Posts Tagged ‘Indie Wedding Dress’

Jan 2012

*Connie, Interactive Designer & Brian, Writer*

Today’s wedding graduate post is TheBest (all one word). First, there is a letter from the Groom to his past self, which is so good I was quoting it to everyone. Second, there is the discussion of how, when you’re trying really hard to have a low-stress wedding, you can often stress yourselves out… you know… trying to have a low stress wedding. And as my groom always reminded me during my wedding breakdowns, trying to have an affordable wedding and doing it all yourself is just hard. And that’s normal. So, let’s get ready for hilarious/awesome:

From the Groom:

Dear Pre-wedding Version of Me (You),

My goodness! Much as you might surmise, I am very relieved that the planning/pre-wedding stage of my (your) relationship with Connie (Connie) has finally come to an end. I now spend every day simply enjoying the act of being married to her, instead of spending every weekend and most weeknights preparing and shopping and checking and balancing and crafting and all of those tasks you are most certainly mired in.

But I want you to know something very important: everything you are doing, whether you are enjoying it in the moment or not, is completely worth every second. It came out fantastically, living up to and exceeding the image that I (you) had (have) in my (your) head about how it would turn out. Sure, there are things I should possibly tell you to change—a few invitees here and there, things not to bother retrieving because they really didn’t come into play in the actual proceedings—but as much as I may want to do so, you and I both know that this will cause a temporal paradox that will inevitably change the timeline as we know it, like making us have a robot president, or causing pedestrians to be randomly attacked by mutant grandmothers or something, and/or make the whole darn universe explode into tiny pieces.

The advice that I can give is this: keep your calm, and remain a rock amid rough seas. Know that the pressure she feels is put on herself by A) Her motivation to excel at crafty-type ventures and B) Her desire to outdo the events of everyone she knows, for all time. Understand that she also needs you (me) to show that you care as much as she does, despite that I (you) know you already do, so support her and be willing to get frazzled once in a while.

Remember that these days only exist because of how much you love one another, and not because you are thinking of buying a Goodwill and must constantly visit every one of them to assess their wares. Continue onward, and you (I) will one day enjoy the post-marital shenanigans that I (you) treasure every day and for all time!

Good Luck,

Me (You)

Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Connie & Brian

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 17 Comments »

Jan 2012

Wordless Wedding: Angela & Alex

* Angela, Corporate Social Responsibility & Alex, Nonprofit Manager * Photographer: Jonas Seaman (APW Sponsor) * Soundtrack for reading: “Rainbow Connection” by Kermit the Frog *

The Info—Photography: Jonas Seaman (APW Sponsor) / Secondary Photography: Mary Ellen Williamson and Alyssa Wilcox / Ceremony Venue: Parsons Garden / Reception Venue: Urban Light Studios / Catering: Skillet Street Food & Parfait Organic Artisan Ice Cream / Dress: Blue Sky Bridal

Other cool stuff we should know about: On the morning of our wedding, my dog ate my veil. It was quite an entertaining, albiet unexpected, element of our wedding day. It was high-drama right after it happened, then pretty hilarious a couple of hours later when we had a new veil from Nordstrom in-hand.

Veil fiasco aside, we love dogs and have a passion for animal adoption, so we named the tables at our reception after rescue dogs that have touched our lives. So, instead of naming them tables 1, 2, 3 and so on, we named them after dogs past and present that either we or our family/friends have rescued. We included a photo and a brief story about each dog at his/her table. In addition, on our wedding website, we invited guests to make donations to the Humane Society in lieu of wedding gifts from our registry.

One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: Intimate, laid-back and whimsical.

Favorite thing about the wedding: Sharing it with family and close friends

This post includes Sponsors, who are a key part of supporting APW. For more information, see our Directory page for Jonas Seaman.

Posted in: Wedding Graduates, Wordless Weddings | 27 Comments »

Jan 2012

Wedding Graduates: Alix & Shawn

*Alix & Shawn*

To build on yesterday’s conversation about Why A Wedding, we have Alix, whose wedding in LA’s Natural History Museum makes me want to hug the world. But what I find particularly fascinating about Alix‘s Wedding Graduate post is how she talks about figuring out what a marriage is when your parent have been divorced for as long as you can remember. And, taxidermied animals aside, the part of this post that makes me gasp with delight is this line, “The thing is that the experience of getting married is in some ways indescribable. It is as if you walk through this invisible door and something happens, but you can only see it by looking back through the door at where you were before.” Because that’s how it was for me, too.

