Right Hand Drawn by Miki Huynh | Tried the left hand… didn't work so well. </a>

wedding recap

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April 28, 2014 by miki

Some craft pics to follow.

The past year was a wedding year. Any spare mental energy went directly into wedding preparations, and the least girly parts of me caved in to all the girlier bits that wanted the pretty and the colorful and the delicious and the handmade, which then meant a lot of spreadsheets and dedicated weekends and agonizing over decisions and buying and returning and rebuying things I stingily snorted at months before. How easy it is to revolve your life around a single day, knowing it’s going to fly by the moment it arrives. But, boy, what a day. And not so bad a year, either.

It helps that the current generation of traditional couplers and I are spoiled by the abundance of wedding sites and blogs now in existence. It seems if you want to plan your own party, there’s no shortage of free online resources or searchable public opinion to guide you through organizing the whole process (provided you delegate tasks so you don’t end up a big scary stress ball). So while I don’t wish to add to the plethora of wedding how-to guides out there, I will endorse doing it yourself if you have the time, though I won’t agree with caving in to arbitrary social expectations and unnecessary frills that get tossed away later, though I will concede to maintaining some traditions and making some accommodations to keep both your immediate family and yourself happy.

Most helpful reads for maintaining these viewpoints:

A Practical Wedding – Keene’s take on a wedding is VERY open: Whatever you like is OK! Don’t include the things you don’t want! Anything goes! And I’m very glad I started off with these messages in my head. Affirmations aside, you still need to create actual structure to tie together all your hodgepodge, alternative, tradition-bucking ideas, but her Practical Wedding website does offer helpful starting points for doing just that.

Miss Manner’s Guide to a Surprisingly Dignified Wedding – The humor is dry and tasty like a scone. Her insistence on receiving lines and unguided invitations is debatable, but the ultimate message of focusing on what is sensible and what really matters, and a lot less on your own ego, is sound.

Also, if you’re like me and roam the internet for ideas in pictures, it seems impossible not to be influenced by the aesthetics pushed forward by Etsy and propagated by Pinterest. Especially if you try to combine “simple” and “elegant” with “crafty,” you seem destined the land somewhere outdoors, among trees, with some vaguely vintage and rustic decor (also key product search terms), and on the actual day you find yourself giggling with delight as you stand there in front of a questionably elegant tractor in your 30s-influenced dress holding a multicolor bouquet composed of miscellaneous flora and vegetation. Did our end result look pretty? Yes! The guests enthusiastically agreed. Was it unique? Not entirely, though we included a lot of things that we thought up and made ourselves, also with the help of family and friends. I think putting on airs about avoiding a “cookie cutter” wedding is ridiculous. Search enough and you’ll inevitably find your private and unique idea pinned up on someone else’s public page, so better to surmise that there are plenty of differently shaped cutters out there with which to cut out your own cookie. Besides, we put a lot more effort into the dough, and that’s what really matters.


The Pajamajamas play the Paddington theme

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April 6, 2013 by miki

Adding to our once in a blue moon repertoire, my friend Anthony and I scratched and strummed the theme to a favorite stop motion kid’s program, Paddington. Instruments include ukelele, violin, mini bongos, and pepper shaker.

You can even check out all three cover tunes by the Pajamajamas, a group earnestly dedicated to cobbling together tunes late at night in the most comfortable of clothing.

I bought an electric violin a number of years ago out of impulse and in hopes of applying my public school orchestra education. The brain and fingers are slower and the sound remains squeaky, but playing is still just as fun as it was back in the day.


Attack of the Androgynes

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March 12, 2013 by miki

I’m late to the dinner party, but man oh man, David Bowie and Tilda Swinton. Two of my favorite people to watch.


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