So You're EnGAYged

Lisa Gordon Events is offering 2009 prices for any weddings booked through the end of 2010!

The Maryland attorney general takes a step in the direction of gay marriage

Go. Right now.  And look up all of your vendors on the Better Business Bureau’s website.  I’ll wait.

Done?  Feel better?

A couple days ago I realized that things were getting close and I still had no schedule for the wedding day.  So I set about calling everyone to confirm when and where they’d show up.  My first frantic call was to the jewelry store that was engraving our rings—they were a week late because of the valentine’s day rush and I was afraid we wouldn’t have our rings to use at the ceremony.  But they’d rushed them through for us and were ready, so I ran over to pick them up on my lunch break.  Before I left I got the phone numbers for our minister and photographer.

The minister was fine—I left a message at the church to have him call me back and dialed the photographer’s number.  But it was disconnected.  I had a brief flash of fear when I thought about how his website hadn’t been working on my computer—I’d had to find the number in an email since the site wouldn’t open.  But I thought I’d just written it down wrong.  Nope.  Phone line, gone.  Website, gone. $500 deposit?  Oh, yeah.  Gone.

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While we haven’t officially ordered our wedding cake (hmmm… I should put that on a to do list ASAP) we have already decided what will sit on top! We looked at the few same sex wedding toppers out there and didn’t really care much for them. Despite the fact you could change the hair color and opt for a dress or suit they still felt totally generic. I really wanted the cake topper to reflect the two of us, and be a keepsake we would treasure. So I turned to my new best friend: Etsy!

I instantly fell in love with the adorable handpainted style of the toppers in DANDELIONLAND‘s shop.  None of the toppers in the shop were of same sex couples so I sent them a message on Etsy to find out if they would create a custom cake topper for us and was so excited to hear that she had been hoping that someone would request two brides or two grooms. It was so fun working with her to create our toppers. We shared photos of all the details of our hairstyle inspirations, dresses and accessories to go with them.

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Well, after some negotiations with Stacy, I’ve gotten a promise that she won’t look at this entry (if you’re reading this, Stacy, remember, you promised!) so I’m finally able to share the pictures with you.

Here I am at the salon, trying the dress on for the first time:

I had tried on about five dresses before I got to this one, and I’ll admit that I kind of gave it the stinkeye when the saleslady brought it in, but when I put it on I was stunned by how elegant and comfortable it was. I think the A-line is really flattering, and of course the corset back doesn’t hurt either! I LOVE the detail at the front where the beading curves out and then the material fans downward.  It adds a little bit of an 1800′s feeling that I just adore.

I never thought in a million years that I’d pick a dress with so much beading, but it’s subtle enough that it complements the rest of the dress nicely. I also really like the amount of ruching- just enough to be complementary without being overwhelming. (No offense, but some of the dresses that are ALL ABOUT the ruching just make everyone look like they’ve been sealed in Saran Wrap, you know?)

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The second half of this square dancing, burlesque veil, wishbone designed, barn wedding is here!

Favorite design element of your big day? Any tips for readers on how you created it?
There was a theme in the ceremony of being on a journey together. We love to travel together and we used the trips we had taken together as a theme for the decor. The tables were not numbered, but were instead named after places we had visited since we have been together. In all the flower arrangements there was the name of the locations (really big so people could see it easily) and a photo of us on that trip and a little story about what we experienced on the trip. We tried to set it up so that guests from Erica’s side of the family were seated at a table with a trip to Audrey’s side of the family in New England, and that Audrey’s East Coast friends and family would get a story about Erica’s family in Montana or here in Washington. Most people walked around and read them all actually. It was really fun to write them and super easy. We just got 5×8 prints made and printed our story out on the same size piece of paper and put them back to back in the flower arrangements with one of those plastic pronged card holders that you get in a bouquet of flowers.

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Growing up, I swam competitively and my mother told me that if I dyed my hair the chlorine would turn it green.  Therefore as soon as I stopped swimming in college, I dyed my hair red, then black with red streaks, then black for 3 years.  Somehow this is the only picture I have of myself with black hair.  My hair is very dark anyway so there isn’t much of a difference.

At some point before my senior year of school, I was watching Gone in 60 Seconds and decided that I wanted Angelina Jolie blond hair.  So I bleached my hair for 7 months.  The first picture is when I did it myself.  As you can see going from three years of black dye to blond is a terrible idea.

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