Weddingbee Blog

Originally posted on September 24, 2008

We’re kicking off our helpful series with a post nominated originally by Mrs. Pony and then nominated 5 times over by other bees in the hive! Mrs. Pony says: “I found Cherry Pie’s writing-their-own-ceremony-post to be extremely helpful when trying to write our own ceremony.”

If you’re planning on writing your own ceremony, Mrs. Cherry Pie gives us some helpful guidelines to craft it.

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When we decided to have a non-officiant friend marry us (remember: anyone can marry you in Montana), I knew it meant that I would have to write our wedding ceremony, or at least contribute heavily to its creation. This was high on my list of “cons” relating to not hiring an officiant, but I very quickly came to enjoy that I had the power to word smith our ceremony in any way I wanted.

I want to share with you what writing our ceremony meant to me, the process I used to write it, and finally, our ceremony text, in case any of these things might inspire one of you to follow the same path.
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This post originally ran on November 10, 2008.

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I know we’re getting a bit too “punny” with the “Secret Life of Bees” titles, but I had to give it a shot.

I even made a PIE CHART to illustrate the four very random “secrets” I’m going to share!

Har har har, I slay me.

Let’s start at the top, shall we?
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I’ve been a busy bee since I started my own business in Seattle. Working from hard is home, and can be isolating…so instead of being a hermit, I decided to see how I could get involved with the community and give back to the industry that inspired me to take charge of my career for myself! It wasn’t hard: one of the first things I learned about was a homegrown wedding charity and fundraiser gala called Get Hitched, Give Hope, and I got involved right away. For the last two years I’ve been working with a fabulous team to make this amazing event possible, and I’m pleased as punch to announce that the 2010 Get Hitched, Give Hope is coming up this week! (Eep! So soon??) If you’ll be in Seattle this Thursday evening and don’t already have plans, I’d love, love, LOVE to see you there. It’s going to be a blast.

What is Get Hitched, Give Hope, exactly? Well, it’s kind of like a cocktail party crossed with a boutique wedding show. Over 100 of Seattle’s top wedding vendors have donated their goods and services (not to mention their time!) to help raise money for a good cause by passing on amazing deals to local brides and grooms.
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Like most people, I suffer from the malady of time passing faster as I get older. When I finished my recaps half a year had passed since our wedding. In the blink of an eye, another half year was gone, and we’d made it to the one-year mark. Last September, we celebrated our paper anniversary in a quiet cliff-top house on Orcas Island, eating wedding cake and watching Fight Club. (Why Fight Club? Don’t ask… I’ve no idea. As for the cake, it was actually DELICIOUS. Ya just have to store it right!)

Aside from cards, cake, and champagne, we only really had one special thing planned…a Trash the Dress shoot with our friend and fabulous wedding photographer, Kate McElwee. I didn’t want to actually “trash” my dress because I had just had it cleaned and was coming to terms with the idea of someday selling it. (I still might. Soon.) I really just wanted an excuse to put it on and feel like a bride again… to celebrate our wedding in style. So that’s what we did!

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Hellooooo ladies! I’ve been a BAD BEE. You’ve not seen hide nor hair of me since my final recap and I have NOT shared with you the photos from our Zihuatanejo honeymoon or any information about it. Well, next weekend is our one-year anniversary and I think it just might be time to relive said honeymoon with all of you wonderful readers.

Recently, I discovered a Seattle charity event for brides that touched my heart and seemed like it would be genuinely useful to the Weddingbee community. I’m sharing with you because it’s for a great cause, and because good deals on high-end wedding goodies might be just what you need!

Here are the deets:

WHO: Well, that’d be you, of course. And other brides-to-be, or anyone who likes a party, really… the goodies up-for-grabs aren’t just limited to wedding or pre-wedding services! Oh! And I’ll be there, too.

WHAT: It’s called Get Hitched, Give Hope, and it’s a one-night event to raise money for Brides Against Breast Cancer & The Making Memories Foundation by offering, at auction and through raffles, fabulous deals on wedding goods and services.
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I feel like an equally fitting name for this post would be “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems”. See, there’s a reason I haven’t talked much (at all?) about finances or budget before this post. We had a budget, to be sure, but no matter what number we set, it kept changing, morphing, and growing as we planned our wedding.

My rationalization, of course, was that this is was once-in-a-lifetime event, and even if we ended up spending more than we thought we would, we’d be OK. I felt like rather than trying to scrimp and save to make every penny fit within the confines of a single number, that being realistic meant understanding that our budget was an estimation, and we would probably overshoot it.

I think you can see where I am going with this. Things add up fast. We definitely haven’t dug ourselves into a hole, but we spent way more than we intended.

{O hai, I can haz budgets?}

About three months into our two-year engagement, when we first started planning our wedding, I envisioned a gorgeous, country-chic affair that would cost us no more than $12K.
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Well, folks, this is it… the last photo recap of our wedding. Next, I’ll share with you our budget breakdown, and then it’s on to our Zihuatanejo honeymoon. After that, who knows!

My first detail recap showed you the people and accessories that gave our celebration special warmth and feeling.

Today’s post focuses on some of the details that made our wedding unique: DIY projects, decorations, food and beverage, transportation, et cetera. I’ve picked lots of colorful photos to share each detail with you and, wherever possible, linked you to my past posts with more information or other external resources. Enjoy!

