I have something a little different today that I’m SO excited to share with you. I knew Angie and Dave had put so much time and effort and so much of themselves into their wedding (her bouquet is made of flowers he’s given her over the years, he typed all the place cards on an old typewriter, she made his tie) that I asked Angie if she would mind to give me a write-up of their planning process. This is an amazing story of everything that went into their vintage wedding. It was a day I feel so privileged to have been a part of – hope you enjoy 🙂

Dave and I had so much fun planning our wedding together. At first we weren’t sure what we wanted to do… traditional weddings are not our thing, and we didn’t want to spend more than a few thousand dollars. In all areas of planning (except the photography!) we just couldn’t find anything local that suited us. Also, my brother (a chef) made our food as a wedding gift, and almost every location we looked at did not allow outside food. We were getting a little stressed, so we decided to change our perspective, stop looking so hard for the perfect place, and let things come to us when the time was right. No pressure. This was the best decision we made. At the time, I was doing some volunteer preservation work at a local historic park, which includes the 200-year old estate/farm of Frederick Bates, the second governor of Missouri. It was the perfect wedding location for us; it reflected our shared interests in nature and history, and it was gorgeous. The problem? They don’t rent it out for anything, least of all weddings. The fact that we did end up having our wedding there is proof that when you know someone who might be in a position to trade a favor, it never hurts to ask.

Once we had our location, everything else fell into place beautifully. The wedding planning process became more of a creative process. We love making things and working with our hands. If there’s work to be done, we have a hard time finding a reason why we shouldn’t do it ourselves. We can’t help it. I think we were probably born in the wrong century. With that, and with this gorgeous site full of historic folk art, tools, and furnishings as a backdrop, it was only natural that the entire wedding would be authentic in feeling and almost completely handmade. It wasn’t even a question that we would do it together, as a team.

We made the invitations and place cards ourselves. I found several antique fonts for the invitations, and added a simple picture of a Bur Oak tree from a photo that we had taken on our first trip together. Dave sat with his typewriter and typed out each guest’s name on kraft paper place cards. Instead of table numbers, I named each table after a feature on the property (the barns, the house, the ghost) and wrote a short piece about the history of each… I hoped that this would get our guests excited about exploring the whole property and learning a bit about the history of the area. We also made the table runners and napkins; I had seen a post on a sewing blog about a couple who used their cloth napkins to make a wedding quilt, and we really loved the idea of holding on to a little keepsake from each one of our guests (even if it was just a used napkin!). We found a few reproduction fabrics from the early 1800’s, the period when the house was built. Dave is very good at hand stitching but has never really used a machine, so I taught him how to machine sew, using these napkins as our first project. My mom joined us with her machine, and this is still one of my fondest memories of planning our wedding. The quilt is now in the works.

We were both quite timid about sharing something as intimate as a wedding ceremony with anyone we weren’t very close to, so we kept the guest list fairly small and invited only family and our closest friends. Our officiant had met with us in her home and taken the time to get to know both of us quite well, so our ceremony was extremely personal, lighthearted, and best of all, full of laughter. Instead of reading vows out loud, we both wrote our vows inside journals, reading them after the wedding when we were alone. We plan on making this a tradition, writing something new and exchanging our journals on every anniversary. The ceremony was held at the back of the property, at the tree line where the woods began. We had a simple arch made of two bunches of curly willow, again, a score from Dave’s greenhouse, that a friend wove together at the top.

I wanted Dave to have something on our wedding day that I had given him, and since most neckties are made of silk and he doesn’t like “shiny things”, I decided to make him a tie out of brown tweed. I hand-stitched every seam, and added a little red heart on the back, over the french tack. I also wanted to make my own wedding dress, not only because I love a good challenge, but also because I dislike spending large sums of money. When my cat decided to destroy most of the silk fabric a mere four days before the wedding, I have to admit that I started to panic a little. I cried for about three minutes, called a friend to vent, and left it alone for the rest of the day. In the morning, I took the remaining unsoiled fabric meant for the underlining and petticoat, and started making a new wedding dress. Three days before the wedding. The morning of the wedding, my mom came over and worked on the hem so I could take a shower (my hero), and then I picked it back up so that she could run home and get ready. I finished it two hours before the wedding ceremony was supposed to start. All but the zipper. When I got to the park, a friend (my other hero) finished the zipper while my mom quickly curled my hair. Truthfully, I liked the new dress better than the original.

