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I’d like to thank everyone for following along with me this week as I guest blogged here on Elizabeth Anne Designs. Before I return to writing about newlywed life, life in the lab as a graduate student, the full picture recap of my own wedding for those interested (to begin shortly) and soon the trials and tribulations of a long-distance marriage over at Disgruntled Julie: A Ph.D. in Progress, I thought I would step away from my own projects, and share my favorite memories from our wedding.

Please don’t tell my our parents (who helped to contribute financially), but looking back on the wedding, my favorite memories weren’t our amazing 10-piece band, or our beautiful flowers. I was recently involved in a discussion whether it was worth upgrading to nicer linens, and I couldn’t even remember if we had - I had to look at my pictures to see that we ordered the black linens through our florist. No, for me, the most memorable and meaningful events were the things that went wrong.

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My family is spread out across the country, so wherever the wedding was held, they would be flying in from all over.  My husband’s family, however, is almost entirely located within a 40-mile radius around Philadelphia, which made it a natural choice for the location of our wedding.  Additionally, since my husband was set on returning to live near his family and friends, it would be a perfect time to “introduce” my family to the location where I would someday be settling down and making my own home.  However, this meant that I was planning a wedding in a location where I, and no member of my family, had ever lived - in essence, it had become a “destination wedding” of sorts for every person invited off of our side of the guest list.

Because of this, we decided that we wanted to include a Philadelphia feel to our wedding.  When it came to picking a location, I knew I didn’t want a traditional ballroom - something that could be located in Anywhere, U.S.A.  When we found the Loews Hotel, located in the PSFS Building (the first international-style skyscraper), I was sold.  Just look at the views from the 32nd floor, where we held our ceremony, cocktail hour, and brunch the next morning!

{Jennifer Childress Photography}

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I wanted to share my wedding invitations as an example of the stationary I handcrafted for our wedding. Unfortunately, I don’t have any invitations left, or even a picture. I spend dozens (and dozens!) of hours silkscreening my invitations, and I don’t even have one picture of all that work. This is why it is crucial to drastically overestimate the number of invitations you may need, if your family is as wishy-washy and uncommitted as that of my husband. Our limiting factor for our wedding was the space - our ceremony room held 180 individuals, maximum. Due to that constraint, we had an A list, and unfortunately, also had to have a B list. I had counted the number of invites I would need if we went through every single person on the A list and on the B list… and added 40, “just in case.”

People, this STILL wasn’t enough. Forty extra invitations… and I still ran out. My husband’s family treated our (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime wedding (for our families, a wedding is a rare event - my husband and I are both only children and only grandchildren on both sides, so it’s not like they can just wait for the next wedding to come along!) like a family reunion. Roughly 30 of his family members RSVP’d yes… and then a few weeks later called back and changed their mind, because so-and-so (a cousin, niece, aunt, sibling, whomever) wasn’t going to make it to the wedding, so they decided not to come (this was, of course, on top of the other guests who declined attendance from the beginning). As we had to do significant trimming of our initial list even to get down to a B list, we had lots of family friends who were thrilled to come… but that required invitations. And thus, I ran through all of ours. And the ones I had saved for myself, and sent to my parents, and my mother-in-law, and even had to ask my labmates for the invitations I had send to them (tacky, yes, but as a bunch of bachelors, they had all admitted that they were just going to throw the invitation out anyway). The moral of this story is that you can NEVER have too many invitations - and if you care about your invites, TAKE A PICTURE before you send them all away!

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One of the most tedious projects I undertook for my wedding also wound up being one of the most valuable because of what I learned.  You see, my mother became somewhat notorious for her slightly… ridiculous demands during the wedding.  One fateful night, she happened to call while I was over at my then-fiance’s apartment cooking him dinner.  Like usual, I put the phone on speakerphone (insurance for my sake, so he knew she was the one making the absurd demands and not me) and waited to see what was in store.

