So there you have it, from start to finish… a week full of wedding recaps. My favorite thing about all these photos, three months later, is thinking that our wedding could be no one else’s. That’s my own personal measure of success. For what it’s worth, here are a few tidbits we learned along the way:

Celebrate your weirdness. Really. All those ways that you feel different than the brides in magazines? Rejoice in it! By putting as much of who you and your fiance truly are into your wedding, you’ll be repaid tenfold by how personal and meaningful your wedding becomes. Oh, and the less it’s like any other wedding your guests have seen? The more everyone loves it. So take ownership and go!

Start your own traditions. If you love every wedding tradition in the book, that’s great. But if tradition isn’t for you, throw out that wedding book and start from scratch. Use an officiant who means something to you personally. Use words that strike right to the heart of who you are and why you’re there. Create space for your loved ones to affirm and bless your marriage. Don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable; do the things that will make you happy. We’re all different. Our weddings should be, too.

Get inspired… and then edit. The amount of wedding inspiration out here in blogland is phenomenal. Every day - no, every hour - we can find hundreds of different ways to say I Do, from dresses to venues to food to photography. That’s a wonderful thing. But once you’re well on your way, don’t let all that new inspiration sew seeds of doubt. An edited vision is just as important as an initially brilliant one.

Go team! I’m especially talking to my fellow gals out there without planners/DOCs: know that  you cannot do it all by yourself. Create a small team of family and friends that you can trust and work together through the entire process. Address new projects realistically in terms of what you can and cannot accomplish as a team. Don’t micromanage. Don’t take for granted. And toward the end, when new folks ask you how they can help, don’t blow them off. It takes a village. A very, very organized one.

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I adored our wedding reception. It flew by like mad, but here’s what I know: I have distinct memories of everyone who was there, it felt exactly like we’d hoped it would, and we’ve never had so much fun.

Crossing the street heading over to the reception:

We chose Ray LaMontagne’s “You Are the Best Thing” as our song, and my heart bursts through my chest every time I hear it, still.

We had a buffet of local food featuring the Outer Banks at its best: fresh shrimp served with grits, stuffed flounder, seasonal vegetables, and of course… mini strawberry shortcakes, made Southern-style with shortbread biscuits. With freshness like this, who needs a wedding cake, anyway? Not us.

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We approached a reception decor plan much the way we approached our ceremony decor plan. The reception would take place across the street from the ceremony in a tented area that leads out onto the Sound. We were dealing with a standard white tent, and wanted to incorporate three big things: color, pattern, and personal touches. We’d keep costs down by reusing elements from the ceremony and making as many of the elements ourselves that we could.

I knew from the start that I wanted patterned tablecloths, and found out two things very quickly: local rental companies didn’t offer patterns, and pre-made tablecloths for sale weren’t available in appropriate colors or patterns. In other words, we were going to have to buy fabric and make the tablecloths ourselves. Searching for the right fabric - the right color, the right patterns, all at the right price - was extremely challenging. To increase the pressure, almost every decision about reception decor was contingent on the fabric decision. We searched long and hard for almost two months before making our final selections. (Nothing went to waste - a fabric we decided against for the tables after seeing it in person became our aisle runner!) Here are the final fabrics, both from Premier Prints:

The reception tables were 60-inch rounds, so we hired a family friend to make 84-inch square tablecloths (half in the red print, half in blue) to provide a 12-inch drop all the way around the table. Each tablecloth was stitched in three pieces, with the pattern lined up so precisely you couldn’t even see a seam. Having such strong linens on the tables allowed us to use the vendor’s white underlays without sacrificing color, which helped cut down on costs.

