meantime, by following the B-List Blog!
Earth Day is 40 years old today, and we’re so excited. Mother Earth means so much to us, that we even made a vow to protect her during our wedding! So, naturally, on this day in her honor, we’z about to bust out some of our favorite green goodies to help you discover how being green can help you save green, have fun, and give Big Mama Earth a big, heartfelt, broke-ass hippie {HUG}
Anyone out there have disposables guilt? You know, that regretful feeling when you buy a pack of disposables for your home, a party or a wedding event? Hang onto your socks, and meet this bevy of bio-goodness. There are tons of disposables out there made from biodegradable materials, such as corn starch, bamboo and sugarcane bagasse, and they’re super affordable, yo! We used some for our day-after party and they were perfect! Biosmartused to offer a $20 party pack that fed 50 people… I wish they’d bring that back! But still you can get 125 plates for $9.99 or 250 bar cups for $24.61 – can I get a what what? That’s my jam!
Ohh Emm Geee.
Yes, please.
Sustainable Party is an adorable site filled with different styles of sustainable disposable – from your basic whites to some really stylish bamboo. They sell most items in bulk batches (ranges from 25 to 3,000) and bulk batches mean bulk discounts, and you know we love that! And I can’t resist those party monsters they put in the product porn GreenFeet has a great selection at great prices too – but my favorite has got to be the bamboo spork!
Present your disposables in a cute fabric lined basket, tie some rustic twine around the utensils, cut up recycled fabric with pinking shears to create adorable cloth napkins and some grub…. you’ve got yourself a guilt-less, easy clean up and affordable feast.
Browsing for a wedding dress can be eco-friendly in so many ways these days, its hard to justify not checking this shiz out! Naturally I’ve gotta plug the eco-fashionistas out there, having worn a gown made of sustainable fabrics… so let’s give it up for Deborah Lindquist, Amy Jo Tatum, and Puridee who handmake gorgeous confections of dresses out of organic and recycled fabrics and are just to die for!
Amy Jo's green-chic line has retro flair
I LOVE this color by Puridee!
But there before buying new, make sure to check out the zillions of bridal resale options… from vintage shops in your hometown to awesome online resalers like Recycled Bride, wedding website classifieds, or charity resale events like Brides Against Breast Cancer. You can even rent gowns like the one in yesterday’s gorgeous real wedding feature for just one night! Already married? Unload that lonely gown and send it down the aisle again on another lucky brides back, and list it for resale or donate it today!
Guiltless snacking is my favorite.
Add some sun to your day.
I’m sure you’ve seen that Sunchips has a very sexy new biodegradable bag, but did you know that all those old bags can still be put to good use? Check out this cutie pie chip bowl from Ecoist for your wedding registry or a gift, or snag a purse made from a Lay’s bag for your summer wedding!
California Pink Tourmaline, and vegan!
Something old, made new.
Eco-wedding rings do exist, and what a great way to make a vow, right? Recycling rings from estate sales and vintage boutiques is a great place to start, but you can get even more progressive by seeking alternative styles like the gorgeous wood-laid reclaimed silver bands right there, or those made of reclaimed metals and non-diamond jewels like this gorgeous $298 pink solitaire by McFarland Designs on etsy. Even better, scour your old jewelry box and ask friends or family to donate old metals, send ‘em to a jeweler, and have your own design cast from some meaningful metal.
Oh, there are so many goodies we love that support and protect the lady that feeds us, houses us, nourishes us and on which we’ll marry… I could go on for days. Do your part today and every day. As the Native American Proverb says: Treat the earth well… we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
Here at Team Broke-Ass, shopping is serious business, and so are sustainability, good value, and giving back whenever possible! That’s why we are luuurving on companies like Seven Hopes United, one of many rad Fair Trade green wedding and gift registries and shopping sites.
Fair trade is the Bibimbap Biggity Bomb, and it gives back to the craftsman and artisans who create the goods. Seven Hopes United, Global Exchange, and SERRV feature products that are fair trade certified which means that they are made in fair trade co-ops and aim to provide economic stability. Oh hello, I love that mission. The added bonus? The price will often beat large chain stores!
Fair Trade intends to provide access to other marginalized goods, and gives a higher and more fair wage back to the people who produce these products. These gift registries have crafts, jewelry, and housewares from all over the world including places such as Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Their products are beautifully handcrafted, and part of all proceeds are invested back into the artisan communities. It’s shopping for a cause!
Some of my favorite items:
This necklace is the "Taryn Delicate Y Necklace" in Teal. Isn't it gorgeous? I love the turquoise and brown together!
These could be the perfect gift for any bridesmaid. I never met a pair of baubles I didn't like!
Love these square salad bowls!
Go ahead, register for a hammock! You've earned the relaxation!
Tons of sites and wedding vendors offer fair trade or some other charity incentive these days, so be sure to patronize vendors like this when possible. It’s a great way to pay it forward while getting your shop (and your wedding) on, and to get your marriage started off on a great karmic foot, yo!
See the cheese and crackers down there? (mmm, cheese and crackers…..) He put them in a butter dish and it’s cover. Bonus use!
See them in the lower left corner there?
