Our Wedding: The Photographer

Our photographer was my good friend (and bridesmaid) Hannah's talented husband, Daniel Meigs.

Daniel did a great job of documenting our wedding -- as we looked through photos we realized just how hard he had worked to capture so much of our day. He really got in the action and got pictures of every fun moment that we wanted to remember.

Our wedding day ended up rainy and overcast so the bridal party photos that were meant to be on the downtown square had to be relocated to indoors, where luckily the Early Works museum staff let us use the inside of the museum for photos.

Daniel got some fun shots of all of us and afterwards did some portraits of me and Josh in a great spot he found around the back of the building. It stopped raining just long enough for him to get some special images of us together before the ceremony.

Our Wedding: The Coordinators

Tonight I got choked up talking to Josh about my friends who coordinated our wedding: Stacy Nesselrotte and her lovely daughter Tyler Faith. Stacy has been my friend for close to twelve years now. We first met when I was a junior in high school and she was one of the leaders in my church youth group. Stacy has seen me through multiple teenage crises, through my pregnancy with Maggie (she and her husband Preston are Maggie's godparents), and through all the ups and downs of twelve years of life. She and her family have meant so much to me over the last decade. It's hard to believe that when I met the Nesselrottes, Tyler was six (!) -- she is now a beautiful, smart, hardworking young lady who I'm proud to know.

As a wedding gift, Stacy generously offered to coordinate our wedding, with the help of Tyler. The two of them have by this point coordinated at least 5 or 6 (maybe more like 10) weddings of past youth group girls that Stacy used to mentor. As soon as I knew Stacy would be taking care of the details on my wedding day, it was like I could breathe again. She helped me figure out everything, from planning the reception set up to figuring out what needed to be rented and who needed to be where when.

Several people have commented on how calm and low-stress I was on the wedding day -- it was 100% because of Stacy. I trusted her completely to follow my vision for the wedding and knew that she would handle any bumps in the road with grace and ability. There was nothing for me to worry about because I knew everything was in Stacy's capable hands.

 One of the most special moments of the day was when I walked in to the reception hall, which Stacy and Tyler had made absolutely beautiful, and Stacy first saw me all decked out in my dress and veil. We both almost cried, knowing all the history we had together and how far I had come to get to the point of getting to marry an amazing godly man.

We never got any photos together (sad!) but Daniel captured some sweet pictures of the Nesselrottes dancing: Tyler dancing with her little brother Christian, Preston dancing with Maggie (who wore herself out completely; she didn't sit out for even one song!), and Stacy dancing with Christian.

Our Wedding: My Hair

I've had the sheer good fortune of having a friend who is amazing at doing hair:  Miss Amanda Rogers. She's been doing my hair for at least three years and even now that I'm in Alabama I still make the 90 mile drive to Nashville to get my hair done by her -- she's that good.

Amanda colored my hair the week before the wedding to make sure it was just right. On the wedding day she came to the hotel room and got my hair all fixed up and pretty while Tyler Faith did my makeup. My hair was another situation in which I basically told Amanda "I want something vintage-ish with curls" and just trusted her good taste to come up with something beautiful.

I got a lot of compliments on how well my hair held its curls through the photos and then on to the ceremony, especially since it was raining -- well, it was because amazing Amanda gave me a touch-up right before the ceremony! It really pays to have such talented friends.

Photos by Mandii Marie Photography and Amanda's iPhone

Our Wedding: The Flowers

My good friend and old roommate Katie, who now is a professional floral designer with the most beautiful logo, did the flowers for our wedding. She was AMAZING because when I sat down with her for our planning talk, I had only a very vague idea of what I wanted. She showed me a bunch of inspiration photos and made different flower suggestions, then came up with the perfect arrangements, both for the bouquets and the reception centerpieces. She's a floral genius, I'm pretty sure. 

Our main flowers were cotton bolls (to honor our great state of Alabama), pale pink garden roses, baby's breath, freesia, and silver brunia berries.

My favorite antique store is on I-65, exit 361, and is called Candlelight Antiques. It's a giant building overflowing with any old stuff you could imagine from multiple vendors. My guess is there are at least 50 different booths there, all packed to the gills with amazing vintage finds. One vendor always seems to have an abundance of blue Ball jars at astounding prices. Usually I see these jars selling for at least $10 each for pint size, but here I was able to buy about 20 of them for $3 to $3.50 each. 

Stacy and Tyler (my wedding coordinators - blog post to come about those lovely ladies) artfully arranged the blue Ball jars and clear mason jars of varying sizes into centerpieces, which Katie then filled with an array of beautiful flowers. I think my favorite flowers were the pale pink garden roses, but the tall sprays of white flowers (freesia maybe?) were gorgeous as well. Vintage doilies graced the burlap tablecloths that Josh's mom helped me sew together.

My bride's bouquet was a particular example of Katie's floral genius. I gave her a general idea of what I wanted but nothing specific, and she came back with this beauty of a bouquet. Pink garden roses, freesia, silver brunia berries, dusty miller, cotton bolls, and hanging white lilac, which was my unexpected favorite. I loved how it gave gentle movement to the bouquet, plus had an incredible fragrance.

