relivin’ our wedding: part 2

Back in July I wrote a post about the his­tory of our wed­ding venue – and promised future posts in the fol­low­ing weeks about the plan­ning of our big day. Clearly weeks have turned into months and I decided it was high time I deliv­ered an entry before 2012 arrives. In the orig­i­nal post you can see a video of the raw recep­tion space. The snap­shots that fol­low doc­u­ment the plethora of projects we tack­led in the months lead­ing up to our Octo­ber 2010 wed­ding. To say that I loved plan­ning every detail of our wed­ding is a major under­state­ment. It was like one big art project – my largest to date! And to have our fam­i­lies help con­tribute and orches­trate it made it that much more special.

My father and I sten­ciled pieces of an aban­doned picket fence to make signs and my hus­band, brother and I painted a con­sign­ment store buf­fet that we used to dis­play our guest book and other memen­tos. After­wards, we found a per­ma­nent home for the buf­fet in our liv­ing room, a sweet daily reminder of our wed­ding day.

Each Fourth of July, we head north to my grandparent’s home in upstate New York. While there the sum­mer before our wed­ding, more projects were checked off the list. My aunt and I gath­ered rhubarb from my grandparent’s gar­den to prep the punch that would later become a main ingre­di­ent in one of our sig­na­ture cock­tails. The rhubarb punch recipe was orig­i­nally thought up by my aunt the year prior when she made it for my grandparent’s 50^th wed­ding anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion. It seemed only fit­ting to serve it as we cel­e­brated our first day of mar­riage. We also prac­ticed mak­ing minia­ture ver­sions of my grandmother’s sig­na­ture choco­late cream cheese cup­cakes. These petite delights would be part of our dessert dis­play along with my gram’s other claim to fame: apple pie.

Dur­ing our time in upstate New York, we had the good for­tune of dri­ving by an inter­est­ing tag sale. A tag sale where a hunter was sell­ing his tro­phies – not a sight you see very often! It was my hus­band, Tim, who whipped the car around after spot­ting mas­sive Elk antlers. As a lover of all things taxi­dermy, I was thrilled when Tim sug­gested we buy them to use as wed­ding décor. Pur­chas­ing them was the easy task, fit­ting them into a two door coupe, not so easy.  We drove home 8+ hours with the antlers pok­ing out the sun roof while the other half was posi­tioned directly in front of my chest. Thank­fully, Tim’s deft dri­ving skills pre­vented the horns from impal­ing me!

The week prior to our wed­ding, both of our fam­i­lies arrived from out of town and helped to set up our recep­tion site. We worked for days to bring in all of the ele­ments: café lights were strung from the rafters, thread­bare ori­en­tal rugs were laid on the hard­wood floors, vin­tage fur­ni­ture was arranged to cre­ate cozy seat­ing areas. Every sin­gle piece of décor was brought in to trans­form the century-old ten­nis casino.

The pièce de résis­tance was the chan­de­lier instal­la­tion. My father rewired an aban­doned brass chan­de­lier and hung it from an over­head beam. That week while scour­ing thrift stores for fin­ish­ing touches, we found a vin­tage white tulle wed­ding gown that made for a per­fect “lamp shade”. With some wire, safety pins and more tulle (yes, even more tulle!) a beau­ti­ful wed­ding dress light instal­la­tion was cre­ated. It was stun­ning against the wooden beams and a real show-stopper!

Up next, I’ll share with you the images from our wed­ding day cap­tured by the crazy-talented and dear friend Carla Ten Eyck!