Once we made the fabric decision, it was time to call in our floral/event design guru Renee Landry to help us plan out the rest of the space. I was inspired by tablescapes that featured separate clusters of matching flowers, grouped together in varying sizes. I was also inspired by pomanders, and was committed to reusing them from the ceremony for our tables. Here are two of my favorite inspiration images, both from Martha:

We decided to use urns to hold the large flower pomanders as table centerpieces and as accents on areas like the bar. The pomander centerpieces would be surrounded by smaller receptacles holding matching flowers, and we decided that the small receptacles should add to our mix-and-match feel by introducing yet more pattern. In order to cut down on costs, we planned on using aluminum cans of various sizes and printing patterned paper ourselves to cover the cans. I got to work creating patterned sheets using the design files that ABCD had given me, while my sister headed up the job of printing the paper and covering the cans. Lots and lots and lots of cans. And did I mention that she was super-pregnant at the time? Go sis! To supplement the look of the cans and centerpieces, my mom decorated white rice paper votive holders with whimsical red and blue designs.

The look coming together (remember our pomanders and wedding wands?):

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Personalizing our ceremony was of the utmost importance to us. If our guests hadn’t already clued in to our loose relationship with wedding traditions, they got a sense of what awaited them on the very first page of our program:

There were five key ways that we strived to make our ceremony uniquely ours: music selections, choice of officiant, family participation, readings/crowd participation, and vows. I’ll tell the story of how each made a difference at our ceremony by taking us through our wedding ceremony photos.

Half of Trevor’s family is Scottish, and while he didn’t feel the need to wear a kilt and have a traditional Scottish ceremony, we both thought that incorporating Scottish music would be a great way to pay tribute to his heritage. We decided to play up our beach location and take advantage of the open space by having the bagpiper lead Trevor and his groomsmen from the dunes overlooking the ceremony down onto the main deck, playing “Scotland the Brave” all the while. Trevor’s cousin, an accomplished Scottish drummer, surprised us by playing along with the bagpiper.

(All photos by Beach Productions)

My cousin is an accomplished violinist, and we chose to have her play music for the bridesmaids’ entrance as well as for my entrance. A more delicate instrument than the bagpipes worked well for the more intimate deck setting. As big music lovers, we thought long and hard about our selections. We wanted to make a transition to pop music with the violin, and set an upbeat tone for the ceremony. We chose The Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” and it had guests grinning from the start.

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We were married at an inn on the Outer Banks, on a deck that led from the inn to the dunes, and then the ocean. The space has the same rustic, weathered look the defines the Outer Banks. Since “rustic and weathered” wasn’t quite the look we were going for with our ceremony decor, we needed a decor plan in place to achieve our vision. My mom, sister, and I took a trip to the Outer Banks to work with floral/event designer Renee Landry and create a decor plan that achieved three things: (1) the space should burst with personality and color (2) the space should be red and blue, but use a range of palettes and patterns so that it didn’t feel too “4th of July,” and (3) in order to keep costs down, we would reuse as many ceremony decor elements at the reception as possible, and make as many elements ourselves that we could.

I fell in love with the idea of using pomanders instead of traditional altar florals as a way to add vibrant pops of color and personality to the space. (True story: the wedding that got me hooked on pomanders was right here on EAD!) In my mind, pomanders were fun, flirty, and more casual than traditional florals, so they fit into our wedding theme perfectly. The downside of pomanders is how long they take to create, which means they’re fairly expensive to use in bulk. We achieved the look of a pomander bonanza at a lower pricepoint by making fabric pomanders to supplement the floral pomanders at the “altar,” then reusing only the floral pomanders as our reception centerpieces. We had originally planned on tissue pomanders, but the high humidity and wind on the beach called for a more substantial material. My mom took on this thankless task, using pinking shears to cut fabric squares and inserting them one by one into styrofoam centers. Each pomander took up to nine hours to create, and she made lots of them. Here’s a shot from her dining room as the pomander collection started to grow:

In person, the effect was wonderful. The floral pomanders (made primarily of carnations) were beautiful, and the overall look had so much volume that you didn’t notice they weren’t all flowers. Up close, though, the fabric pomanders were so pretty that you didn’t mind they weren’t flowers - the patterned fabric added some depth to the overall effect.