Music was important to us, and since there was limited electricity at the site, we had to get creative. We have several friends who play music, but nothing was working out for any of them to play at the wedding. I joked to a friend of ours that we should just have a friend play a kazoo during the ceremony, and he in turn suggested that we have everyone play a kazoo. We couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of it, so we designated him Band Leader and bought fifty kazoos. Our guests were all happy to oblige, and played Here Comes the Bride as I walked down the aisle. For the reception, we spent hours putting together a playlist of songs from our own record collection, and brought our home stereo to the park. I was apprehensive about the sound quality of a home stereo for an outdoor reception, but it sounded great (we didn’t have dancing, so it worked for us).

We didn’t want to spend much money on flowers, and, in case nobody has noticed yet, flowers can be expensive. I’ve saved every flower Dave has ever given me, they’re dried in vases all over our apartment, and one afternoon while trying to decide what to do for flowers, I took one bunch out of a vase and took it to the mirror to see what I looked like holding a bouquet (giggle). I liked what I saw. I took the best flowers out of each dried bouquet, added some dried purple coneflowers that he grew for me in his garden that summer, dried onion flowers from his first onion crop, and some wildflowers we picked on the side of the road one day and dried on the dashboard of the car, and made my wedding bouquet from them. I can’t think of a better bunch of flowers to hold at our wedding, they were a perfect symbol of our past three years together. We decided that we love the look of dried flowers so much that we would use them to decorate the tables as well. I think dried flowers are just a little bit creepy (in a good way), and since we were getting married close to halloween (my favorite holiday) at a haunted house, a little bit of creepy was perfect. Dave works at a greenhouse/flower shop, so for the next six months he brought home all the throw-away bouquets and roses from the shop, and I dried them in our spare bedroom. Dried flowers are tricky, and my mom and I spent two days putting the arrangements together, but I have to say it was very convenient that we could just pack them in a box and didn’t need to worry about keeping them in water! At the end of the night we burned them all in the fire pits we had set up. The vases were all mason jars, antique bottles, and vases that we had around the apartment. My mom also brought cattails that she and her boyfriend had cut and dried for us, and Dave brought some potted mums, pansies, and strawflowers. Dave also came up with the idea of giving tulip and daffodil bulbs as wedding favors, since fall is the time to plant them. He got the bulbs together with typed instructions for planting, and I put them in muslin bags with tags that I made using images from vintage Halloween postcards.

Dave built all the signs out of pallet wood and painted them. My mom supplied our card box, a small antique terrarium. Our cake topper was another of the few things that we didn’t make, cute little spun cotton deer from an Etsy seller. Dave sliced up a small log and oiled one of the pieces for me to use as a base, and I attached the dolls, along with a few red autumn leaves, the first ones we came across at the beginning of the season. My grandparent’s wedding album, which my grandfather made, is wooden, and I loved the rustic look of it, with thick paper pages full of old photos held to them with black photo corners. My dad is a woodworker, and when I told him this, he offered to make us a wedding album in the same fashion. He made it out of paduak and purple heart, with the image of the Bur Oak from our invitations printed on a piece of canvas and inlaid into the cover. It’s gorgeous. We used the first few pages of the album as our guest book at the wedding.

We worked together with my brother to come up with the menu. We wanted seasonal dishes, but we also had to consider the limited space and limited electricity in the summer kitchen of the house. I thought back to the trip Dave and I took when we got engaged (has asked me to marry him at the summit of Ben Nevis in the Scottish Highlands… swoon…), and remembered us walking down chilly London streets eating warm Cornish pasties, and it seemed like perfect comfort food for a possibly chilly Fall wedding. We added pumpkin soup, homemade bread and some salads. He made literally everything by hand, even commenting that while it would have been easer to buy chicken breasts and cut them up for the pasties, he preferred roasting whole chickens and carving them by hand because it allowed him to put more love into it. People are still talking about the food.

Dave and I made pecan pies and asked a few friends and family to make pumpkin and apple pies and a pear crisp. Frederick Bates had a distillery and a peach orchard on the property, which he used to make peach brandy, so we decided to try our hand at making our own for the toast. We don’t have a distillery (although, if we’d had the time we probably would have built one), and the peaches in Frederick’s orchard weren’t quite ripe yet, so we made a peach cordial out of brandy and fresh local peaches. It was a huge hit.

It was such a perfect day, and I still can’t get over how loved we felt. It truly felt like a community affair, with everyone contributing a little something to the day, whether it was work, pie, or hugs. We’re so lucky to be surrounded by such incredible people. At the end of the night, a full eight hours after the ceremony started, people were still hanging out with us around the fire, drinking beer and peach brandy, having a great time. Definitely a memory I’ll keep forever.