Our original idea for our wedding was to have a sort of old-timey style formal picnic wedding in Fort Tryon Park. This is the park near where I used to live in New York, and when we first started dating we used to spend a lot of afternoons there. It has a beautiful view of the George Washington Bridge, amazing gardens, and the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters. It’s my favourite park in the whole city! For several reasons, we ended up not going with our park wedding idea, but we still really wanted to make it a part of our wedding experience and share our favourite spot with our friends and family.
So we had a very informal Happily-Ever-Afterparty the day after the wedding, inviting all of our guests to join us in the park to relax and recover from the previous evening. We wanted it to be a pretty casual affair, so we just provided instructions and maps in everyone’s favour bags, gave them a general time-frame in which we would be there, and told them to bring their own picnic! But we did provide blankets for people to sit on, and got some “picnic toys” like frisbees, balls, bubbles, etc. for people to play with.There was some guitar playing, lots of tasty food, and more than a couple people took naps in the grass.
photos courtesy of S. Pyle
It was SO nice to see everyone again in a more relaxed setting, and get a chance to talk more with people you only got to speak with briefly the night before. I loved getting to just chat with everyone, catch up with people on what was going on in their lives, and talk about stuff other than the wedding. Though I do admit there was also a lot of talk about the wedding – but you can’t really get too much of people telling you how much fun they had at your wedding, right?
Before our park gathering, we had planned to meet with our photographer Kelly Prizel for our Trash the Dress shoot. It was kinda fun to take the fancy duds out on the street, and not really worry about getting mussed up a little. We wanted pictures of us in our park, and liked the idea of more subway shots like in our engagement photos, so we rode the subway all the way up to the north end of Manhattan where the park is and got lots of fun pictures on the way!
photos courtesy Kelly Prizel Photography (lots of other great pics from this shoot at Kelly’s blog)
As you can see, we didn’t really do anything extreme so our clothes weren’t actually “trashed”. The rewearability of Bek’s suit was part of justifying it’s purchase in the first place, so we weren’t about to wreck it (not that we wouldn’t have bought it just for how hot Bek looked in it, but it was nice to know that it could look that hot on more than one occasion)! And while my dress isn’t exactly something I can find an excuse to wear again, my mother really encouraged me to keep it and very kindly gave me the gift of arranging to have it cleaned and preserved (though if this had not been the case I would have considered reselling or even donating it, as I think there are lots of great reasons to pass your dress along for others to enjoy). And WOW did it ever need that cleaning! While the Trash the Dress sessions didn’t ruin the dress, the streets of New York (and especailly the subway) are nasty. Really nasty. You know that lovely hot summer New York City street smell of urine, rotten garbage, and sewage? Yup – that’s what my dress smelled like.
Anyway… anyone else do, or planning to do, a Trash the Whatever-You’re-Wearing-For-Your-Wedding photo session? Or doing any kind of day-after brunch/party/gathering? Or were there any other types of activities (in the same vein as Trash the Dress or Day-After parties) that people did or are doing to round out their wedding experience and make the joy of the day go just a little bit further?
Since our wedding was in the afternoon we decided to do an afterparty at a retro bowling alley that was having a gay bowling night! It was so much fun!!
Last weekend we did our trash the dress sesh with Kelly.
Photos to come!
Love your picnic idea, and your day after pictures are gorgeous! We are having a day after brunch at the hotel for out of towners. I’m looking forward to being able to relax with our guests and say good bye informally.