A Jersey Hootenanny Wedding

Chinese wedding portraits

Awhile back, I was sent this Jezebel post on Foreign Policy photo essay "Beautiful Me!", about the business of wedding portraits in China.

Chinese wedding photography is a parade of excess and ambition, an elaborate and expensive rite of passage, and often more prized than the ceremony itself.
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The whole production can cost from $450 to more than $15,000, a huge expense in a country where the average per capita income is roughly $3,000 (about $10,000 in Beijing). But it's increasingly seen as a must-have for China's image-conscious middle class, now some 430-million strong.
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For those who can afford them, these tokens are a constant reminder that they've made it in modern China, and an affirmation of who they aspire to be.

"At popular wedding photo locations, such as this beach on Hainan Island, couples line up every several yards to pose for their romantic photographic keepsakes."

It's an interesting piece, but as with many controversial items on the internet (WSJ's "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" essay, anyone?), the comments start getting repetitive pretty quickly. People going back and forth judging the couples who do this, judging the author for judging these couples, making accusations of the pot calling the kettle black given the state of the American wedding industry as a whole (not just limited to photography), etc.

On the one hand, if you've ever opened an American wedding magazine at all, then yes, the following statements are a bit rich:

In China, unlike in the West, wedding photographs are often as important as the ceremony itself…Both bride and groom are caked with make-up; for any accidental blemishes, there's always Photoshop. The aspiration is not to document a real event, but to look perfect.

As Robin's Brides magazine by the numbers posts show, the American WIC begs to differ. You also have to keep in mind that most modern Chinese wedding celebrations consist of just throwing a big banquet dinner, no elaborate dinner/dancing/decorated venue kind of reception.

But, I do think there's slightly more to this than than just "WIC-induced fever spreads wherever there's an increase in the middle class." I think there's an element of modern Chinese culture that just cares about having a perfect image of things, rather than substance. My parents live in a town where the Asian population is pretty high, and sometimes they'll talk about how they've been to some of the other houses that look magnificent and enormous from the outside but only have plastic furniture inside. Or are empty.

Or, my mom will tell me after her trips back about how Shanghai has been developing so rapidly, where there is now a whole block of skyscrapers used to be just a field when she went to school there, but everything looks surprisingly old and worn for being so new. She says the Chinese can build and develop, sure, but they don't really bother with upkeep of existing structures, and she predicts that all the shiny new arenas they put together for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing will get gross unbelievably quickly.

Shrug. I don't really have a conclusion here. When I first saw that photo-essay, I indulged in a bit "oh man that's crazy!" but ultimately, just as with American wedding excess, my position is that if this what people really think they want, so it goes. Just don't expect me to help bail anyone out if they go into debt pursuing it.

Dress embellishment

In the category of, "probably only if May rolls around and I somehow find myself with oodles and oodles of free time," here are a couple interesting ideas for embellishing the dress:

As brought up by Gertie, the hand embellishment techniques used by Alabama Chanin have the potential to be adapted for different aesthetics.

I checked out a copy of Alabama Stitch Book to flip through and I don't think I would've paid much attention if it weren't for Gertie's post. In its Alabama Chanin form, it would be a little too...homespun-y for my taste, but check out what Gertie's done for one of her dresses:

Gorgeous.

Another method that may be slightly less time-consuming (but probably not by much) is this vintage-style surface cording tutorial from Colette Patterns:

Again, gorgeous.

One of the benefits to cording versus beading is that I might be more comfortable with machine washing it. I think that's a goal I want to have, for this dress to be machine washable, so that I'll wear it often afterwards as a summer dress. Any fancy bits will either have to be detachable or part of a separate piece.

Chinese family naming system

So, I just addressed the last of the save-the-date postcards this weekend. I went to my parents' place for Chinese New Year dinner and tried to pry a few more relatives' addresses out of them. I think about wedding guests in a very relational way, with associated responsibilities. For example, if it's through my dad's side that I am related to this person and are therefore inviting them, I expect my dad to help with procuring the necessary information.