(All photos by Beach Productions)

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Trevor and I decided to see each other before the wedding for photographs. By doing so, we could maximize our time with guests and not miss a significant portion of our cocktail hour. (I was especially excited about making it to the reception in time to taste a mini shrimp and grits hors d’oeuvre that we dreamed up with the venue chef - a girl has her priorities!).  As soon as we made the decision to do a “first glimpse” session, my favorite thing about it very quickly became how much it was going to calm my nerves before the ceremony, and it did exactly that. Every couple is different, but for the two of us, being able to have a half-hour to ourselves before the ceremony was a brilliant way to start the wedding. By the time we made it to the actual ceremony, we were calm, cool, and ready to enjoy every minute of it. Maybe I would’ve been as calm, happy, and excited during our ceremony without a beach makeout beforehand, but I’m so glad we saw fit to schedule it in. :-)

(All photos by Beach Productions)

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I’m going to tell it like it is: nothing made me feel less in the mood to get married than shopping for The Dress. Some girls get goosebumps just stepping into a bridal salon. Some girls hear chords from above when they try on The One. I was not one of those girls. Dress-shopping was the opposite of a fairy-tale for me. More like a morality tale featuring evil, judgmental salespeople trying their best to make me feel too large (”curvy” and “broad,” they said, shaking their heads and sighing) and unsophisticated to wear their gowns. I finally flew my sister down from North Carolina to help me make the final decision, desperately in need for a second opinion and someone who actually knew me to be in the room. I already had a favorite by the time she arrived, and when I stepped out into it - after a morning of trying on dozens of other gowns for her - she called it like she saw it: “This is the only dress that’s made you grin all day.”

I’m a fan of grinning, and my sister was right - the dress was light as air and felt like me. It referenced the beach with a scalloped halter neckline, had a vintage feel thanks to its beautiful lace, had a bit of sweetness with raw silk ribbons woven into the waist and straps, but felt quite modern because of the slim cut. It was Monique Lhuillier’s “Fabiana,” and it was the only one that I felt relaxed wearing, excited, even. Here I am wearing The One at the salon. No chords from above, but a lot of laughter with my sister instead, and that was all I needed.

I ordered the dress in white to coordinate with the beach and Trevor’s seersucker. His suit was something we were thrilled about; it belonged to his late grandfather and fit him like a glove. We found a tailor who modernized the fit a bit, turning the triple-pleated pants into flat fronts. We decided on a navy linen tie and a red and white gingham pocket square in lieu of a boutonniere. The result was dashing, completely beachy-handsome!

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So now that you’ve seen the fantastic “campaign logo” created us for by ABCD, can you guess what happened after that? As much as I love paper, and as much as Amy loves working with fresh, outside-the-wedding-box visions, we  couldn’t stop our collaboration at the logo. We asked ABCD to design our entire wedding stationery suite, and let me tell you… it was one of the best decisions we made in the entire wedding planning process.

By the time we brought ABCD on board, Trevor and I had already spent a couple of Saturday afternoons flipping through invitation books at stationery stores. Our basic reaction to most of what we saw? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. We needed color and art and whimsy in our invitations, and didn’t see it anywhere. We knew our invitations would set the tone for our wedding, and for a girl who used to spend her allowance on pretty paper, I wanted them to be amazing. We wanted our guests to look at their invitations and know that a mellow, tongue-in-cheek, bursting-with-love, FUN weekend on the Outer Banks awaited them. Design-wise, we needed to strike a fine balance. We wanted our campaign logo to be present, but not be overpowering. We wanted to play on the political theme a bit, but not be too gimmicky. We didn’t want traditional script or calligraphy, but we also didn’t want them to be too modern, either. We wanted a vintage and folk art flair, but also to somehow represent the beach. And we wanted letterpress, but we didn’t want to break the bank. A tall order, right? Amy took it all in stride. Here’s our fabulous stationery suite, as designed by ABCD:

The components of the suite played off each other throughout all of the pieces. We had folk art flowers, a swirl motif that hinted at ocean waves, an old-fashioned typeface along with cleaner fonts, and language that was playfully political. ABCD worked within our budget to find ways to maximize the bang for the buck. And oh, was there bang! The first thing guests saw was our love story, letterpressed on the belly band. Notice the Constitution joke… we couldn’t help ourselves!

