one year ago today…

…I married my love.

And I'm increasingly convinced that it was an excellent decision! He is my best friend…the one I can trust with everything. The one who makes me laugh until I can't breathe. The one who holds me when I'm crying for no apparent reason, without trying to fix me. He provides for me, and helps me, and fixes my car and eats whatever I cook without complaining.

Babe, you are a treasure. Thanks for marrying me. I'm looking forward to many anniversaries to come!

For all of you who are not my husband (he's seen the photos a few times!), here are more pictures of our wedding day. With some explanatory notes.

Note: all images courtesy of SoulCam Photography. More info on Scott and Robyn at the end of the post.

The "free" dress. Also a great example of how strong command hooks are.


Me wondering if they could just drop it over my head from here.


my shoes were a ten dollar bargain, with vintage clip-on earrings that kept falling off. Hot glue gun to the rescue!


Thanks to my amazing friend/hair stylist/makeup artist, most people probably didn't realize that I was sick. Another friend/bridesmaid recommended several supplements/herbal remedies and such, so I was drinking weird teas and extracts and really really hoping I didn't sneeze on my groom.


Here's my handsome man…not the slightest bit nervous, he says. Being in the Air Force, he's used to pomp and circumstance and ceremonies & such.


I loved my flowers. I had seen an all-green boquet at a wedding years ago, and it had stuck in my mind. Looking at it now, I still love it, but it maybe doesn't go all that well with everything else. Oh well. It's dried beautifully into shades of cream and green and brown and sits in my dining room. The necklace was my "something borrowed." The friend who lent it, along with a beautiful pair of earrings, also jumped in at the last minute and took care of all those weird details you don't even think of until that day. Like fixing all the bridesmaids' necklaces (magnetic clasps and chokers don't mix all that well!) and handing off payment to the espresso bar guy.


I loved the bridesmaids' bouquets! Those silvery gray ball things…I never knew anything like that existed! that's really a living, growing thing!


Since it was January, we had a snow girl, rather than a flower girl. I found silver snowflake confetti, and she scattered it down the aisle. From what I hear, she was bound and determined to scatter ALL of it, and stood at the end for a bit, trying to empty the basket!


Good thing she didn't dump all of them, though, as the remaining ones gave her something to do during the ceremony!


We said our vows, poured our sand and sealed it all with a kiss. or two.


I think I started to relax as we walked back down the aisle together. The important part was over, and at the end of the day, it's the ceremony, the vows, the things we said to each other before God and all those witnesses that really mattered. From this point on, the soup could be burned, the chairs could collapse, the heat could not work, but we would still be married.




At our first meeting with the wedding coordinator, when she and I were gabbing on about trees with white lights on the stage, and silver branches and snowflakes here and there, and where everyone would stand and who was walking me down the aisle and prelude and postlude music and all that, Dave was mostly concerned with what time he had to show up, and where he could get his uniform on. I know there are some grooms who are very involved in the look and feel of a wedding, but Dave was happy to let me handle most of those kinds of details! There was, however, one thing that he was insistent about. I was informed early on in the planning that we would have a "McCracken Cake" for our reception! Betty is a friend of Dave's family, and has been baking cakes for them pretty much all his life. It was as delicious as it was beautiful!


The photographers have this fun thing they do called the crazy booth. We failed to have it announced early on in the reception, so we don't have as many random photos of the guests as we may otherwise have had, but it made for some really fun shots as things started wrapping up.

I am much more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it!


the brother and his wife


the other brother and his wife


my girls :) I could write entire posts on each of these girls and the unique relationship I have with every one of them. I love them each dearly…and am so very glad they were all able to be there for this day. I also really love their outfits! I bought enough tops for me to have one, too, and I've worn it several times since then.


another group of ladies whom I love.