The bridesmaid bouquets were similar, but with white roses rather than pink. 

Photos by Daniel Meigs Photography and Mandii Marie Photography

Our Wedding: The Bowties

My dear friend and bridesmaid Colleen is a crafty gal who began making bowties a couple years ago for her cute little Etsy shop, SayOoh. She's got a talent for making so many things and has created everything from unique hair pieces using vintage jewelry finds to custom etched pint glasses. One of our wedding gifts from her was the sweetest set of wood slice coasters, with the words "Mr" "Mrs" and "Miss" etched on the three coasters. Maggie was especially excited to get her own personal "Miss" coaster.

I picked out some great fabric (on clearance!) at Joann's and Colleen made all my bowtie dreams come true. I think the boys looked just dapper in their neckwear. The pirate ship backdrop didn't hurt either.

This particular fella looked especially dapper, in my personal opinion. :)

Photos by Daniel Meigs Photography 

Our Wedding: The Portraits

I first met Mandii in 2003, the year I attended the University of Montevallo, a tiny liberal arts school just south of Birmingham. We met through friends and took some of the same art classes; Mandii was then pursuing a bachelors degree in Art with a concentration in painting. Her amazing talent blew me away from the very beginning and she's continued to amaze me ever since.

It seems that there is nothing art-related that Mandii can't do -- she moved from a painting concentration to photography and began her own photography business, moving from wedding photography to maternity portraits to children's portraits. This past year she made a New Year's resolution to learn calligraphy and she has since then (beginning just in January 2012) developed her skills and now owns a calligraphy and illustration business! She just astounds me with how quickly she can pick up new skills.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Mandii's artistic abilities is how freely she shares them with those she loves. Over the course of our (ten year!) friendship, she has taken SO many beautiful portraits of me, Maggie, and now Josh. Mandii has the most generous and FUN personality that spills over into everything she does.

My favorite thing about having Mandii take my picture is how at-ease she makes me feel. No matter if I've had a month where I felt frumpy or fat, I know she'll work her magic to create photographs that make me feel gorgeous.

A couple years ago Mandii went into retirement from wedding photography, but as my bridesmaid and one of my best friends she graciously took some portraits of me and Josh on our wedding day. These pictures were taken while I was getting ready, and then right as Josh and I had our "First Look" at each other. They perfectly capture the happiness and contentment and love we were feeling that day. 

Mandii also designed our wedding invitations (a post on that is soon to come!) and took our engagement photos. She contributed so much to make our wedding beautiful and unique. What a lady!

Our Wedding: The Cakes

My lovely friend Crystal Morgan made cheesecakes for the dessert table and oh boy, were they ever delicious. She did an amazing job with making the main cake gorgeous with two layers and a rough buttercream frosting. The rest of the cheesecakes were incredible flavors that I picked from her extensive list (I think she had something like 30+ flavors to choose from): coffee and donuts, whiskey caramel cinnamon, Nutella, and blueberry lemonade (my personal favorite).

I've always loved vintage cake stands but have never owned any, so I hunted all over eBay and etsy for the perfect stands. The main cake stand was a large milk glass hobnail Fenton stand. I made a sweet little centerpiece with a slice of wood and two little ceramic birds. We ate our first bites of cake using a set of "Mr." and "Mrs." forks that dear Colleen gave us.

The cheesecakes were all so delicious - and we have a few slices saved for our "official" one year anniversary. I'm so excited to eat those slices and celebrate a wonderful year!



Photos by Daniel Meigs Photography 

Our Wedding: One Year

A year ago today, Josh and I celebrated our committed love with a simple ceremony and a fun party with some of our closest friends. Our official wedding anniversary is November 5th, when we got married at the downtown Huntsville courthouse, but Maggie (the only person who was with us) declared that we didn't do it right since there was no dancing involved at the courthouse, so of course we realized we had to go ahead and throw a big party with dinner and drinks and dancing.

One of our main goals was for everyone to have a good time. We wanted things to be laid-back and low-stress and just fun.  I was so happy to hear how much fun folks had! I'm especially glad that we found a venue that allowed us to serve our own alcohol (believe me, there are way more alcohol-free venues than you'd expect) and that we had the space to have square dancing. I was amazed and SO glad to see that almost everyone participated in the dancing! The Hog Slop Boys did a great job with the music and the dance calling.

A lot of love was incorporated into our wedding. Once I started planning, I realized just how many talented friends I have and how lucky I was to be able to spend our budget on their fabulous goods and services. Almost every part of the wedding -- flowers, hair, coordinating, invitations, bowties, cakes, music -- was done by friends. So much love went into the making of our wedding that I've put together a series of blog posts to talk about some of our incredible friends that contributed.

Stay tuned, I've got a bunch of fun wedding posts coming up! It's so nice to be able to look back after a year and know that though there were some hiccups on the big day, it all contributed to making our wedding such a special day for us.

Photos by Daniel Meigs Photography