Kate Middleton’s Sarah Burton reception dress, William’s tux

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, leaves Clarence House to travel to Buckingham Palace for the evening celebrations. (POOL - REUTERS) It’s costume change time. Perhaps slightly less anticipated, but not any less glamorous, Kate’s second wedding gown reveals more of her affection for the house of Alexander McQueen.
Her satin, strapless reception dress, designed by Sarah Burton, features a similar sweetheart neckline and diamante embroidery around the waist. The newlywed duchess let her hair down for the big party and accessorized her look with a fur shrug.


Britain's Prince William and Prince Charles leave Clarence House to travel to Buckingham Palace. (POOL - REUTERS) Staying in step with his father, Prince William swapped his scarlet tunic for a classic, double-breasted dinner jacket and bow tie.
The couple were to celebrate their wedding reception with 300 of their closest family and friends at Buckingham Palace.

The Royal Wedding 2011 of Prince William and Kate Middleton

Prince William and Kate Middleton exchange vows at London’s Westminster Abbey on April 29.
Britain's Prince William, his bride, now known as Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince Charles leave Clarence House to travel to Buckingham Palace for the evening celebrations after the wedding.

For Alexandria couple, wedding proposal in a crossword puzzle just fit

39 Across: “ ‘Casablanca’ screenwriter Julius or Philip.”
Answer: Epstein.
37 Across: “ ‘Shakespeare in Love’ role.”
Answer: Marlowe.
“Am I losing my mind?” Marlowe Epstein wondered.
It wasn’t until she landed on 51 Across that she figured out what was going on.
“Words with a certain ring to them,” she read aloud.
“Will you marry me,” she suggested, and looked to her boyfriend, Corey Newman, for agreement.
He agreed more than she realized. Newman pulled out a diamond ring. Down on one knee, he repeated the words back to her. “Marlowe, will you marry me?”
“Oh!” she whispered. “Yes, of course!”
For months Newman, 28, had been trying to figure out how to propose to Epstein. “I wanted to do something unique,” he said. One day as he watched her sit immersed in a crossword puzzle — as she so often is — he had an idea. And with a little help from Bob Klahn, vet­eran crossword creator, Newman’s plan became a black-and-white reality in Sunday’s Washington Post Style section.
“I was sort of blown away,” Epstein said later. “I was so impressed that he managed to pull that off!”
Careful Washington Post readers may have wondered about the bonus puzzle Sunday, and devoted puzzlers probably picked up on a theme. Clue: Seek to form a union? Answer: Pop the question. Clue: Wedding gown material. Answer: Lace.
But even Epstein, 31, didn’t notice how many questions were intended specifically for her. Other answers included “Aiken,” her home town in South Carolina, and “Corey,” her boyfriend’s first name.
Saturday morning, she said, “just seemed like business as usual to me.” When she woke up, there was a cup of coffee waiting for her. As rain whipped against the windows of the couple’s Alexandria apartment, she settled on the couch with Newman, who was working on a crossword. “I’m stuck,” he said, prompting her to help.

Newman had originally planned to propose Sunday, but a citywide scavenger hunt they’d planned to participate in was bumped to that day, so he made a last-minute decision to do it Saturday instead. For an hour that morning, he raced around Old Town, looking for an early Sunday edition that would have the puzzle, but none of the shops had received them yet. So he did what any desperate man would: swiped one from the front of an office building. No one’s there on the weekend anyway, he figured.
Newman met Epstein in January 2010 at Murphy’s Irish Pub on King Street. “I can still see her,” he said. “As soon as I turned my head and saw her standing in the door I was like, ‘Whoa.’ ”
Two weeks later Epstein, who works in communications, invited him to join some friends at her place as a blizzard was moving toward Washington. After everyone else went home, the two kept talking and the snow continued falling. By early morning Newman realized he was stranded; he wound up snowed in with Epstein and her roommate for four days.
They saw each other only sporadically after that, but when Newman, an event planner, moved from Dupont Circle to Old Town in late July, their get-togethers became regular. By September, they were dating exclusively.
Right away it was serious. “Three weeks after we started seeing each other, everyone was asking, ‘When are you two moving in together?’ ” Newman said.
That happened in January; by then, they were already talking about marriage. “Even though some people say, ‘Oh, you haven’t been together that long,’ it feels like we have,” he said. The blizzard gave them an opportunity to get to know each other in a way that can usually take months, he adds. “We never got the chance to pretend to be perfect.”

Winning design in royal wedding dress contest is classic with a twist

There is a worldwide movement to brand everything under the sun William and Kate: Pez dispensers, air-sickness bags and, of course, sapphire engagement rings. Yet when the second in line to the British throne, Prince William, finally ties the knot with longtime love Kate Middleton on April 29, at least one royal fan will be celebrating more than their marriage and the retail bonanza it has sparked. Becky Schupp, winner of The Post’s contest to design a royal wedding dress, turns 25 that Friday.

