On the anniversary of the day Brian proposed, Angela Stott, the masterful photographer who shot our wedding, sent us the link to our wedding album online. Great timing, right? We spent the evening remembering our wedding day – it couldn’t have been a more perfect way to celebrate the day we decided to become husband and wife.

I’m SO excited to share them all with you, but I have to figure out how in the world to split them up – while I loved looking at them all at once (and on repeat over and over again!), you probably would get a little overwhelmed… So, I’ll start chronologically, but I can’t promise I won’t jump around!

The day started with getting ready. I had my bridesmaids and mom helping me, and boy did I need them! Not only did they help me pull everything together, but they helped me to remember to breathe as I got more and more excited about the upcoming ceremony. While we had a beautiful cabin to get ready in, the light was too perfect outside. So, Angela asked me if I would be okay getting ready out there. While I was a little nervous about stepping out onto the porch in my under-thingies, I decided that I wanted to do this right, which meant I should probably listen to the professional. Plus, my cabin was somewhat hidden from view, so I wasn’t too worried about people seeing me. [I did end up flashing an unsuspecting wedding guest, but fortunately it was one of Brian's mom's fabulous friends and she just chuckled about it with me later... could have been a lot worse!]  So, I bravely stepped outside and my mother and Maid of Honor helped me get into my dress.

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I’m really bad at keeping secrets.  Well, wait, that’s not entirely true.  I’m really bad at keeping secrets that are mine that I’m really, really excited about.  There was one big one at the wedding that I wanted to tell everyone about because I was so excited, but I didn’t!  I kept telling myself that the guests would enjoy it that much more if they didn’t know it was coming…  What was the big surprise?  We asked the Generals, Davidson’s male a capella group, to sing at our wedding!

{Angela Stott}

In the initial planning stages, we really struggled with finding the musicians for our ceremony because nothing we came across felt right or like us… Then the idea of having the Generals came to us and I’m so glad they agreed to be a part of our wedding.  They could not have been more perfect.

So, what did they sing?   Well, for starters, they learned Ben Harper’s Forever to sing when I walked down the aisle with my dad…  This song is the closest thing Brian and I have to “a song” but we felt it was too slow to dance to as our first song – it was really special to have it sung as I walked towards him, though… They also sang Coldplay’s The Scientist (when the grandmother, mothers, and bridesmaids walked down the aisle) and Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars (as we walked down the aisle as newlyweds!).

{Angela Stott}

They also preformed at the cocktail hour immediately following the ceremony, which was fun because they were pretty low-key at the ceremony (they didn’t want to be distracting), but they are known for being great performers!  They sang a bunch of the songs from their most recent album as well as some new ones and really got into it.  They did a great job and everyone (especially Brian and I!) loved them.

{Guest photo}

How cute are they?!

What are you guys planning to do for your ceremony music? Any surprises up your sleeves?

Right before Christmas our photographer, Angela Stott, sent me a preview of some of our wedding photos and when I first saw them I teared up… She has such an amazing gift to not only find beautiful locations to shoot, but also somehow make Brian and I look our best.

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Right before my wedding, I got an email from Maggie at Campbell Raw Press who made my gorgeous guestbook with the fabulous news that she has started doing letterpress printing! I was so happy with my guestbook, I couldn’t wait to see what her letterpress creations looked like… oh man, are they perty.

She has three customizable wedding invitation packages, all of which include a belly band made of the beautiful paper she uses for her book binding creations.  My personal favorite is the Strand with the Dark Green Floral paper band, but they are all gorgeous.  I love how simple, yet elegant they are.

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Since my wedding was really a destination wedding (I don’t know anyone that came that was actually from Cashiers, NC!) and most of the guests were staying at High Hampton, I decided to give each guest an in-room favor instead of favors at the actual ceremony.

When planning the favors, we decided we wanted everything to be consumable, so that guests could enjoy them throughout the wedding weekend.  After lots of ideas were thrown out we decided to include a jar of honey (fewer that three ounces to make sure people could take them on the plane!), biscuits, apples and a bottle of wine.  We felt this mixture had a Southern feel and was seasonally appropriate.

The next step was to slowly, but surely, start organizing the pieces.  First I reached out to The Bradford Store, which is a Huntersville, NC gem that sells all sorts of local produce, baked goods, etc. to see if they sold honey in small jars.  The wonderful owner said she’d check with her honey man and get back to me.  She came back with good news and bad news.  The bad news was that her honey man didn’t have honey in small jars.  Boo.  But!  The good news was that if I could get jars that he could run through his machine, he’d fill them up for me!  Yea!  So, I found jars at Specialty Bottle (they had several options to choose from) and got them over to the honey man.  He filled them and got them back to me in no time, which just let the decorating part.  Brian and I made cute labels to put on the jars and decided to use the scrap fabric from the table runners my mom made (amazing, right?!) to tie (with extra baker’s twine from my invitation – more on those later!) onto the lids.

