An Appalachian American wedding

A piece of the heritage my fiance and I share has been part of almost every direction I've gone in wedding planning so far -- we're country (you might say "redneck," I say "Appalachian American"). It's not something that we really wear on our sleeves. Most days, I'm wearing casual office clothes to the library and Johnny is wearing a t-shirt, cargo pants, and flip-flops -- we're not "country" in the sense of wearing cowboy hats, boots, and Wranglers. But we both come from long lines of mountain people.
When Johnny and I started dating, it was the first time I'd been in a serious relationship with someone who came from the same background I'm from, and that commonality is behind a lot of what makes us great together. When I started to think about how to our wedding "ours," I wanted to embrace where we come from in the details.
It works out nicely that rustic is in right now as a trendy feel for weddings, and I love looking at all the different ways that couples incorporate rustic aesthetic into their wedding days. But maybe it's because it's become so popular that I'm still working to personalize our rustic details as much as possible.
So what are some of those details?

Apples and apple butter

Apple butter time! (with future-bridesmaid Kristy and flower girls to the left)

When Johnny and I started dating, it wasn't a week before I met his family. I mentioned that I helped out with their apple butter day in my post about Johnny and his great ideas -- what I didn't mention is that we both grew up in families that made apple butter every fall for a long, long time, up until our generation reached being teenagers. Johnny's family used to run an apple orchard, along with farming other fruits and vegetables, which they sold at a family produce stand on the mountain, and he grew up knowing how to identify different apples by taste. I grew up looking forward to the times when my great-uncles and great-aunts would come to my grandmother's family homestead and sit around telling stories while we passed around the apple butter stirrer. Apple butter is time-consuming, expensive, and tedious to make -- it's been hard for our families to get together enough people with the patience to do it -- but Johnny and I want to keep the tradition alive for both our families in the future, and we're looking forward to making a batch to be served at the wedding if we can!

Mason jars

I know, I know... everybody's doing 'em these days, and there's hardly anything that gives such a quintessential rustic feel as these bad boys. My first ever idea for wedding planning involved mason jar centerpieces, and I thought I was being soooooo original (until I saw how they've exploded onto the wedding scene). But their popularity doesn't bother me a bit -- and I'm still looking forward to using them in our centerpieces. When Johnny and I lived together for a (wonderful) six months on the mountain, near his family, we drank out of mason jars -- they remind me of those days. (I suppose I could also add that we both have for-real moonshiners in our family trees, but I don't know if that's quiiiite the association we want to make at the wedding, or my Granny will start preaching about the Evils of The Drink. We have moonshiners and teetotalers.)
Speaking of my Granny, another great reason for using mason jars? We don't have to buy them. She has a cellar-full, even after we do our summer canning. Yay, free decorations that remind me of my Granny!

Fabric

One of the things that made me leap at the idea of making my own flowers out of fabric is that the women of my family have sewn out of neccessity up until my generation. My Granny's clothes were altered and patched to go on her five little sisters, and she made many of my Mom's clothes when Mom was little. Mom grew up knowing how to sew because she saw Granny doing it all the time, because they had to. Mom used her sewing skills in a different way. She makes German-style cloth dolls, and made lots of stuff for me to wear when I was little because she liked to dress me up and take pride in seeing me enjoy what she made. Then I learned to sew... and spent two years making costumes for our college theatre, along with various RenFaire outfits and costume pieces for others along the way. Further back in our family history, we've got quilters -- something I'd love to try eventually (especially since I know that Johnny's grandmother had a quilt frame that someone might let me use, someday). If I had all the time and money to do it, I would love to make a wedding quilt for us!
Fabric is definitely featuring most heavily in our fabric flowers, but I have a feeling it'll be cropping up in some of my other DIY projects, too.

There are some less visible ways that we're honoring our roots in our wedding -- holding it in the church Johnny's family has attended for generations (Johnny himself helped the new fellowship hall), and by doing a lot of "making do." Budget weddings are coming into their own these days, and I like the ways that our spending decisions on our wedding go with the attitude of making the most of what you have without doing things outside your means that my Granny has always shown me.

I took this picture on the Blue Ridge Parkway in November, 2007

Fat girls get married, too.

