The Wedding Registry, exposed

One of the parts of wedding planning that Chris and I fought about the most was the gift registry. It was a task bound to be fraught with tension. Chris and I have different styles, as any two people do, but disagreeing on things we would use daily in our first home together was worrisome. I was also wary of how it would look if we asked for too much, or things that were too expensive. But people were going to give us gifts, and some of them would want some guidance. What in the world should we ask for? 

Neither of us love to support big box stores, and those are the kinds of stores where most couples seem to register. We didn't need much, so it didn't seem to make sense to register for a bunch of things (you know, kitchen things, decorative things, small appliance things) with one store. With a little help from Lori, who found this post on Brooklyn Bride, we decided to use myregistry.com. It seemed like the perfect solution. Myregistry allows users to add items from any website or any store to a registry in their name, and at no charge for hosting the registry. 

Let me say right away it is not a perfect site. There were a few technical problems, such as some difficulty loading photos (a photo of a deep-dish lasagna pan that we registered for mysteriously popped up on the site after repeatedly refusing to load months ago). Also, several times people purchased items and attempted to mark them as purchased, but the site instead added to the quantity requested. Oops. Chris figured out that to correct it we had to go in and change the original number of the item we requested, and in some cases this even required a negative number. 

But we were willing to put up with a few technical difficulties because using it allowed us to register for this.

 

Instead of registering for a set of dishes at a chain store, we were able to register with White Bike Ceramics in Brooklyn. Lauren, the artist, let us pick out a beautiful set of handmade porcelain dishes. My favorite so far is this beautiful platter. 

We were also given two teacup and saucer sets that are perfect for sipping cup after cup of hot tea when your heat is broken. This weekend we'll go to Lauren's studio in Williamsburg to pick up our plates and bowls. 

We weren't sure how our friends and family would react to our registry being a little unusual. It wasn't completely atypical; we love to cook and certainly registered for a few pots and pans at a typical wedding registry store, and we are loving cooking with them. But having the flexibility to pick gifts from any store really allowed us to carefully select only items that we were willing to pack up and move into a tiny New York apartment.