This time, my mother had the idea that rather than purchase yarmulkes for the ceremony as planned, she wanted to crochet all the yarmulkes for the wedding.  While a lovely, thoughtful gesture in theory, there was one slight problem with this.  My mother hasn’t touched a crochet hook since before I was born… and even back then, she was quite bad at it.  With visions of lopsided, fuzzy, misshapen doilies plopped haphazardly upon the heads of tuxedo-clad guests, my fiance started wildly waving his arms above his head like a windmill to grab my attention, and then passing his hand back and forth over his throat, the universal symbol for “kill the idea ASAP.”

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I knew when it came time to ask (bribe?) my bridesmaids to be in my wedding party, I needed to do something creative. Ideally, I think the best way to ask is to do so in person (perhaps host a nice lunch for everyone), but unfortunately, with my bridesmaids spread out across the country, I realized that there was a good chance that I may not even see some of them until the weekend of the actual wedding.

I initially thought I would send a “Will You Be My Bridesmaid?” card in the mail, but while searching online for card ideas, I came across a company which made cookies for the occasion. The cookies, in the shape of dresses and available in a range of colors, had the bridesmaid question on the cookie itself. However, at a cost of $10 per cookie, plus $3.50 in shipping for each location for each bridesmaid, it seemed like a lot to pay for one measly little cookie. And thus, the motto of our wedding was born — “I can do that myself for cheaper!”

For a grand total of $12.95, I was able to order four wedding-related cookie cutters (cake, heart, diamond ring, and dress) from The Cookie Cutter Shop and went to work with a vanilla cookie recipe and a raw-egg free royal icing recipe. To ensure that they would keep the date of the wedding free (we had already booked the venue for the wedding at this point - remember, we did this before he actually proposed), I iced the date onto the hearts.

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There’s no better place to start than the beginning, so that’s where I’ll start – with an introduction. Back in May, on a beautiful, sunny, warm Memorial Day weekend, I finally married my husband after five and a half years of dating.

We met my second day of my freshman (his sophomore) year of college. Far from love at first sight, however, I thought my husband was a pompous jerk (and his impressions of me weren’t much better!). After our paths continued to cross, we slowly became acquaintances and then friends, but I wanted nothing more to do with him. In fact, my husband had to ask me out nine times before I would agree to go out with him on one date!

Unfortunately for us, our post-marriage living situation will be a bit unconventional, and because of it, the proposal was far from a surprise. At the time when he was thinking of proposing, he was in his third year of medical school (he graduated the weekend before our wedding), and as anyone involved with the medical school process knows, you often have very little say in where you wind up for residency, particularly if you pick a competitive field, like my husband. I happen to be pursuing a Ph.D. in oncology and am currently in my fourth year, with several years left to go, so we knew there was a very good chance that we would be living apart. Knowing this fact, rather than surprise me with a proposal, we chose to sit down and discuss the situation in detail – after all, starting a marriage out living apart for the first 3-4 years is a less than ideal situation.

Obviously, we decided to forge ahead. Since I knew he was planning on proposing, we actually went ahead and met with vendors, and had signed and booked our venue before he had even officially proposed! As it turned out, my husband is doing his one year internship here in D.C. where I am located, but will be moving several states away right around our one-year anniversary, and we’ll be living apart for the next 2-3 years until I finish my degree.

Welcome along for the journey as I highlight some of my favorite projects from the wedding, and share some tips that I learned. For me, the biggest challenge that I faced was just trying to get everything done on my own – I work 80-90 hours/week in the lab and do not live near my family or bridesmaids, so all my DIY projects were really all done by me, not distributed and done with the assistance of others. Furthermore, I had the task not only of planning a wedding long distance (D.C. to Philadelphia), but planning a wedding for a city in which I have never lived (husband’s hometown) which certainly created a few challenges! But, in the end, I wouldn’t change a thing – I was able to marry my husband, surrounded by my family and friends for one of the most important days of my life, and in the end, that is all that matters.