Remember that wedding picture last Friday that I wanted to eat? The beautiful dreamy one? Well, Britta sent me her wedding graduate post, and that picture was just the tip of the amazing iceberg. I don't even know what to say about this post, other than I love it so so so much. I love that Britta was as neurotic about her wedding dress search as I was, and that she ended up with similarly amazing last minute funky results. I love that she also likes to look at her bank statement to see how rich she is. I love that she likes to get her hands dirty and make things. And the pictures. Oh... the pictures. Here we go:

Adam and I have different versions of our engagement story we tell to different audiences but for the semi-anonymous Internet I’ll go with the vague but true:  I came home sauced one night in September and then it just happened.

We’d been dating for about four years. We met after I finally managed to talk to him following one academic year of stalking him through the engineering building we both spent most of college in.  I’ll always remember the first time I saw him standing there in front of the injection molding machine...

After getting engaged the first wedding decision Adam and I made was that our wedding would be cheap.* I don’t like spending money. He has an expensive motor sports habit. We wanted to throw a huge party for all our friends and family (yes, to celebrate our love, blah-blah) but we had a lot of other things we wanted to do with out funds.  (Him:  spend it on tires, Me:  Look at my bank statement and see how rich I am.)

The second decision was where to hold the wedding. We both went to college at WWU in Bellingham WA. My Dad’s cousin Fred and his wife Beverly live outside Bellingham in a big house on the bay. Every year they throw a 300 person 4th of July party because they love huge parties. Patriotism has very little to do with it. I left a message on Beverly’s phone telling her Adam and I had ‘Big life news”. When she called me back the first words out of her mouth were ‘Are you pregnant? Are you getting married? Are you having the wedding here?” Of course we were! Done and done.

Neither of us had thought much about weddings previously nor did we have particularly opinionated family members to guide us.  So we generally made the whole thing up as we went along.

As we made decisions like ‘choosing a mystery groomsman before the ceremony based on best mustache’ we got a few raised eye brows, but that was part of the fun and I think most people who know us would have been disappointed with less. All we really wanted a was huge party. We were lucky enough to have un-particular and  indulgent friends and family. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Britta & Adam

So, as long time readers of this site know, I go out of my way to make sure I don't just show case a bunch of hyper DIY weddings, that make those of us that are a little, achem, unskilled/lazy in the DIY department feel inferior. But. I have been getting a wave of wedding graduate posts that fall into the, "D*mn girl!" category. As in, "D*mn girl, you did all THAT? Whoa." And Christa and Chris's wedding is firmly in that camp. I mean, he's a chef and they self catered in a serious way. And that alone is pretty bad *ss. But what I love about this wedding is not how much they did themselves, but how right they got it. Christa says, "We pretty much did everything ourselves, so we were familiar with flowers, food, décor, etc.  It also seemed as though so many of the wedding decorations had become part of our lives, which somehow made it more comfortable. So many of our wedding details – and I assure you, I am a detail girl – weren’t just details.  They meant something to us and will give us more memories than just those from our wedding day." And that, I think is the last word on the details versis minuta debate. And with that, I give you the girl herself:

I would love to sit here and tell you that planning my wedding from 2,714 miles away didn’t drive me crazy.  But I can’t, because it did.  Because we didn’t just plan our wedding.  We also catered our wedding, and hosted our wedding.  Did I mention this happened from 2,714 miles away??  Yes, planning drove me crazy.  No, I didn’t enjoy it.  Yes, I wanted to cancel everything and elope.  But we didn’t, and I’m glad we didn’t.  And although it was very hard at times to push through the planning process, I did, in fact, survive!  And I’m confident in saying that you will, too.

Chris and I had a small wedding on a lake-front cottage in New York State – a cottage that has been in Chris’s family for many generations.  And although Chris had spent his whole life taking yearly trips to this cottage and was familiar with the property and the surrounding areas, I had only been there once.  This was a problem for me because I am a visual person - I need to see things to know exactly what I’m getting.  I had to rely on Chris’s memory of what was there – where the trees were, how much room is there on the beach, things like that.  And let’s face it; Chris doesn’t have the best memory.  But just not being able to see the cottage during the planning wasn’t the only thing making me want to cry and pull all my hair out.  In the year leading up to the wedding, the whole cottage was being torn down and rebuilt.  Why we were crazy enough to plan a wedding during this time, I’m not sure I’ll ever know.

But it was so worth it.  It meant so much to Chris to just return to this beautiful property that he’d spent so many sunny days at in years past, yet alone get married there.  Plus it was a really good feeling “breaking in” the new cottage with some really great new memories.  So, how did I know this was the right decision if it was so stressful during planning?  I don’t really know.  It just felt right.  We couldn’t really see ourselves getting married anywhere else. We knew we wanted an intimate, honest wedding and we knew we’d get it if we had it at the cottage.  So we had to let fate take over, and just trust that the cottage would be finished by May 22.  And what did we find when we showed up at the cottage front door four days before the wedding?  That it was breathtaking and absolutely gorgeous.  And I do mean that it literally took my breath away.  And you know what?  No one had to know that the basement was unfinished.

So, let’s talk about food.  Yes, we catered our own wedding for about 50 people.  I know this sounds crazy to many people.  But my husband is a Sous Chef at a five diamond restaurant, so he knew what he was getting into.  He’s fed many more than 50 people in one night before.  We hired a couple friends who also knew what they were doing, and they executed everything the day-of so Chris didn’t have to spend all day in the kitchen.  You can’t keep a chef out of the kitchen; it’s just not going to happen.  A little crazy, yes, but it’s who we are. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Christa & Chris