We did the same thing in the first round with getting addresses for Dan's side of the guest list, but my parents have been less forthcoming. I think they're a bit of the attitude, "if you can't reach someone via email, why bother with mailing addresses, just use the phone." They played it off as giving me an opportunity to reach out to my cousins for their parents' addresses. Luckily, these cousins came through for me, and very quickly at that, too, so I looked up the last few kinship terms on this helpful chart and wrote them out in my likely worse than a Chinese kindergardener's writing. It's the thought that counts, yeah?

I'd mentioned briefly in the last post about the save-the-date postcards about how I had to look up then which were the right terms to use for different family members, based on how I'm related to them. This chart I found this time around, though, better visually describes the precision to which you can name a relationship in the Confucian system.

Really gives you a sense for a non-Western culture in which your relationship to other people and your relative ages are more important than your individuality, since at family gatherings, you wouldn't really address anyone outside of your own generation with their given names. Instead, you'd use the appropriate kinship term (after a hushed conference with your parents, generally) and respectfully greet everyone. "Hello, 3rd uncle older than my father, 3rd uncle's wife. Hello, 2nd aunt older than my father, 2nd aunt's husband."

It's a complicated system, but it mostly makes sense since it's all based around the principles of increasing respect with increasing age (and a bit of, more important to distinguish males than females, which sometimes sets my mom off on how Confusion culture is patriarchal, which I'm really amused by because she mostly lives a feminist life but doesn't usually go off on feminist rants). It makes more sense to me than the Western system with all the "once removed" or first/second/etc. business. I can mostly remember the Chinese kinship terms now, though it's nice to be to easily look them up now too (yay Internet!) but I can never remember the right designations in the Western system.

Anyway, just wanted to share a bit of Chinese culture there, since in general people seem to find it interesting that I often have no idea what my relatives' real full names are (in English or in Chinese), because I only know them by their numbered designation.

Dress construction

I keep meaning to start on the muslin for the Crepe dress sew-along, which is an easy-to-fit wrap dress from Colette Patterns with a sweetheart neckline:

I bought a bright green leaf print cotton to use for the sew-along, and then I realized that this might work for The Dress as well. So, my plan is to make and fit the bodice in musin, then make the whole dress out of the green fabric, and then if all goes well, make it one more time in a dressier red fabric.

I do also have this New Look pattern I ordered of eBay ages ago, that also has a sweetheart neckline but with princess seams and a zipper, as well as the dress sloper I made in the Perfect Dress class at Sew Fast Sew Easy, so I have a few backups for patterns.

The issue to getting started is that I still want to finish the skirts I made even before the dress class, and I just haven't gotten around to doing that. Also, I hate cutting out fabric at home, I clear off the kitchen table or the coffee table but it always takes ages because I can't lay everything out at once, the heights are uncomfortable, and I worry that things might slip and the cutting will be inaccurate.

I've discovered that there's a sewing studio right in Hoboken that hosts open lab hours for $10/hour. It might be worth that just to have sufficient space to cut everything out on, I could do all the sewing at home. I meant to go check it out this past weekend but decided that staying in my PJs and finishing up the chilling book Let the Right One In, and later finishing up my spice jar/soap dispensers reorganization with the newly arrived labeler I bought from Amazon was more appealing. I have pretty simple needs.

Anyway, a few more construction details/ideas I've been saving up:

Gertie's post of examples of vintage red dresses with lace overlay made me swoon, but I don't think I'd be up for making a whole dress with a lace layer. Maybe just a skirt overlay wouldn't be too bad, though? Also, here's Gertie's own finished red lace dress, which is lovely.

I really want to do everything right on the dress, even if it's simple. Putting a lace trim on the lining would be such a fun detail. Perhaps my something blue?

If I don't go with the wrap dress pattern, a waist stay seems to be in order if you want to do a proper full skirted dress ("hooks up around the waistline and helps to support this wonderfully full skirt...also reduces strain on the zipper, which is great on any fitted dress").

