BERLIN, TWO YEARS AGO TODAY ♥

Photo: Lindsay Isola

OUR CSA WEDDING PARTY

                        ARRIVING                 

                            THE BAR                         

                   CAKE CUTTING                         

         

       

                            THE DANCE                        

                          THE DRESS CHANGE                  

                       LOVE, FAMILY  and TACOS                

Photo: Lindsay Isola

E+K, KARL MARX ALLEE, BERLIN

Photo: Britney Anne Majure & Magnus Bjerk

These pictures were taken two days after we got married, before the party we hosted for our friends at the cocktail bar CSA on KARL MARX ALLEE. We met up with BRITNEY and MAGNUS a couple of hours before the PARTY and took some pictures and a drink. We were really lucky to have friends of ours do all the wedding photos, for me that made the photo shoot something much more and much more fun than if a stranger would do it. When we met Britney and Magnus they were both dressed up for the party as well, and all the time when Britney was taking pictures I was thinking; ah someone should be photographing her, she looks so great (she was wearing this nice coat and her hair and makeup looked fantastic). I'm really sad I don't have a picture of it, but I guess when you have your wedding photos taken you just have to accept that you are not the one doing the photography that day. 

So ..I really wanted our wedding photos to be taken on Karl Mar Allee. Even though E and I met in OSLO this is where he lived when we met, where we lived together for the first time and where he proposed to me. Even though Karl Marx Allee can be a little too monumental, gray and quiet in the long run I have always loved the esthetics of the architecture in our neighborhood. I therefore really like that some of the pictures Britney and Magnus took of us shows the beauty of the KINO INTERNATIONAL and CAFE MOSCAU. For some these buildings will probably always just mainly be iconic buildings, but for me it is the neighborhood where it all started. 

WEDDING DAY MORNING

   

Photo: Lindsay Isola

When we came back to BERLIN from NORWAY, LINDSAY had left all the photos she took during our wedding on my hard drive. It was so fun to come back and be able to spend time looking at all the pictures that both she, BRITNEY and MAGNUS took during our wedding weekend. The pictures on this post Lindsay took on the morning of the wedding. I decided to spend the whole morning at the apartment getting ready together with my sister, Lindsay and my great hair dresser and makeup artist NADIA. It turned out to be a perfect morning and I am very glad that I had the opportunity and chose to spend the morning home in our beautiful apartment.

THE MAKING OF MY WEDDING DRESS IV

So these are the pictures from the day that I picked up my wedding dress. It was the first time I saw the veil completely finished together with the dress ..and I was super HAPPY about the result. On top of that it was just really fun to be there in the store with all my BERLIN GIRLFRIENDS (in their matching black power girl outfits) ...and a very nice couple shopping that got very fascinated by the the scandinavian 'Midsummer Night's Dream' like bride, trying on the dress and drinking SPARKLING ROSÉ on the house (THANK YOU!) After I put on the dress and the veil we decided to try on the flower crown my friends had bought me for the evening's BACHELORETTE PARTY. There was something kind of magical that happened when I put it on ..the flower crown made me feel like a FAIRY TALE princess who spends all day playing in the forest and has a MAGICAL DEER with FLOWER ANTLERS as her best friend ..or one the ANGELS in the scraps (glansbildene) I had as a child. At this point I had not decided about flowers and I started thinking maybe this was meant to be.. because if I wore a flower crown I didn't need to buy a bouquet  ...thinking about this today it was almost like the crown put a spell on me and the people around me. It's weird how an object like this flower crown can change an outfit ...and the whole atmosphere. Looking back at it today it's obvious to me that the magic of the flower crown was meant for that moment and not the wedding day, it would have been totally wrong for my wedding and the kind of look that I was going for, but as I said, right there and then, it was like it put a SPELL ON ME.

Photo: Lindsay Isola and Britney Anne Majure

THE MAKING OF MY WEDDING DRESS III

So these are some of the pictures from my FINAL DRESS FITTING at CRUBA by Mira Becker (there was one in between this one and the first one, but I don't have pictures from that fitting because LINDSAY went off to ROME for a month and therefor could not join me). At this point the dress was basically ready.. It was very exiting.. and a bit nerve wrecking seeing it almost all done because I had basically never seen the dress before ..and the wedding was almost only two weeks away. After the first meet we decided to do quite a bit of changes compares to the first dress I tried on. It was very fun to be able to discuss with MIRA how the dress could and then should look like. Compared to the dress I first tried on my dress ended up WIDER and with a BELT (Mira already had designed a dress in a slight different design with a belt on it) in CHAMPAGNE instead of light grey/blue, more OPEN IN THE BACK and with the glossy side of the SILK turned outwards instead of the matte. They also doubled the fabric to get a more HEAVY and DRAPEY feel. So yes ..even though I felt that the dress would turn out great I was a bit nervous, but I was very happy when I saw it and took it on!

So for this last fitting we just had to decide about the length of the dress ..and if I wanted a VEIL. I really had not made up my mind when I entered the store that day, had it not been for the fact that Mira had already ordered the fabric I'm afraid that there never would have been a veil (THANK YOU Mira for your clairvoyance!). This by the way was not the only time she helped me during the wedding planning; every time I was there she would ask me; have you thought abut this or that ..and often I hadn't. She both introduced us to a GREAT CAKE PLACE in the WEST called WIENER CONDITOREI CAFE AM ROSENECK (some of you might remember that we first tasted some cakes from local bakers) that we ended up using ( the cake place is a story of it's own..it's situated in the middle of one of the embassy areas in the western part of BERLIN, where you are surrounded by people talking all different languages, where there are fancy young women in burkas and women in their 60's looking like BOMBSHELLS from LA; wearing all white and pink with their crazy blond hair) ..Mira also introduced us to a FLOWER GUY(the guy who do their flowers, and they are always beautiful, but I never managed to decide on what I wanted till the day before the wedding so I didn't use him, and now I have forgotten his name, but I bought my flowers in our hood from a CRAZY lady in PURPLE who didn't cut off the thorns so my hands hurt all our wedding day.. anyway, that is again a whole different story, so let's return to THE DRESS ...AND THE VEIL!!

So there I was, in the store, in the dress with Mira and one of her co workers CUTTING the HEMLINE ..and then SHAPING, SCULPTURING and CUTTING the veil ..on my HEAD ( the cutting was by the way done with a beautiful pair of GOLDEN SCISSORS that Lindsay just fell in love with). They custom made the veil so that it would work perfectly with the back of my dress. When they showed me what they wanted to do there was no doubt in my mind. Up till that point I had been going back and forth between thinking that I really just liked the dress the way it was and that a veil would be too much ....BUT also thinking that it would be ONE BIG MISTAKE letting the one opportunity I ever (hopefully) would get to wear a veil pass me by ..taking that I am a big fan of ACCESSORIES ...and a little bit of DRAMA. But yes, when they showed me how the veil would turn out I knew it would be just PERFECT, and today I am so happy I ended up wearing a veil, with out a doubt it brings a little extra something! So after the cutting and the shaping we decided that I would come back for the dress and the veil on the Saturday almost a week before the wedding. This was also the day of my BERLIN BACHELORETTE PARTY so it turned out to be quite a fun pick up. Pictures from that later in the week!



All photos by LINDSAY ISOLA

AT CRUBA BY MIRA BECKER, THE MAKING OF MY WEDDING DRESS II

Photo: Lindsay Islola