Spring 2010 Inspiration!

By Truly Engaging

If Pantone the color boss says it… it must be true. As you may know, Turquoise has been declared the alpha color, the top tinge for 2010. Over the next few months, you’ll hear the word “trendy” wrapped tightly around this color but I think it’s forever stylish and a solid choice. Stunning whether you incorporate it as a main color or as an accent. Think tropical blue waters and warm, sunny days.

I took the color boss’ suggestion and paired this yummy color with the likes of the new “classic” red…Tomato Puree. I used the design studio {although not exact} to convert Pantone’s Turquoise CMYK: 61,0,32,0 and Tomato Puree CMYK: 0,75,78,13.

I absolutely adore this high energy combination. So fun.

And behind every great color is a great neutral! These are the shades to set the stage for spring: Pink Champagne, Tuscany, Dried Herb and Eucalyptus as the ultimate grey. LOVE the neutrals for this spring!

Another lovely color for Spring 2010 is Fusion Coral {yay for coral~even though we’ve been admiring this one for a while}. Using the design studio {not exact~coral cmyk: 04,49,55,0 and tuscany cmyk: 0,20.31,25} I changed the colors on this damask Invitation from black and white to the Coral and Tuscany…

soft, warm yet energetic at the same time!

So what do you think… did Pantone hit that color nail right on the head?

When ‘the Dress’ Turns Into 5 or 6

Tom Bloom

SARAH NIANOURIS found the perfect wedding dress. Then she continued shopping.

Why, she can’t say. But she fell in love with another, then another, then another. She now had four sashaying, cascading, lace-adorned, bead-bedecked and — not to be ignored in an economic downturn — way-over-her-budget gowns. She wasn’t marrying enough times to wear them all.

“I know: psycho,” she said. But she has plenty of company. Multiple wedding-dress purchases, are a trend in the wedding industry, if the anecdotes mean anything.

Ms. Nianouris (now Mrs. Sollar), a real estate broker in Dayton, Ohio, considers herself “very frugal.” She had budgeted $1,000 for her dress. She spent $800 on her first pick, a Sarah Danielle, then bought an elaborate, tiered tulle-and-lace Mia Solano for $1,000. Then she opted for handmade, setting her back $550 on the deposit. “When I put it on, I wanted to throw up,” she said.

Then she bought the winner, an Amsale sample gown, for $699, with $300 in alterations. She sold the first two on PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com for a loss of $650. It was a long journey to the right dress, but “I couldn’t have been happier,” she said.

Not that Mrs. Sollar spent much by today’s wildly priced wedding-dress standards, where something from the couturier Monique Lhuillier’s Platinum Collection can sell for upward of $20,000.

Annie Hunter of Seattle, who works in marketing for a nonprofit organization, reached more than half that total when she bought four dresses for her August wedding. She bought two at a sample sale in Seattle for $3,800 combined. She bought a third dress, an Amsale, online for $3,000. “It had pockets,” she said. “I wanted pockets.” She wore it to a small wedding ceremony she and her bridegroom held in Mexico, but felt it was a bit too revealing for her formal wedding. The fourth, and final, dress she bought at a shop in Seattle, a Monique Lhuillier for $3,400.

“My husband paid for the first two, I paid for the third, and my mother paid for the fourth,” she said. “Everyone contributed to the madness.”

But Mrs. Hunter’s mother was her cautionary tale. “She thought I was nuts,” Mrs. Hunter said. “But she hated the way she had looked on her wedding day, and she wanted me to have a more positive experience, which I did.”

Josie Daga, the owner of PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com, has labeled the phenomenon multiple-dress syndrome. “A two-dress wedding is old hat,” she said. “Easily 15 to 20 percent of our sellers are two-dress brides. But buying several dresses? This is new.”

Mrs. Daga points to dozens of brides who have shared their multiple-dress stories on her site, including a woman who bought seven dresses, and another who bought six.

“They are a little bit ashamed of it,” she said. “But with longer engagements and the excitement around the wedding industry, the dress is often the first thing they buy.”

And buy, and buy.

The phenomenon has not registered on the radar of the Wedding Report (theweddingreport.com), an online market research firm tracking all things wedding-related. “I’ll add it to our next survey,” said Shane McMurray, the firm’s chief executive.

Multiple wedding-dress purchases are part of what continues to be a high level of spending on weddings, a $40-billion-plus industry according to information from the Association of Certified Professional Wedding Consultants and a number of other industry groups.

Amber Schneider of Boston, who bought a mere two gowns, saw her wedding as a once-in-a-lifetime event.

“My husband and I will be paying this wedding off for years and years to come,” said Mrs. Schneider, a hospital social worker. “I felt guilty about it, but at the same time, I wanted to feel beautiful on my wedding day.”

It is a sentiment that has certainly helped the resale industry. Sales at the pre-owned dress site are “fabulous,” Mrs. Daga said.

“The recession has helped the business, because it’s crazy what a wedding dress costs,” she said. “If you can get a dress that looks essentially new, or sell your dress and get some money back, why wouldn’t you?”

The buyers put their money in a holding account provided by the Web site, so the sellers do not receive the money until the buying brides sign off on the dresses.

Whatever their reasons for buying in bulk, brides said love of a wedding dress, then ultimate rejection of it, did not reflect on their decision-making capabilities regarding a husband.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Sollar said, laughing. “He’s different. I love him to death.”

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Josie Daga appeared on I Do Radio in February 2009 ==> Listen here

Aretha Davis and Angelo Volandes

AS far as destination weddings go, having one at an orphanage near Calcutta is no doubt unusual. But so was the 20-year odyssey that brought Aretha Davis and Dr. Angelo Volandes to that location.