Finally, in my last skirt class, the teacher introduced us to the marvel of hem-marking tools, to be used while you're wearing all the right shoes and such to measure and mark consistent distances from the groun. She used this Dritz chalk hem marker in class and said it could be used by yourself, but I'm doubtful of my ability to do so and it seemed to required too much careful inching along and around to rope Dan into helping me with it. So this vintage hem marker tool from Singer seemed a lot more usable:

The method of placing the pins at the right height seems a little more foolproof on this one.

Standing at 5'2" since 8th grade, I do a lot of hand hemming on jeans, pants, and vintage cotton dresses (and send over to the tailor the knits, polyester, silk, and other slippery fabrics). For the most part, I just (try to) measure an equal distance from the bottom all the way around, iron, pin up, and hem by hand. The problem with this is that the dresses often end up being shorter than ideal in the back because how it falls over my rear end. On the denim skirt I need to finish, I dropped the back hem by about 0.5" which seems to have helped with that sufficiently.

However, I've also messed up the measuring/pinning before and ended up taking the dress to the tailor to get it fixed, because fixing the curve on a full circle skirt seemed to be just asking for more trouble to me. With a handmade dress, measuring up from the bottom will also demand more accuracy from the piece cutting out phase. We'll see how it goes, it's usually a bit easier when you need to chop off less than my usual 6" all around. I may get my sewing-inclined friends to help with the pinning, or I might just throw it the tailor if that's the last thing that needs to be done.

The final, tangible save-the-date postcards

Ta da! After all those different designs, here's what we ended up going with.

It's a combination of my two favorites from the last round of designs, plus my remembering the Chinese double happiness character. The 618 in the corner is supposed to reference Scrabble tile numbers...not sure if that will be apparent to everyone, but I like it.

Here's what an order of 66 postcards looks like in real life:

I really like the rounded corners because of how they echo the rounded squares in the design, definitely worth the extra $1.

Yup, I'd ordered 50 postcards, but they sent us 66 instead. The extra 16 on the left, 50 on the right.

66 postcards take up less space than I thought it would, the whole thing came in one of those slightly larger UPS envelopes. I was very pleased with Overnight Prints overall, I think you could discern the slightly lower quality of digital printing if you stared at it a bit, but it's not immediately apparent, as Robin said. The paper was nice and thick and the surfaces were shiny and smooth. The order was guaranteed to be delivered by Friday but they made the first attempt on Thursday, so the shipping was pretty quick as well.

I did have to test out a couple pens to find one that wouldn't smear and ended up using my green space pen that I got a Christmas present from my college roommate Emily in '09 (love that thing). It took me about...2 hours? To address my half of the guest list, but this included calling my mom to harass her about getting a couple more relatives' address (still waiting on this) and to check which names were the right ones to use, as well as looking up Chinese characters online (the word for an uncle who's older than my dad is different than for an uncle that's younger than my dad, for instance) and practicing them a bit so they wouldn't look entirely like a kindergartener's scrawl. I also wrote quick personal messages on each of them.

Dan, on the other hand, took 30 minutes to fill in the addresses and note that people could invite a guest if they liked.

It balances out, though, because he took all the ones that needed to be mailed out (40) and got them stamped. The postage came to $11.20 (28 cents to mail a postcard, currently) so the whole save-the-date postcard endeavor came to just about $31. Thanks again to Amy for designing them and putting up with all my requests through the whole process!

Kate's Lazy Meadow suites and airstream trailers

A couple weeks ago, Dan buckled down and started booking hotel nights for us with his Marriott rewards points, and I've started to bookmark blog posts that mention Seattle or Vancouver (like this one for Seattle by Nothing But Bonfire readers or this recent visit to Vancouver). Maybe if we wanted to do a weekend summer getaway next year, though, these suites/airstream trailers in the Catskills (an area northwest of NYC and southwest of Albany, evidently) sound awesome. Via the haystack needle, several months ago :P