submerge: Our Wedding!

Today marks our first wedding anniversary. I can hardly believe that it's been a year - time flies when you're having fun! Since we never posted photos of our wedding, I thought today would be a good day to do so. Thanks to the digital age, we practically have a second by second replay of the wedding, which makes whittling down photos difficult. From the beginning...

We set the tone for our outdoor, destination wedding with a playful save the date. The invitation that followed was more refined and elegant but picked up on the color of the save the date. We designed the invites around a leaf motif to refer to the outdoor ceremony/reception and wrapped a red thread around the invite to imply a branch, which also became a way to tie all of the different pieces of the invitation together. The same red thread showed up again in the binding of our programs.

Sean and I got married in a field in front of a cabin outside of Seattle that has been in my family for generations. My great-great-great grandfather owned the land between the cabin and what is now Kayak Park. Over the years all the land was sold, but my great grandmother was eventually able to buy back a small portion of the property where the cabin now sits. I spent many childhood summers here picking apples, camping in the field with cousins, swimming and building elaborate sand/driftwood forts down at the beach, so it was a very meaningful spot for us to have our wedding.

While we were getting ready in the cabin, Sean was memorizing his vows, and the rest of the guests were hanging out with cocktails. I had no idea at the time, but apparently we delayed the ceremony by 45 minutes because it took us a while to get ready - whoops!

Sean memorizing his vows, and my little brother, Ben, who was one of Sean's groomsmen.

At around the 45 minute mark, my mom came into the cabin and told us that make-up or no make-up, it was time to go! So, my ladies headed outside and I waited on the porch with my dad.

My cousins were the flower girls and the ring bearer. I learned many years ago that rings are best kept in boxes - about twenty years earlier, my aunt and uncle had a small wedding on the porch of the cabin. My brother, who was three or four at the time, was the ring bearer and somehow dropped the rings between the wooden slats of the deck. My great uncle had to crawl underneath the porch with all of the spiders to find the rings, which luckily he did!

We were married by the same pastor who married my parents - an old family friend whose daughter I grew up with. Bob kept it short and sweet but had words of wisdom for us, centered around being faithful in God's provision for us and our marriage.

Our first moments as man and wife!

My lovely ladies...They were seriously the best bridesmaids ever. They kept me supplied with food and make-up items and just took good care of me. Alice ran all over Seattle the day of the wedding getting tiki-torches and little stands for the table numbers. I love them all to pieces.

After the ceremony we had to take all of the formal portraits.

Our parents, grandparents, and siblings.

After the wedding ceremony, dinner was served to our guests and we took our wedding portraits.

Some wedding details:

Our table settings and the wagon that my grandma painted to match our flowers.

We silk-screened a print as our wedding favor. The print incorporated the cabin and the location of the stars on our wedding night.

We are cupcake people, so we decided to forgo the traditional wedding cake and have cupcakes made instead. We had a larger cupcake made up for us to cut and serve to each other. The toppers were a little lego couple that I found on ebay.

We kept our flowers very simple - local and seasonal - a lot of dahlias and daisies in red, yellow and orange.

Our first dance was to Etta James' "Sunday Kind of Love". Sean proposed to me after asking me to dance to this song up at Lincoln Center, ending an evening out celebrating my 27th birthday.