Though she has long followed the British royal family, Schupp hadn’t noticed the coincidence when the couple announced their wedding date in November. It wasn’t until she was looking at the dress competition that “I saw the wedding date on your Web site and thought it was kind of funny.”
Aspiring designers submitted entries from Feb. 18 to March 11, and readers narrowed down the 56 sketches to five finalists. Schupp’s design garnered 38.2 percent of the vote.
Schupp, a resident of Helena, Mont., has wanted to be a fashion designer since she was 11. Her hobbies include sewing and drawing, and she studied apparel design at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn. She moved to New York after graduation in May 2008 but returned to Montana after a couple of years and is trying to build her portfolio while looking for other work. She hopes to return to New York this fall.
Fashion is “a different sort of art form,” says Schupp. “It’s fun, exciting, a good way to express yourself.”
In designing the gown that won The Post’s contest, Schupp, who is single, did think a little about what she might want to wear at her own wedding one day. But she focused chiefly on the royal bride-to-be and thought about outfits that Middleton has been photographed in.
“I think her style is very young,” Schupp says, but “definitely classic and clean. I wouldn’t say she’s a risk-taker, but she definitely has her own sense of style, what’s appropriate, [what] makes her look good.”
So how to create a dress for a young, modern woman in a historic occasion and setting? Start with sleeves.
“I assumed that in Westminster Abbey you’d kind of want something a little more modest, like covered shoulders,” Schupp says. The church where William and Kate are to marry has been the venue for British coronations since 1066. A “royal peculiar,” meaning that it is the chapel of the British sovereign — and “exempt from any ecclesiastical jurisdiction other than that of the Sovereign,” according to its Web site — it is also the place where William’s grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and other relatives were married. Schupp went for long sleeves, but in a sheer fabric.The rest of the ivory gown would be a heavier silk, she decided, with a very full skirt. (Full or loose skirts were features of the wedding gowns of the queen; her sister, Princess Margaret; her daughter, Princess Anne; and Sarah Ferguson, who took four minutes to walk up the aisle of Westminster Abbey for her 1986 wedding to Prince Andrew.) Schupp ruled out embellishments other than a band at the waist — pale pink could be a nice touch, she thought — and focused on “architectural sort of layers” with the skirt, along with a sweetheart neckline.

The total effect? “Kind of classic but still has a modern twist to it.”

Weddings: Charles ‘Jud’ Hamblett marries Lynne Platt

In 1991, Lynne Platt was in her mid-30s and settling into her new life as the wife of a Foreign Service officer when her husband suddenly fell ill during a post in the Dominican Republic. The couple quickly traveled to the United States for treatment of what turned out to be a rare blood cancer.

There was little the doctors could do. After just 13 months of marriage, Platt became a widow.
She returned to Washington, where she had previously lived. But rather than trying to get back into a policy job like the one she’d left to go abroad with her husband, she showed up on the steps of the State Department and asked for an application to join the Foreign Service. It was, she says, “a way of honoring my late husband.”In 1995, Platt got her first assignment: Cairo. From there she moved on to Casablanca and Brussels, and in 2004 she landed a coveted post in Paris.
By then, she’d started dating again; she had even accepted a proposal from one man but broke off the engagement after deciding that the relationship wasn’t quite right. What she wanted was a man with a kind heart and strong values — “somebody who’s really good,” she says. “The quality of goodness, I think, is highly underrated.”
She hadn’t thought much about Charles “Jud” Hamblett, who arrived to work at the embassy the following year, until she read a review he had written. “This boy can write an English sentence,” she noticed approvingly. Later, while working on projects together, Platt was impressed by Hamblett’s kindness and competency. So she was happily surprised when he asked her to join him for a few hours of boating along the Seine.
Hamblett was nervous about making the invitation — his 21-year marriage had recently ended, and the father of three was just beginning to contemplate dating again. “It was awkward, really,” he says. “I don’t get out much.”