I met our wedding photographer almost 20 years ago, when I was a student at Word of Life Bible Institute, and he was the staff photographer there in the upstate New York headquarters. We didn't stay in touch much, but a few years ago, in one of my phases of googling people from my past, I came across his blog and found that he and his wife were really stellar wedding photographers! I loved the idea of someone I knew doing our photos…and knew that we would get some great images of our day with Scott and Robyn on the job. I'm so glad they were willing to travel, toddler and all, and I really love the images they captured.

details

A year ago right now, I was fighting a head cold, getting my eyebrows waxed, and thinking about all the last minute details that needed to get done before my wedding. My love surprised me by getting to town a whole day early (right after the eyebrow wax…I was still all pink and surprised-looking!), and we had a romantic late-night Walmart run for I don't even remember what.

In all the time that I was planning things, I was browsing lots of wedding planning blogs, checking out all the great details that other brides were working on…seemingly on an unlimited budget of both money and time. How they managed to not only do the planning of every intricate detail, but also blog about it is a mystery to me. Except that I've come to the conclusion that most of the more successful blogger types (the ones who post a lot and attract thousands of readers, etc) are much more type A personalities than I am. I'm so type B…not a single driven bone in my body.

So, in the true spirit of a total procrastinator, I have decided to post some of the wedding details now…a year later! I did manage to take some photos along the way, but not a ton…so we'll see what I can dig up.

As a graphic designer, I simply couldn't have anyone else design our wedding invitations. I've been doing invitations for others for years, and it just seemed silly to turn elsewhere for my own. Besides, the ones I would have really wanted were insanely, crazily expensive. Like eight bucks PER INVITATION. Nope. Can't do it.

I really like the look of bare branches, so went with that as a theme of sorts for our invitations and decor. I figured it would fit with the January in New York thing. My husband jokes that we decorated our wedding with dead trees. He's got a point there.


I had the printer letterpress the branches in silver ink. I failed to say "hey, the thing I love about letterpress is the nice deep indentation that adds texture to your final printed piece." So he didn't really hit them all that hard, and no one would know these had been letterpress printed. However, 98% of the people I sent the invitations to probably don't even know or care about the differences between offset and letterpress printing. But I still get that disappointed feeling in my stomach when I think about it too much.
I was going to put in dummy text so I wouldn't be annoyed about the blurring…but I didn't have the right typeface handy at the moment, and I'm not taking the time to hunt it down. Sorry.


If I don't tell you there's something wrong with these, you won't know, right? Okay. I won't tell you. I'll just say that I need to learn to communicate more clearly to people whom I am paying to render a service. Like hair stylists. And printers.


I have this mild obsession with really nice paper. Thick, textured and beautifully colored. I went with a heavy barely-ivory paper for the invitations, and these gorgeous silver envelopes. I've known for years that I wanted an odd size for my invitations…something to make them stand out a bit. So I went with the long skinny envelopes that open on the narrow end. I designed mailing labels with the branch art that wrapped around from front to back, so I could get the return address printed on the same label as the recipient's address. The green love stamps worked out okay, though they're not my favorites.

I had grandiose plans of scouring the woods and harvesting branches myself. But then I found bunches of willow branches already trimmed and bundled at the Christmas Tree Shop for maybe 2.99 a bundle. Yep, that saved me some time. A few cans of silver spray paint later, and we had "décor," thanks to a very helpful bridesmaid and her basement!


The mom of my maid of honor also came to save the day when she found these white branches on clearance after Christmas. She loaded up her trunk full of them for me!


Another good friend had a mother-in-law who had owned a bridal shop for years, but had just closed it down. She had a few dozen dresses that she just really wanted to be rid of. So my friend brought a bunch back with her after a visit, and we played bridal shop for an evening. I found a lovely dress that was "me." Very simple, with really long flowing chiffon sleeves. Do you know how hard it is to find a wedding dress with sleeves?? Bummer that it was a size too small. But yet another friend recommended a seamstress for me to go see, and it turned out that this seamstress said she could let the dress out enough to work…but I would have to find a lace to match what was there already. She was pretty doubtful I'd be able to. But the Lord really does care about all those silly little details, it seems, because the first place I went, I found the perfect lace. I have looked and looked at the dress, trying to find the seam where she added to the original, and I can't find it.