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So how do two stridently independent and opinionated lovebirds get married in the age of Platinum Weddings, anyway? Like so many things that would follow, we found our inspiration in the world of wedding blogs.

After months of floundering for a wedding vision that felt like our own, I stumbled upon a blog post featuring a wedding “monogram” that looked like a campaign logo. I was instantly, head-over-heels smitten with how un-wedding it was. After all, politics run through both of us. I’d been writing about candidates long before I was old enough to vote, and the two of us never would’ve met at all had Trevor not been working on a political campaign. The discovery of that logo put the entire wedding planning process into focus for us. Suddenly, we weren’t grasping for wedding ideas anymore, but were full of them. The idea of a red and blue wedding felt fresh and new to us - neither of us had ever seen one before - and we loved the challenge of making sure it didn’t look too “4th of July” by using a palette of shades and a slew of mix-and-match patterns.

Blue would work wonderfully with our beachside location, and also meant that Trevor could wear his grandfather’s seersucker suit. Strong punches of red suited my sensibility perfectly - in flowers, on tables, and most importantly, in a killer pair of red satin heels on my feet! Very quickly, our wedding vision started to feel more like us than like a “normal” wedding, which was exactly what we’d wanted all along. Here’s our original inspiration board, featuring the wedding logo that kicked the whole thing off:

Meanwhile, in other stroke of blog-world luck, I won a contest online where the prize was a custom wedding logo designed by the one and only Amy Beth Cupp Dragoo of ABCD Designs (now a contributor at EAD Living!). I couldn’t believe my luck - we finally had our wedding inspiration, and now we had a super-talented designer on board to create our official “campaign logo,” too! Over the phone, I laid out our election theme for Amy to explain why we wanted her to design a campaign logo for us instead of a typical wedding monogram. Amy didn’t just get it, she loved it. Here’s the “campaign logo” that Amy designed for us. More than any other single detail, this logo set the tone for our crazy election-themed wedding:

Adams-Hanger ‘09… the ticket of a lifetime!

Next up: From logos to letterpress!

Hi everyone! I’m thrilled to be among the fantastic group of women on EAD who have documented their respective journeys down the aisle. You might already know a bit of my wedding story if you followed my wedding blog Eat, Drink, Marry, which I began shortly after our engagement and continued through our wedding over Memorial Day weekend. During our planning process, I relished the opportunity to tap into the bounty of inspiration and knowledge out there in the wedding blogosphere, through EAD and other great blogs out there. Now that the wedding’s over, I have a new home on the web: The Freckled Citizen. Old habits die hard, though – my new blog just happens to be designed in our wedding colors and oops, I posted a wedding photo just the other day! On to the fun details, then!

I’m originally from North Carolina and have bounced around for various degrees over the last decade (going to school is something I’m really good at, it turns out): Boston for six years, then New Mexico for five. Both cities brought out my love for place, culture, and politics. One night in Albuquerque, I met a cute campaign worker named Trevor in a bar and proceeded to engage him in the sort of feisty debate that I felt certain he desperately needed (he had that “in need of a challenge” look about him that night… know the one I mean, ladies?). By the time the bar closed, Trevor was either going to kiss me or never speak to me again, and luckily for both of us, he kissed me. On a street corner. With teenagers speeding by yelling at us to get a room. A Modern American Love Story, really.

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