But Hamblett, who spent much of his spare time exploring the waterways of Paris in a 16-foot inflatable Zodiac boat, was completely at ease on the river. As he and Platt slowly cruised the city, they traded stories of their journeys.
“I love to listen to Lynne speak. And I loved that the very first time we talked,” says Hamblett, now 56. “We would drift in and out of serious things and light things. There seemed to be an easy flow.”
Soon they were boating together every weekend and exploring the city by bike during the week. Platt, now 57, discovered that Hamblett was a multifaceted man. He was as enthusiastic as she was about art galleries and museum exhibits, and for her birthday, he gave her a poem he’d written. But she could also find him covered in oil from working on a car transmission. “He’s just not what you would expect,” she says.
The pair knew that their magical days in Paris were limited; in October 2008, Platt moved to a one-year posting in Baghdad. But before she left, they talked about finding a later assignment where they could serve together. The country that fit was Haiti.
The two arrived in their new host country in 2009. But the rhythms of their life on the island were blown apart on Jan. 12, 2010, when a massive, 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck. “It sounded like the ground underneath the house was exploding,” Platt remembers.
The U.S. Embassy’s 10-acre compound became the center of the relief effort. For two weeks, Platt and Hamblett slept under desks and worked around the clock to help with evacuations and the organization of rescue missions. The embassy “looked like its own refugee camp,” Hamblett says.
But living through the terror and tragedy of the quake drew the couple even closer, and the dedication they saw in each other affirmed to Hamblett that their lives were on“parallel tracks.”
So during a break in June, they returned to Paris, and on a footbridge near Platt’s old apartment, he asked her to marry him. “There was an endless stream of positive reinforcement,” he says of the relationship. “It seemed like a natural.”
It seemed that way to Platt, too, who had finally found the goodness she was looking for. “Having had a good marriage, I knew what I needed, and I was willing to hold out for it,” she says.
On March 12, the waiting was over. They exchanged vows and selections of poetry in the atrium of the Meridian House in Washington.
And two days before the wedding, the State Department came through with a perfect gift: word of their next assignment. Later this year, the couple will move to London.

On Love: Dana Milyak marries Dennis Marron

Milyak, a 37-year-old development manager at a conservation nonprofit, had first spotted Marron during the summer of 2007, when he was jogging through their Alexandria neighborhood. “Ooooh, there’s my boyfriend,” she would think at each sighting.
After several weeks, she approached him at the dog park; they introduced their pets and then themselves. Chatting on a bench, Marron told Milyak he was a chef at the Grille at the Morrison House and Jackson 20 in the Hotel Monaco and told her she should stop by for a bite sometime.
Milyak, who was in the midst of a divorce, was nervous about taking him up on the offer. But when they ran into each other again while walking their dogs, she accepted his invitation to stop off at his house for a beer and promised to visit the restaurant. When she dropped in at the Morrison House with a friend the following week, she intended to stay just for a quick bite. But Marron instructed his staff to take them to a special table and proceeded to serve them a 13-course meal, complete with wine pairings.
“She’s a good eater,” he noticed approvingly as the plates came back clean. She’d already earned points in his book for being a dog lover and a runner with a cool tattoo and good taste in music. So as they had a nightcap to end the evening, he kissed her.
Soon all of his limited free time was spent in her company. But even as he was falling for her, he sensed resistance from Milyak.
“For the first couple months, I pushed away a lot. I was very standoffish,” admits Milyak, who was still waiting for her divorce to be finalized. “I just had really intense feelings, and I was afraid of them.’”
By March, Marron, now 37, was exhausted from his efforts to break through and told her he couldn’t do it anymore.
“It was just really hard, because I kinda knew I did that to myself — or to us,” Milyak says.
A few weeks later she came home to find a package on her front porch. Inside was a bat box — like a birdhouse, but for bats. It was something Milyak, an animal lover, had told Marron she wanted on one of their first dates. She cried as she unwrapped it, knowing it meant that he truly understood her and listened when she spoke. She hoped it might also mean they still had a chance.
So when Marron texted her at midnight on her birthday and asked if he could come over for a drink, she said yes. They warily sat on opposite ends of the porch until he told her what she’d been waiting to hear: “I miss you.”
She gave herself wholeheartedly to the relationship this time, and invited Marron to move in with her that summer. With him she was happy, relaxed and affectionate in a way she’d never been before. For years, she’d been accused of being too guarded, but Marron, she says, showed her so much “caring and loving, it kinda broke me down.”
“We draw the good out of each other,” Marron agrees. “We want to make each other better.”
Soon Marron began talking about marriage, a subject Milyak preferred to avoid. But on vacation in Ireland the following August, Marron asked her directly: “What would you say if I asked you to marry me right now?”
“I would say, ‘Why do we need to get married?’ ” she responded. In her eyes they were already committed to each other.
“I’m not asking you ever again,” he told her with a tone of resignation. “If you want to get married, you have to ask me.”
By the next summer, her thinking had changed. They wanted a family together, and she’d begun to see the value of a permanent commitment.
So Milyak had rings made, and in October she returned to the bench at the park where they first met and carved a heart around their initials. The next night she led Marron and their dogs back to the park.
Not quite believing his eyes as she pulled out the ring, Marron responded, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” she said, before adding, “but maybe it can be a long engagement.”
But her thinking on that changed, too. “I’ve sat on this. I’ve thought about it thoroughly. I know what I’m doing,” she says. “And there’s no hesi­ta­tion.”
On March 13, a Sunday when spring seemed to dawn in Washington, Marron and Milyak exchanged vows by the banks of the Potomac near Mount Vernon in front of 50 guests. Before heading to a pig roast at the Hotel Monaco, their friend read the lyrics of a Johnny Cash song, “ ’Cause I Love You.”

“I’ll sweep out your chimney
yes, and I will bring you flowers
yes, and I will do for you
Most anything you want me to.”