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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …