* Lin, Product Manager & Pat, Optician * Photographer: TC Fitzgerald * Soundtrack for reading: “I Got You” by Wilco *
One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: A happy day at the farm surrounded by awesome family, friends, great food, and lots and lots of dancing.
Continue reading Wordless Wedding: Lin & Pat’s DIT Massachusetts Farm Wedding
It’s crazy to think how much technology has changed the way we interact with our weddings. I’ve only been married a few short years, but thanks to iPhones and…well, let’s face it, iPhones, the landscape now is completely different than it was then. In some ways this is not so great (ever been to a wedding where the guests spent more time recording the ceremony than experiencing it?) and in other ways, it’s kind of awesome. In the time since we ran our first ever How To DIY Your Wedding Photography post, advancements in technology and user-friendly social media platforms have made wedding photography even more accessible than ever. So today I’m excited to introduce Mallory, who crowdsourced her kick ass wedding photos through Instagram. And she wants to show you how.
—Maddie
Crowdsource Your Wedding Photos (With Instagram)
Early in our planning, we agreed that we didn’t want hundreds of posed wedding photos. Flipping through years of pictures, the candids always transport us back to the moment the picture was taken. Our favorites include amateur snapshots taken by family and friends with cheap digital cameras, iPhones, and even a few wind-up disposables.
So we decided to crowdsource our wedding photos.
I was in the middle of launching a project at work, using a mix of social media tools to compile photos from students at my university. And then it hit me—we could use this same idea for our wedding! And so project “Instagram Our Wedding” was born.
You will need these (free) tools:
• Instagram mobile app
• Predetermined wedding hashtag
• Online photo storage site
• Account on ifttt.com
• Several wedding guests with smart phones
From there you just have to:
Continue reading How to Crowdsource Your Wedding Photos with Instagram
Today’s wedding is, in a sense, about getting married young (and it gives me such a funny feeling about being thirty-two and remembering twenty-one, which seems like seconds ago). But really, Laura’s story is about being present in the moment, accepting ourselves for exactly who we are, turning off that voice that tells us that our wedding has to be like the other weddings and that we’ll never be good enough. Laura’s letter to herself back at the beginning of planning is the best advice we could ever hope for. Listen:
Dear Laura (the twenty-one-year-old college graduate, who has no idea how to plan a wedding):
First step: breathe. Second step: smile. Third step: Let your inner-child shine!
Tim, your boyfriend of four years, has just proposed and you are already set on the theme of your wedding. You want it to be homegrown, because that is what the two of you are, homegrown. Family is the most important thing, so you both choose your aunt’s house as the location. You were blessed to be able to fit into your mother’s fabulous 70s wedding dress. Food comes next, so you plan menus with your mom and dream up wonderful ideas involving farmers markets and family reunions. Then you go back to college for your last semester.
You’re sitting in your dorm room, looking at some Etsy page for customized wedding hangers (something you don’t want and you really don’t need), worrying about whether your wedding will be the “right kind” of wedding instead of finishing your sixty-page senior research paper. Don’t you remember, Laura? This is a paper you’ve wanted to write since you started college, and it’s here. So stop looking up how to make felt balls or what song is best for your bridal entrance and instead write that awesome paper, screw around with your friends, sleep in hammocks outside, and stay out all night having a blast and doing cartwheels on the lawns of your college with your fiancé. That is what matters most, that you always find true Joy in life.
But okay, I know, it took a while to learn that lesson. You graduate and come home with your fiancé to live with your parents while you plan your wedding. Now you are sleeping in your bed from eighth grade while your soon-to-be groom is sleeping on the futon couch in the office. In your eyes, you went from badass college graduate to “tween” bride-to-be in one week. You tried to plan the perfect wedding, but everywhere you looked, all the photos, blogs, websites, albums were about “women” getting married. Not twenty-one-year-old post-college chicks, but thirty-two-year-olds, with savvy jobs, awesome vacation spots, who are always photographed looking sexy and pulled-together while holding some cocktail that’s pink or orange and has a flirty name like “Between the Sheets.”
