Home › Weddings › A Blue and Gold Wedding
A Blue and Gold Wedding
EPTEMBER and October weddings are always popular, partly perhaps because of the decorating possibilities of the autumn season.
Goldenrod and wild asters one thinks of for early fall. At one evening home wedding where this blue and gold color scheme was used, the stalks of plumey golden rod seemed to be growing naturally along the stair rail; they were held in place at the uprights.
The rooms were hung with blue and golden globes of lights - in reality paper lanterns - sheltering electric bulbs. The fireplace held masses of goldenrod, and blue jars holding wild asters crowned the mantel, the tables, the piano, and the wide window sills.
The bridesmaids wore gowns of yellow organdy and the maid of honor an aster blue costume. [159] In the dining-room a dull gilt basket of blue asters occupied the center of the table set for a buffet repast, and a bow of blue and golden tulle fluttered from the handle of the basket.
The favors were tiny kewpie dolls, wearing frilly skirts and caps, some of blue and others of yellow. The blue were for the men, the yellow for the girls.
This is a decorating scheme rather than a recipe, and the method is the useful part: choose two colours from whatever is in flower, then repeat them in the lights, the gowns, the table and the favours.
- Goldenrod is not the hay fever plantIt is blamed for it every autumn, and unfairly: its pollen is heavy and carried by insects, and the usual culprit is ragweed, which flowers at the same time. What goldenrod will do is wilt fast once cut, so it needs deep water and should be cut the same day.
- Wild asters are michaelmas daisiesThe same group of plants, sold in garden centres and by florists under that name, and a reliable late-season blue. The page assumes you will gather them from a roadside, which means asking whoever owns the roadside.
- A kewpie doll needs explaining nowIt was a cheap mass-produced doll with a topknot and a wide stare, sold everywhere, and handing one to each adult guest at a wedding was an ordinary thing to do. The favour as a category survives; this particular object does not.
- Organdy is a stiff sheer cottonIt holds a shape rather than draping, which is why the bridesmaids’ yellow gowns and the tulle bows read as crisp in the description. Any modern fabric chosen for softness will give a different effect from the one the page is describing.
- The scheme uses the house as the frameGoldenrod fixed along the stair rail, asters on the mantel, the piano and the window sills, and the fireplace filled. None of it requires a florist; it requires a house with a visible staircase and large sills, and it falls apart in a rented room.
- Blue for the men, yellow for the girlsWorth noticing, because it is the reverse of the colour code a modern reader expects, and it was clearly deliberate. If you copy the idea, the point is that the favour told the guest which half of the scheme they belonged to.
This is a wedding held in a private house in the evening, and almost every detail follows from that. The decoration works along a stair rail and a mantelpiece because those are what the room offered; the food is a buffet because the dining room could not seat the guests; the flowers are goldenrod and wild asters because they were growing within reach in September and cost nothing but the gathering. What the page spends its words on is the colour scheme, carried from the lights to the gowns to the basket on the table to the dolls handed out at the end, and that consistency is presented as the achievement. It is a book written for hostesses with taste, time and a garden rather than with money, and it treats the ability to make a whole evening agree with itself as the skill worth teaching.