Having the dress given to me was great…especially since when all was said and done, the alterations cost as much as many dresses out there!

For centerpieces at the reception, I grabbed a bunch of glass trifle bowls from the Christmas Tree Shop, poured in some white sand we got at Home Depot (it was stored outside, and frozen, hence how clumpy it was!), sprinkled some stones on top that I had gathered from the shore of lake Ontario and spray-painted silver, then stuck some of the white sticks in there.


Bead garlands around the base added a pop of color. I can't find any photos of them in the photographers' shots, but here's one somebody snapped during the set up the day before the wedding.


My maid of honor had the idea of getting mugs custom made and having them be used at the reception and taken home as the favors. We ended up going with a standard coffee mug style, since the cappuccino style mug was so huge and way more expensive. These were a huge hit, and since there were lots of extras, people took home entire sets of them (in the white paper gift bags we provided)! I wanted them to be a design that didn't scream "wedding favor" yet still reminded people of Dave & I and our wedding day. So I used the graphics from the invitations and put the date on the back of the mug, really small. Another advantage to this mug style was that it could be printed all the way around. perfecto.




The paper lanterns were a challenge to hang. I have to say that being rather sick the day before the wedding worked out to my advantage. I showed up at the reception site with all the stuff I had collected for decorating and promptly got sent home to rest because I felt (and looked!) so awful. The team of volunteers was amazing…pulled together by my oh-so-amazing maid of honor. They transformed the place into a happy, bright fun space for our afternoon reception of soups, espresso bar & desserts.

I went home and from a mostly horizontal position on my couch, designed the programs for the ceremony.


I had seen another bride and groom use sand instead of a unity candle, and really like the idea. I have been to a lot of weddings, and have found that as far as symbolism goes, the unity candle falls rather short. The main candle is supposed to symbolize the joining together of the two individual lives into one…which is great, except that so often, the bride & groom have a hard time getting that candle to light (I've seen the pastor step in and do it for them on occasion!), and then ten minutes later, that candle gets blown out so it can be taken off the stage. I liked the sand, because once you pour the individual vases of sand together, there is no way you can separate them.

We took it one step further, and had some people who had played an important role in our lives (including the bridal party) add small vials of sand to the vases our moms carried. So that is the part that I called "the walk of our lives" on the program.

I am so grateful to so many people who helped plan our day. The ladies who baked desserts, everyone who showed up to help decorate, the musicians who practiced and practiced and played/sang so beautifully at our ceremony, my maid of honor who totally took over working with the caterer, the family friend who made the lovely & delicious cake, the caterer and her team who worked in less than ideal conditions and made us a delightful lunch spread. To tell you of the brie appetizers and the various toppings she created would be another post entirely.

I'm planning to share more of the finished details in another post soon, with photos from the professionals. Stay tuned!

the gift of warmth

If you had asked me 20 years ago what the best month for a wedding would be, I would for sure have said October. Maybe September. Certainly not January. But that's how it worked out for me…a January wedding, in a string of weeks of below-freezing days, and on day three of a terrible head cold for me. Not ideal, but hey, in the end, we were married, and that was what mattered the most.

We received so many amazing gifts that day and in the days leading up to the wedding, and a few in the days since…some beautiful things we would never have thought of needing, and some totally practical things we knew we "needed" (I realize that the term "need" is relative, and could be a whole post on its own…). Anyway, one of my favorite gifts was from a friend and bridesmaid and knitter extraordinaire…the gift of a great cozy blanket to chase away the chills of a winter honeymoon (yes, we stayed up North).