The problem was that you were stuck in a cycle you knew too well, where you kept comparing yourself to others and feeling nothing but guilt. You looked at other weddings and wondered if you measured up, if you were confident and capable of being a perfect “grown-up” bride. You saw the photographers, the chefs, the table settings, the whimsical decorations that look hand-done yet professional at the same time. You told yourself you had the skills to do everything DIY even though your last craft project resulted in a C- and a disappointed sigh from your teacher. You decide to go to an event rental place called “Chic” and felt small and awkward while standing in their showroom instead of feeling, well, chic. You didn’t know what was wrong and why you felt so unaccomplished, when you should have felt amazing.
Well guess what. I can tell you exactly what was wrong. You were feeling guilty about your age, your youthfulness, your child-like pizzazz. You looked to your peers who were also getting married that summer for support, and instead of seeing weddings like the one you wanted, you saw thirty-two-year-old-inspired weddings with three photographers, a castle location, and pashiminas for every guest. You panicked and felt unsuccessful in all your ideas and plans. You didn’t know what to do. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Laura & Tim’s Homegrown Backyard Wedding
* Emily, Nonprofit & Colm, Finance * Photographer: Paul Rowley and Family & Friends * Soundtrack for reading, officially: “Rainy Night in Soho” by The Pogues * Soundtrack for reading, unofficially: “Call Me Maybe” by the inimitable Carly Rae Jepsen *
One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: A debaucherous celebration of our international romance featuring a Brooklyn backdrop and buckets o’ beer.
It’s been a long while since we had a self-catered wedding here at APW (which if you’re considering catering your own wedding, we’ve got helpful tips for making it happen here and here). So I’m thrilled to have Amanda and Shaun here today to tell the story of how they made all the food for their own wedding, and how doing so ended up meaning so much more to them than they expected. But the thing is, what I appreciate most about Amanda and Shaun’s post isn’t that they took on the daunting task of catering their own wedding (though, to be clear, I think that is seriously rad). It’s that they did it because it was a path that felt authentic to them. Because while self-catering is certainly not for everyone (I mean, I can barely make spaghetti), shutting down the noise that says your wedding has to be the same as everyone else’s or the most different thing ever and instead saying, “Here’s what we’re doing because it feels right for us,” now that is something I can get behind.
—Maddie for Maternity Leave
Shaun and I were married almost two years ago in Toronto. The morning of our wedding, we awoke to find that what was promised to be a light dusting of flurries had instead been replaced with six inches of snow. While we ran last-minute errands and worried about our guests, my grandmother assured my mom that since I had always loved winter, it was the perfect day for our wedding. Shaun and I got engaged the previous August, and I—in that romanticizing of winter which can only be convincing at the end of a hot summer—had pictured just such a day.
What neither of us anticipated back in August was how many expectations and frustrations we would encounter along the way to January and marriage. We weren’t trying to be subversive, but we quickly discovered that in the world of weddings w-o-r-k was the dirtiest four-letter word around. When we talked about our wedding plans, the most common reaction was, “Oh, but that sounds like a lot of work!” uttered with a tone that seemed to suggest, “Oh, but you must be really poor!” Apparently, the only work we were supposed to do was endlessly research and agonize over everything, and then pay someone else to do it. We could have done this, had we wanted to, but we were too independent, thrifty, and particular. And besides, we had the slightly delusional conviction that we could do everything better ourselves—with help, that is.
Our decision to cook our wedding food drew different reactions: bewilderment, frustration, pity, indifference, and, thankfully, offers of help. Many times, people close to us tried to reason with us, and we seriously considered catering at several points. At times, cooking for about eighty people seemed like an insane task. Several months before the wedding, crazed from indecision, I actually e-mailed the lovely Marie-Ève, of APW self-catering fame, who reassured me that cooking for your own wedding was indeed possible.(Thank you, Marie-Ève).
For me, cooking food for a wedding was a long-standing fantasy. I thought of scenes from movies where families and friends were all sweaty and flour-coated in the kitchen (I watched Like Water for Chocolate several times in my formative years). I knew we were in for a lot of hard work, but this work was, in part, what I craved: a practical, grounded ritual of preparation to balance the awe-inducing realization that we were promising to be together for our lives. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Amanda & Shaun
* Caitlyn, Assistant in a Child Health Research Centre & Adam, Film and Music Specialist/Podcaster * Photographer: Adam’s cousin, Julian Johnson * Soundtrack for reading: “This Will Be Our Year” by The Zombies *
One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: A beautifully relaxed wedding on a perfect, golden Melbourne day, surrounded by friends, family, and an abundance of flowers.
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