From the beginning planning our wedding was strange for me in that the whole idea of marriage had been so foreign my whole life. My parents were divorced before I was one, so I had no memories of them together. While I always believed in commitment, I was not raised with the concept of marriage and for most of my life I did not imagine I would get married.

It wasn’t until the past few years when Shawn and I started attending our friends’ weddings did I begin to see the significance of marriage and actual weddings themselves. When Shawn asked me to marry him it was as if this weight I had been carrying around my whole life without realizing it was lifted from my shoulders. I had found the one person I wanted and he had found me.

So we embarked on planning this event, this huge party tied down to tradition and loaded with emotional significance. Despite my excitement, it was difficult for me at first. While there were the usual stresses of choosing venues and wardrobe and staying within our budget, the hardest part was feeling like I was alone.

I didn’t feel like I had that core group of friends or a close family to help me through the process. It wasn’t that the people close to me were absent, I just didn’t know how to ask them to be a part of the experience with me. Then I found APW and all the intelligent, thoughtful ladies who inspired me and helped me through the process with their own stories. I was no longer alone.

When I started to imagine our wedding I imagined an intimate outdoor affair where we would be surrounded by those closest to us in the midst of nature. This was my dream. Shawn on the other hand was adamant about having an indoor wedding. He warned me about what happens when it rains on outdoor weddings. I proclaimed that it never rains in sunny Los Angeles.

Ultimately, we agreed to have the wedding indoors, in the Natural History Museum. If we weren’t going to be married outside, we were at least going to be married surrounded by taxidermied animals. Needless to say, it poured on the day of our wedding. The skies opened up and let down a flood of water, and in a way it was one of my favorite parts of the day as we still had the fury of nature in the middle of the city. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Alix & Shawn

Posted in: Wedding Graduates | 29 Comments »

Feb 2012

Wedding Graduates: Dianne & Chuck

*Dianne Callahan, Deputy Executive Director, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society a.k.a. Fundraiser & Chuck Callahan, Sr. Systems Analyst, US Defense Media Center a.k.a. Nerd*

Today’s post is profoundly overwhelming in an Everyone Has To Read This way, and also in a Not At All Safe For Work You Will Be Bawling At Your Desk way. But for me, it’s way more special than that. Dianne has been reading APW since the very beginning, and in my fourth month of blogging, I wrote about her $10,000 wedding in reverse, where she worked to raise $10,000 for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) Light The Night Walk. But it’s more than that. At the LA book tour stop, which was my true hometown stop (more on that tomorrow), I started by saying that I’d founded APW because nothing I saw in wedding media bore any resemblance to the backyard weddings that happened where I grew up. And Dianne lives just a few blocks away from the house where I spent the first twenty-two years of my life. So, I’m proud to bring you a wedding from my hometown and from a woman I deeply respect. Now, I’m sure you’ll all join me with a love intervention for Dianne and Chuck, and you will send them your good wishes and/or prayers. I hope this makes all of us think about what our marriages really mean.

Last September, my amazing husband, Chuck, and I celebrated our third anniversary. Actually, we put off celebrating it until November, which is our tradition. We put off our anniversary celebration each year because we chose to combine our 2008 wedding with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s (LLS) Light The Night Walk, and since I’ve been working for LLS for almost three years now and am in charge of the Light The Night campaign, our anniversary falls in my busiest time. So Chuck helps me by serving as one of our lead volunteers for the event so we can raise lots of money for this precious mission, and we wait a couple of months to celebrate our precious anniversary. Except for this year. This year, instead of getting away for a sweet weekend together, we were getting the news that my aggressive cancer had returned and once again I would have to fight for my life.

Which brings me to “…in sickness and in health…” You need to know that Chuck knew what he was getting into when he said those words during our traditional wedding vows. You see, Chuck actually proposed to me in a hospital room the night we found out that I had an aggressive form of stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. We had only been dating three months. That night, I told him he should run, that he deserved to be with someone healthy, someone who wasn’t going to lose her hair and maybe her life. His response? “When God gives you a gift, you don’t give it back.” He told me he was not going to run and that he already knew that he wanted to spend the rest of our lives together, however long that might be. He said he didn’t ever want me to worry that he would leave my side through whatever we faced. He asked me to marry him that night, knowing that my cancer was incurable and would, undoubtedly, come back.