Several things I love about this blanket:
1. made by hand by Andrea.
2. made by hand by Andrea while traveling all through central Europe…this blanket has been to several different countries at various stages of it's development, while Andrea traveled to teaching engagements and kids camp, etc. in her life as a missionary in the Czech Republic
3. the color, the pattern, the weight of the yarn…it all comes together to make the perfect blanket for a graphic designer who loves neutral colors and a heavy blanket on me as I sleep! And it goes great with the blue coverlet we found…bonus!



the top photo is where the blanket has found its home…at the foot of the bed during the day (on the days that I make the bed…which are far more than they used to be!!). the middle photo is at the house where we stayed for a week after the wedding…a really lovely rental property in Niagara-on-the-lake that my husband found for us.

where God proves once again that there is nothing too hard for Him

For the past year, Kim had been praying for no rain on her wedding date so the ceremony could be held outside. I hit the road in Rochester for the hour-long drive and drove through visibility-impairing rain much of my way there. I arrived around noon to a light misty drizzle.


Kim showed me the verses she had printed out…with the statement at the bottom that "God is in control and He will choose the weather." We spent the next 3+ hours checking the windows, judging the intensity of the rain and hoping for breaks in the clouds.


Here we are, testing the lighting for having the ceremony under the roof of the veranda. The chairs were set up inside, ready to go.


But wait! Is that sunshine I see?


Decision time. The coordinator said they'd haul out the outside chairs and set them up, in case it clears.


And then, the God who asks Jeremiah "is there anything too hard for me?" and of whom the disciples exclaimed "even the wind and the waves obey Him" steps in and holds back the rain. He held it off for the ceremony and all the photos afterwards…even for a trip onto the golf course.

When we got back to the lodge, it started raining again.

What have you been thinking is "too hard" for God?

(stay tuned for more pics of the wedding soon!)

we interrupt the long, drawn-out silence on this blog to announce…

yep. mmm-hmmm. that's my hand.

this is what it used to look like:


notice anything different?

maybe this will help:


and really, he's happy about this…this is his happy face.

couldn't think of a title, but i missed the orange

I am finally getting somewhere with the 1200+ photos I took for the last wedding I shot! I tend to get a bit overwhelmed with the enormity of a task like that, but once I get into it, I find some gems and I realize that I should have started sooner (if I could have). Fortunately, this bride and groom is quite understanding and hasn't hassled me at all!!


This was my first shoot in our new church building, so it was the first time I had quick access to the height needed for an overall shot of the sanctuary during the ceremony. Fortunately, I didn't trip on the stairs or make a commotion or anything! Take note of the huge pile of rose petals halfway down the aisle, where the flower girl dumped them out, froze, then turned and ran back into the arms of the wedding coordinator rather than endure any more of that nonsense.


This was a great bride to be a bridesmaid for! She just wanted the girls to pick out whatever black dress they wanted, and wear a pink ribbon "somewhere." That was all the direction she gave…and the final look was fun.


I kinda hope this sweet lady in pink is someone special to the bride and/or groom, because I really like the shot regardless, but it would have so much more meaning if this was like the favorite great-aunt who used to babysit one of them or something!


they had the wording of their invitation wrapped around the unity candle. I really like the bejeweled butterflies they had attached.


so, as we were taking the group photos up on the stage, one of these flower arrangements spontaneously fell off its stand. ruh roh. it was lovely while it lasted, though…and it did last through the ceremony!


this was a fun one of the guys…I wasn't sure how it would turn out, with the huge skylights confusing my light meter. No, the groom is not bald…just very blonde! (and by that, I don't mean ditzy blonde, either…I'm referring purely to the color!)


a bit of an overzealous flash…but I like the effect on this getaway shot. It almost seems silly to point out how beautiful the bride is, but I really love this shot…isn't she lovely??


couldn't resist trying this one out. I've seen a few other photographers do something similar and I like the depth it gives. I always loved those photos that have someone holding a photo of…oh, I can't even explain what I mean in words. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?? Actually, now that I think of it, those things kinda irritate me.

Anyway. stay tuned for more…there should be a bunch up in my photo gallery soon.