So You're EnGAYged, A Gay Wedding Blog

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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Dress Confession
I have a guilty admission: I found the dress of my dreams in 15 minutes. I didn’t mean to – I wasn’t even looking, I swear. I was fully committed to devoting hours upon stressful, uncertain, self-doubting, non-committal hours to the hunt for my perfect wedding dress… and instead I found it on my lunch break.

The Flashback:
I work in the fashion district of Toronto, with more bridal shops within a 3 block radius than I can count. So while I began this process certain that I wouldn’t be wearing a traditional wedding gown, the idea of it has actually been physically unavoidable. I’ll admit to initially having conflicting emotions about what to wear…. I’m already legally married and, of course, gay as the day is long, so I was unsure if the traditional white gown was right for me. But I still found myself daydreaming about the perfect white dress, and scouring the internet for something that matched the gown I (sheepishly) envisioned myself in. So on a whim, on the way back to work from lunch, I dropped into a bridal shop to maybe book an appointment for later in the week. Maybe.

The Find:
The ever-so-helpful (read: ever-so-pushy) woman at the store informed me that they did not require appointments, I had waited far too long to start the dress-shopping process, and that 20 minutes on your lunch break was plenty of time to try on a few dresses. I was ushered upstairs and grilled on what I wanted. I explained I wanted a full skirt, fitted bodice with rushing, and preferably a pleated crumb-catcher – absolutely no lace, no beading. I was skeptical that she would happen to have on hand exactly the dress I had been imagining for months but been unable to find online or in magazines, and my skepticism was reinforced by the two lacy and beaded numbers she pulled off the rack first. Then she said, “Oh! Wait, this is the one you wanted” and handed me… the one I wanted. It was everything I had daydreamed about: it was an out-of-control puff-fest, equal parts princess and old-Hollywood glamour, so simple, elegant, and ridiculously feminine. All worries about the appropriateness of a big white gown were out the window, because I didn’t want to feel anything other than as good as I felt in that dress. The princess in me felt swept away, and the no-fuss low-maintenance gal in me was won over by the ease (15 minutes!) with which my dream had become a reality.

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Prepare yourself people- this is just the first half of this wedding all sent over by Jenny GG.

Our wedding was perfect! We had beautiful weather, a lovely location, friends and family helping with every aspect of it including making our own boutonnieres, centerpieces and bouquets from flowers from the farm across the street; setting up the tables and all the place settings ourselves; Audrey had a friend doing hair and makeup for all her attendants; and we had friends setting up decorations, DJing and emceeing. We had a touching personal ceremony and lots of great food and dancing! Our wedding turned into such a party, and everyone from the bartender to the guests said it was the best wedding they had ever been to (do people tell that to everyone?).

We both felt so loved by everyone this day. Our friends and families that were there are truly amazing and supportive and loving and we really couldn’t have wished for a more wonderful day to celebrate with everyone.

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Last Saturday I planned a tux shopping event with my Best Man, Jon, to occur around the same time that Liz went shopping for her dress with her Matron of Honor, mom and cousin.  I knew that the tux shop would likely be confused and would assume Jon was the one getting married, and they might even go so far as to assume he was marrying me, so as an incentive I promised Jon a beer at the local pub afterward.  What I hadn’t realized was that this process would be much more painful to me.

The Men’s Wearhouse near me hadn’t batted an eye when I was fitted for the tux I wore when I was Best Mate in another friend’s wedding, but they, unfortunately, don’t have tails in ivory.  So Jon and I, instead, headed to Selix Formalwear.  They carry ivory tails and for some reason I had really fallen in love with the idea of tails.  After some initial confusion on the part of the salesman, he had me set up with a shirt, vest, tie and jacket.  Now, my idea is to have a sage green vest and a  cornflower blue tie, but this will give you a general idea:

I liked it, I did.  Although I would have liked to have seen it with the pants.  I’m not sure why they weren’t offered.

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