Vows: Aretha Delight Davis and Dr. Angelo Elpithoforos Volandes

Chiara Goia for The New York Times

The girls from the orphanage helped the bride prepare. More Photos »

They met in 1989 in a freshman ethics class at Harvard. He was a handsome philosophy major from Brooklyn with black turtlenecks, slicked-back hair and compelling rhetoric.

Ms. Davis was soft-voiced and strong-willed. She wore her father’s fedora “with the feather,” she said, along with leather high-tops and Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses.

It was her impassioned empathy for those less fortunate that mesmerized Dr. Volandes, now 38. “Aretha has boundless love,” he said.

They bonded over their shared perspective as first-generation Americans; her parents came from Guyana and his from Greece. Dr. Volandes, who bused tables at his father’s Greek diner, said they both grew up in families that prioritized hard work and helping others.

They started doing volunteer work together and engaged in endless hours of ardent debates — on every topic other than romance.

“We were two nerdy people,” said Ms. Davis, 37.

The relationship remained platonic. But in their junior year, Ms. Davis, who describes herself as a late bloomer, “developed some curves,” she said, recalling with amusement that “Angelo looked at me differently.”

Gone were her thick prescription glasses and fedora. Instead, she had contact lenses and cascading cornrows. “All the sudden she was this voluptuous woman,” said Dr. Volandes, now a medical ethicist at Harvard who specializes in end-of-life decision-making.

As one who spent Saturday nights in the library, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. It took him until their senior year in 1993 to send her a Valentine’s Day card, albeit an ambiguous one. “As soon as she read it, she ran back to my dorm room livid,” he said, remembering the interrogation that followed. Cornered, he admitted his feelings, and they tearfully embraced.

After graduating that spring, they received fellowships; she did nutrition research at a Guyanese orphanage, and he studied healing traditions in Greece and Egypt.

Deeply in love, Ms. Davis looked forward to taking their relationship to the next level when they returned for grad school.

Dr. Volandes, contemplative by nature, felt pressured. “At 21, she was ready to get married,” he said. “I wasn’t.” He abruptly broke up with her in 1994, insisting it was prudent for them to stay focused on their studies, law for her and medicine for him.

She was shattered, she said, and they didn’t speak for six years.

“There wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about Aretha,” Dr. Volandes said. Yet he never told her, even when his medical residency took him to Philadelphia, where she was working as a lawyer. “I imagined some other lucky guy was already married to her.”

But while Christmas shopping in 2000, Ms. Davis spotted him post-call, unshaven and bleary-eyed. “I had practiced all these things I was going to say to him for years, but I felt nothing but love when I saw him,” she said.

He responded in kind. “To meet the love of your life randomly for a second time, you don’t mess up on that,” Dr. Volandes said.

But this time, marriage was not her priority, having decided to switch careers and become a doctor.

So it wasn’t until 2008, with her fourth year at Harvard Medical School on the horizon, that he proposed, quoting from C. P. Cavafy’s poem, “Ithaka” about Odysseus and his epic journey to Penelope: “As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery.”

On Nov. 18, they had a brief civil ceremony in Easton, Mass., where Michael Marram, a justice of the peace, officiated in his home. Then on Dec. 13, the Rev. Andrew P. K. Mondal led a Greek Orthodox ceremony at a girls’ orphanage in India run by the Philanthropic Society of the Orthodox Church, where the bridegroom’s mother had volunteered in 2000.

“Instead of a big fat Greek wedding, we donated funds and asked our family and friends to donate funds,” Dr. Volandes said. The money will go toward college scholarships for the orphans. The couple plans to return to the orphanage each year for community service vacations, Ms. Davis said. “Our children will hopefully see the girls as their sisters.”

The 95 girls, ranging in age from 3 to 18, were both hosts and honored guests. They helped the bride prepare, wrapping her in an embroidered lehenga, painting her with henna and giving her costume jewelry.

“They have so little, but what they have they will offer,” Ms. Davis said. “The only difference between us and these girls is their parents didn’t emigrate.”

A dozen of the girls in colorful saris escorted them through a verdant courtyard and into a simple white chapel. There, the couple was joined by the rest of their 95 bridesmaids, who showered them with rose petals after they exchanged their vows.

“Our relationship has been more of a marathon than a sprint,” Ms. Davis said, sounding jubilant about where their journey had led.

“The destination is a beautiful thing,” her husband said, “but arguably the richer story is what it took to get there.”

A. Sharma contributed from Bakeswar, India.

Jocelyn del Carmen and Christopher Tanabe

Photo by:David Bayless

The bride, 42, is taking her husband’s name. She is an ophthalmologist at and a partner in the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a multi-specialty group practice there. She graduated from the

Dr. Jocelyn-Louise Flores del Carmen and Christopher Thomas Tanabe were married Saturday at the Stanford Memorial Church in Stanford, Calif. The Rev. Scotty McLennan, dean for religious life at Stanford University and a Unitarian Universalist minister, performed the ceremony.

The bride, 42, is taking her husband’s name. She is an ophthalmologist at and a partner in the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, a multi-specialty group practice there. She graduated from the University of Texas and received her medical degree from Harvard.

She is the daughter of Josefa Flores del Carmen and Rolando del Carmen of Huntsville, Tex. Her mother retired as a secretary in the Office of Student Life at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, where her father is a criminal justice professor.

The bridegroom, 41, is an engineer who manages a software team at the Oracle Corporation, suppliers of software for information management, in Redwood Shores, Calif. He graduated from Stanford.

He is a son of Joanne Tanabe and Thomas M. Tanabe of Cupertino, Calif. The bridegroom’s father, a retired chemical and materials engineer, worked in Sunnyvale, Calif., for the Lockheed Martin Corporation.