In honor of this momentous occasion, I have decided to do a 6 part series on our wedding (with a final post to sum up our year of marriage).
I hope you enjoy, because I love recapping such an amazing and yet
<----- Part 1: Pre-wedding ----->
Our engagement story can be found here.
DIY Planning
As soon as we got engaged I was in wedding planning mode. Note: We were also full-time students in our last year of college.
Our wedding, from the very beginning, was on a tight budget. This meant that a lot of things had to be DIY.
I have no regrets for not hiring a wedding planner or professional help. We had so much help from everybody around us that it was perfectly fine!
If you didn't know already, I'm a bit OCD. Not hiring a planner made it very easy to be picky and plan each detail according to how I wanted it and how I wanted to do it. I even made my own gigantic all-wedding excel spreadsheet. You may get a post about this later, but I love excel and word. I use them WAY too much.
Just a snapshot of my excel spreadsheet. It had all of my addresses (labeled by family, friends, etc.), my timeline to-do list, food info, decorations, music selection, photo-ops, and job list. Yup, OCD.
Picking the church was very easy because we knew that we wanted to get married in an orthodox church. There are two where I grew up, but I never went to them. Nick grew up at his church and so it was a pretty easy decision on where we should go (I'll admit, I really wanted to get married near my hometown, but we made the right choice).
Picking the date was also easy because we knew that we didn't want to get married while we were still in school and we didn't want to get married too far into summer because it gets ridiculously hot on the east side. July 3rd ended up being the perfect date.
Engagement pictures
About 3 months after our engagement we had our engagement photoshoot. We were so lucky to have Nick's best man, David, be our engagement photographer. He is an awesome photographer (mostly landscape) and knew of some great places in Seattle to get our photos done.
We ended up getting pictures taken at the UW campus, the arboretum, Kerry Park, and one of the marinas. He did such an amazing job. Thank you David!
Save the dates and invitations
We had so much help with the wedding process. My aunt and some of her friends are extremely talented in the art of scrapbooking and paper-crafts. She, plus a few friends, offered to help me out with our save the dates and invitations.
My aunt and I put our brains together and, with a few details from me, she came up with a beautiful idea for our invitations. I loved them both and am very proud with how they both turned out!
Dress shopping
Dress shopping was so much fun. When, as a girl, do you ever get to dress up in huge fancy dresses?!
We only had to go to one dress shop. We ended up picking dress #3 of about 7 or 8 dresses from Alicia's Bridal. If you haven't heard of them and are ever looking for a place to find a dress in the PNW, I HIGHLY recommend going there. The staff is incredibly sweet and supportive. They aren't pushy and somehow they know what kind of dress you want. I didn't pick out my dress (I was 99% positive that I wanted a non-strapless dress), they did!
Anyways, we found the perfect dress. Yes, people cried.
Bridal showers
I had two bridal showers. One was put on by the church, where we were getting married, and my mother-in-law and the other was put on by my mother and maid-of-honor.
They were both so much fun. I can't believe how many gifts we received from everyone! I am so thankful for everyone's help with the showers.
Bachelor/Bachelorette parties
My husband and I had two totally different parties on two different weekends.
His party was a camping trip to a beach on the Washington coast. Complete with hiking around, campfires, crazy manly activities, and lots of booze.
Mine was a quiet, but very fun, party at our lake house. Complete with jello shots, very
Thanks for reading part one of our wedding series. Stick around next week for part two!
Thanks for sharing this Alison. This could be very helpful for me, I'm getting married in a year. Congratulations on your first anniversary!!
ReplyDeletelove it! :) excited for part 2. love this idea for a series, i might have to do one too :)
ReplyDeletePrecious! The first year is flying by for us, too! Wedding recaps are the best <3 and I can't wait to read all about y'alls perfect {not so perfect} day.
ReplyDeleteI dunno... July 3rd at 5:30PM was a pretty darn stinkin warm time of the year/day to get married (re: your comment that you didn't want to get too far into summer lest it was too hot). Those of us in the balcony were sweating like crazy! :) Justina
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