{guest photo}

Here they are at the reception – we had extras, so we set them up in case anyone wanted more than one!

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So, Brian and I have been married for one week now… wow!  I have a husband!  We’re down in Huatulco, Mexico for our honeymoon, but I wanted show you a picture from the wedding – I can’t wait to share all the details with you!

This picture was taken by my cousin – what a perfect shot!

With everything behind me (how crazy is that?!), one of the moments I remember most vividly from my wedding is dancing with my dad…

It took me a while to come up with the perfect song to play when I danced with my father at my wedding… First I asked him for any suggestions he had: “Stairway to Heaven. Obviously.” Clearly this was not going to be the best way to go about finding the perfect song…

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Oh my wonderful!  I just viewed the photos from our engagement shoot last month and boy do I love them.  Angela Stott, our very talented photographer, did an amazing job – she found funky, interesting places to shoot and was able to capture such great shots of us.  I have to admit that on our drive home from the shoot Brian and I worried that our pictures might not turn out, not due to any fault of Angela’s, but because Brian and I just felt so silly most of the time – would our awkwardness come through in the pictures?!

Well, we spent the two hours home from Asheville worrying about nothing.  Check these puppies out (all by Angela Stott):

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Wow.  When did that happen?  The past month has just flown by and all of a sudden it’s one week until the big day!  Things have been pretty crazy (hence my sad lack of posts – I’m so sorry!), but I’ve gotten a lot of the big “to dos” checked off my list:

1. Pick up wedding dress – check!
2. Nail down all rentals – check!
3. Finalize guest list – check!
4. Put together all gifts for bridal party – mostly check!
5. Bust butt in the gym so that even if I look the same in a week, I feel amazing – check!
6. Sit down with musicians and finalize selections for ceremony and reception – check!
7. Make final menu decisions – check!

Despite all this, there still seem to be a million and one things on my to do list…  no big items (yea!), but lots of little ones.  Fortunately my wonderful fiance and dedicated bridesmaids have the reserved the upcoming weekend so we can do all the remaining wedding projects (they even seem excited about it!  though I think that may be entirely for my benefit…).

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Well, at least that’s what I keep telling myself because it’s all I can think about these days!  Fortunately, it’s not the tables themselves or really what’s going on them that’s keeping me up at night, it’s the gosh darned table numbers!

I know exactly the shape/size/dimensions of all the tables and where they’re each going to be located in the reception space – my poor, sweet Caroline at High Hampton spent several hours with the rental company coming up with a design that I liked (I strangely have an aversion to round tables, which made this all much more complicated that it otherwise would have been – I’m sorry, Caroline).  Also, I have a wonderful florist doing all the centerpieces and overall table decor and my amazingly crafty mother is making all the table runners.  I keep thinking I should feel really good about the tables, and trust me I do, I just can’t for the life of me figure out what I want to do about table numbers!

There are so many cool options out there and I can’t seem to narrow it down… please help me!  What do you think of my top three ideas (pictured below)?

These are from The Craft Pedlars and go with some of the other pieces from our wedding (like the invitations and our seating cards), but they seem kind of pricey ($3 per number) for something that is cute, but ultimately not a big wow factor… but I keep going back to them, so maybe it is worth it…

I love the idea of chalkboards, too, and this could be used elsewhere in the reception (like menus with the food):

(image from little white book)

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I always thought I wanted to get married in a church. When I was little, my mom “dragged me out of bed by the big toe” every Sunday to go to church knowing that somewhere along the way it would become something I did all by myself. I thought she was crazy – who would want to get up that early on a Sunday unprovoked? Then at some point, 10am seemed really late and somehow found myself wanting to go to church on Sunday mornings (more evidence that I might be a grown up…).

So, when I got engaged, getting married in a church seemed like where I was headed. Then we visited High Hampton and right across the street was the cutest little Episcopal church – this had to be a sign, right?

After deciding on High Hampton as our venue, I excitedly called the church. Here comes the bad news: the person I spoke with told me that, despite the fact that I was a practicing Episcopalian in the same diocese, they were unwilling to turn their church into a “Las Vegas-style wedding chapel” by having non-members marry there. After being rebuffed in a very (what I deemed) un-Christian-like manner, I determined that this was the sign. I knew there was something better out there for my wedding.

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