I suppose it is natural that the thing I remember most about our wedding is standing beneath the tree in our backyard in front of our family and closest friends as Chuck and I repeated those age-old vows. Promises to love and honor one another in good times and in bad, in richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. The promises my parents made to each other that carried them through almost sixty years of marriage before my dad’s death just six months before our wedding. Promises that even today seem to echo back to us from all of the couples who went before us into this sacrament called marriage.

There were many things about our wedding (the second for each of us) that were not traditional that I loved. I wore an aqua dress and a white flower in my hair (that had grown out to almost 3 inches!). We greeted and mingled with our guests before the ceremony. We walked together down the aisle as my sister sang “When You Wish Upon A Star” (the music for the recessional was from Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade). Our attendants were Chuck’s son and daughter—my dream of being a mom answered at last! Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Dianne & Chuck

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Graduates, Wedding Graduates Return | 34 Comments »

Feb 2012

Wordless Wedding: Sarah & Jeffrey

* Sarah, Theatre Nerd & Jeffrey, Dance Nerd * Photographer: Emilia Jane (APW Sponsor) * Soundtrack for reading: “In My Life” by The Beatles*

The Info—Photography: Emilia Jane Photography (APW Sponsor) / Bride’s Dress and Coat: Crafty Broads (APW Sponsor) / Venue: mk The Restaurant /Florist: Dilly Lily / Harpist: Ben Melsky / Bride’s Hat with Birdcage Veil: BHLDN / Bride’s Fascinator: PompAndPlumage / Groom & Best Man Suits: Tom James / Hair and Makeup: Cally’s Curls & Co. (Sharon Slater/Bette Schwarz for hair & Kimberly McMahon for makeup)

Other cool stuff we should know about: We got married in the restaurant where we had our first date. (Jeffrey’s idea!) We got married on a Monday in Chicago in December two days after I finished the run of a show I was acting in. It was the soonest we could get married and it was great. The people we love came to Chicago even though it was cold. (At first, I had panicked, “Wait! We have to get married in the summer so we can have the ceremony in a field like all these weddings online! Wait! We’re indoor city people, that makes no sense!”)

As their gift, our friends did performances—one of my friends from college played the harp during cocktails and the ceremony, two of Jeffrey’s friends who are professional dancers performed a dance piece for us (to Rihanna, yes!) and Jeff’s dance partner who is a children’s librarian/storyteller got the entire group to participate in a story!

One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: Joyful and intimate, with a wild dance party.

Favorite thing about the wedding: Jeffrey and I created our ceremony together, with lots of help from his sister Karen. (We wanted someone who knows and loves us to perform the ceremony, and as a dedicated Buddhist, we knew she would create a positive, meditative vibe.) I’m Jewish (though not all of my family is) and Jeffrey is Buddhist (though not all of his family is) so we had no set template to go on, but we wanted to involve our families. We began with a lovingkindness mediation and ended with smashing the glass and a mazel tov. My sister rang the meditation bells. My dad gave the Jewish blessing over the children/priestly benediction—which I’ve heard once every week since I was a wee girl—and my mom read the wedding blessing from the Reform prayerbook. I was apprehensive at first about writing our own vows, but that’s what we did when none of the templates seemed to fit us. Being able to surprise each other during the ceremony with the words we had chosen was like giving an enormous gift. We also had our first dance during the ceremony—it was a meaningful moment to just hold each other and be symbolically married. We met dancing, so it seemed especially fitting for us. (Another of Jeffrey’s ideas, and he surprised me with the song, see above.) Lots of tears, laughter, music, and moments of powerful silence. I’m also amazed at the explosive dance party we managed to fit into a relatively small space!

This post includes Sponsors, who are a key part of supporting APW. For more information, see our Directory pages for Emilia Jane Photography and Crafty Broads.

Posted in: Wedding Graduates, Wordless Weddings | 25 Comments »

Mar 2012

Wordless Wedding: Ashley & Minh

I never introduce Wordless Weddings, but today I am! This wedding was shot by my good girlfriend Jamie, one of the first friends I made through blogging (and one of APW’s first ever wedding graduates) and her partner Michelle, as part of their brand new collaboration Rad + In Love in Southern California. J, I’m so proud. —M

* Ashley, Artist and Part-time Treasure Hunter & Minh, Student and Part-time Treasure Hunter * Photographer: Rad + In Love * Soundtrack for reading: “Everlasting Light” by The Black Keys, or if you’re the crying type “Welcome Home” by Radical Face

One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe of the wedding: Come hungry, leave happy.

Rad + In Love (8)