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Today I’m delighted to share with you the first of two detail-oriented recap posts. These are sort of like recaps of the recap - focused on all the outfits, accessories, DIY projects, decorations, and edible/drinkable pieces of our wedding. Many of you have asked me questions about specific things that we wore, made, or did. Well, these detail posts are the best place to look for all that information, and to see new photos of all the little things that made our wedding day special.

Check it out!
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After our bouquet and garter tosses, the Good Wood Band again took the stage for the second half of their three-hour set. By this time it was very dark - the kind of pitch blackness you can only experience on a cloudy night in the middle of nowhere - and quite cold. But the rain from earlier had still not returned, and between dancing, drinking, and huddling near the wood stove, we were staying warm and content.
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In my last post, I introduced you to our bluegrass band, Good Wood. In my next post, I’ll let you hear some of their music and detail the craziness at the end of the evening. But now, as the band is taking a break between sets, it’s time for us to take the stage for the garter and bouquet toss!

I’ve always been a big fan of bouquet tosses. As a single girl, I loved the symbolism of “passing the torch”. I’ve caught my fair share of flowers over the last few years– and it’s always been a source of great entertainment and pride. Plus, free pretty flowers are a nice souvenir!

The garter toss, however, gives me mixed feelings. I’ve always found the symbolic “deflowering” to be somewhat tasteless, and not particularly relevant (myself having been deflowered a long while ago). Also, while it seems that everyone enjoys watching the groom fish around in the bride’s dress for her undergarments (ack!), my observation has been that male audience participation in the garter toss is always less enthusiastic than female participation in the bouquet toss.

But whatever, Mr. CP seemed eager to toss a garter, and I’m an equal opportunity bride, so I decided to oblige, and we had both…

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Besides our ceremony, the thing I was most looking forward to on our wedding day was the music and dancing. From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to hire a band to play live. It’s not that I was all that adverse to an iPod reception or even to a DJ - I’ve been to plenty of weddings that worked well with them - but I love live music, and neither iPod nor DJ seemed to fit into Montana ambiance or our Americana theme. Our wedding just seemed to call for a band - so I started to search for one.

I found our band, Good Wood, as the first hit in a Google search for local Montana bluegrass. After I listened to a few clips, I thought, “Damn, these guys are good.” I made a mental note to come back to them later. Then, I scoured search results, local directories, and MySpace for more worthy bands and could find nothing that compared. So, I listened to every streaming mp3 that Good Wood had to offer, was suitably impressed, and dropped them a line. Two days after we started entertaining the idea of live music, we had booked our band.

Like our photographer, they were the first we found (by random chance) and the only option we really considered. In both instances, we were more than satisfied. There was no choice - it was fate!

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Today I’ll be sharing more great portraiture from our fabulous wedding photographer, Nicole of Piknik Studios. In my last post, I showed you our individual portraits. This post will showcase the portraits Nicole took of our friends and family, which make excellent, frame-able keepsakes for us and for them.

With full-resolution digital files at our disposal, we were free to dispense copies to our guests in print or email as additional “wedding favors” after the fact. So far, everyone has been very pleased with the down-to-earth, candid photos that were taken of them. And who doesn’t love receiving free, professional portraits as a result of attending a wedding!

Keep this in mind when considering your photographer’s talents, or in giving them a list of shots. Portraiture doesn’t have to be done as a part of a formal sitting or a photo booth. A talented photographer can capture good pictures of your guests as they enjoy your celebration or employ a second shooter to take photos of your friends and family while the main photographer focuses on you. It’s worth it! You will love having portraits of your loved ones, and they’ll be happy to have nice pictures of themselves too.

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Gather ’round, gals & guys, because I have a feeling you’re gonna love this recap.

Today’s post is chock-full of gorgeous, close-up portrait photography taken by Nicole Tavenner of Piknik Studios. I’ve peppered some of my previous recaps with a few of these photos (particularly getting ready, the bus ride, and pre-ceremony shenanigans), but there are just so many amazing individual portraits that I have to dedicate not one, but TWO posts entirely to them.

This first post will showcase some of our portraits of me and the mister (individually, versus the portraits we took together), and my next post will feature portraits of our guests.

Fabulous portraiture was one of the many benefits of hiring Nicole. She has an impressive online portrait portfolio of families, kids, brides, and seniors, and we were wowed by what she delivered during our 2007 engagement shoot in Glacier National Park. Good portraits are excellent photos for framing, particularly in a series of two or three, and having flattering close-up pictures just makes you feel so glamorous!

I hope these pictures can help convince you to consider a wedding photographer with a talent for portraits, or to add portraiture to your wedding day photo-list. Anyway, enough chatter… let me now allow the pictures to speak for themselves.

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During dessert, we invited our guests to witness our license signing. So, as they sipped on French-pressed coffee and savored the baked goods, we called them to gather ’round, and then we took one of the final steps toward making our marriage official.

There was no real ceremony to it - we simply set our Flathead County marriage license on the now-empty buffet table, brought over our official witnesses and officiant, and got out a fancy pen. Then, after Cathy filled in the blanks with her lovely, legible printing, we all signed on the dotted line!
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After a delicious dinner and wonderful toasts, we slipped momentarily away for some private portraits, some of which you saw earlier, and more of which I will show you later. (As luck would have it, the pouring rain stopped just as we finished eating!) Then, we hurried back to the reception tent, where our delectable desserts were waiting for us: A vanilla-huckleberry cake with buttercream frosting and mini cherry & huckleberry tartlets, all made fresh by the famous bakery at the Polebridge Mercantile.
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