Maybe it's because January has been National Fail At Silly Resolutions Month. Maybe it's because my bosslady has gone on a diet and talks about it with me nonstop. Or maybe it's because I went for a bridesmaid's dress fitting for a friend's wedding last month and was introduced to the miracle of Spanx. But as my wedding planning process has kicked into a higher gear, I've noticed that I feel more and more pressure to lose weight before "the big day."
I don't doubt that most brides, whether they're size six or size twenty-six, hear those messages -- they're really hard to escape. Even if you're not reading bridal magazines or watching Say Yes To The Dress, if you're talking with other people, it seems like it just comes up. Like it did with my bosslady. We were sitting at the circ desk when she started telling me about another assistant librarian she'd had who had gotten married during her time there.
"Rory really wanted to look great for her wedding, so she lost a ton of weight..." Bosslady said, with a nice awkward pause at the end as she waited for a response from me and I fumbled around in my brain for one. My personal response to "how are you losing weight for your wedding?" is simple - I'm not really planning to.
One thing I promised myself when I first got engaged was that I wasn't going to let insecurities about my weight rob me of any of the joy that comes with the experience of being engaged. About three years ago, I realized just how much of my life I had spent feeling like I was less of a person because there was more of me. Waking up to that was hard.
I've been overweight since I was eight years old, and I've stayed about the same proportions since puberty. When I was in high school, I evaded the pressure to lose weight by dressing like a guy -- wearing clothes that hid my shape as much as possible and masking my insecurities under combat boots and two-inch-long hair kept me a step away from being compared to the other girls.

I'm the second from the left, in all my John-Lennon-shirted glory.

When I went to college, I went to a tiny hippie school where there were so many kids trying to be unique that weight wasn't really an issue -- who cares about how one girl looks when there's social justice to be done and everyone's rockin' dreadlocks? But at that time, I started dating a guy who was really into running, weight lifting, martial arts... and two years into that relationship, he had me feeling pretty awful about my body. Before I left him, I felt like he was with me because he could stand me in spite of my curves and softness, and knowing that he found me unattractive despite the fact that we were dating was painful. When I left him, I somehow didn't stop feeling like I was unlovable because no one would look past my surface to give me a chance.
I spent my two years in library school walking two miles each day and eating haphazard meals that weren't nutritionally sound because I was trying to escape being in a place I didn't like. For about a year, it was hard for me to care for myself because I was so busy trying to shut out the world. I weighed the least I'd ever weighed (including the three diets I'd gone on while dating Martial Arts Dude), but I was miserable with myself. Part of that -- not all, but part -- came from being surrounded by the "beautiful people" who flocked to the institution. I felt like I didn't fit in because of my size (at least on the campus at large. In the library school itself, there was much more diversity -- at least the way it seemed to me.) It was in the middle of that time that I started realizing, with the help of some amazing friends and a therapist on campus, that the first step to taking care of myself was to love myself the way I was. Not allowing popular opinion about what's pretty to dictate how I treated myself and what I let myself do opened up a whole new world of experiences for me. I started wearing tank tops for the first time ever, felt more comfortable in social situations, tried more new things.

In grad school, at my lowest weight.

When I found a guy who loved me for the woman inside and who made no secret of appreciating the outside as well, I realized that my ability to trust in our relationship came partially from that foundation I'd built. Learning to be okay with myself helped me open up to the idea that someone else could feel that way about me, too.
With that history being a part of what led me to the life and love I have, I knew I didn't want to fall back into a pattern of feeling not good enough leading up to what I want to be a day of happy memories. Being a bride means being at the center of a lot of attention for a couple of hours, and being in that kind of spotlight is what motivates a lot of people to lose weight, build muscle, whiten teeth, treat their skin, and do all kinds of other things to feel like they're at their best. And that's not a bad thing -- it's great to have a goal to motivate you to make changes. But any type of changes that come out of guilt or feelings of self-loathing aren't okay with me. My personal approach to that impulse puts things in a slightly different focus because I don't want to fall back into negative thought patterns (and which would make my fiance sad, because he works hard to make sure I know he loves me the way I am). I want to make healthy changes based on what I have to gain, not lose, like more high-quality days on this earth to spend with the man I love, or knowing that my future kids will have a healthy start in life.
I'm doing my best to develop the most positive habits I can. It means trying to add more vegetables and fruits to what I cook, trying to find healthier substitutes for less healthy things, trying to embrace more movement in my everyday life. I'm not purposefully starting a diet -- I'm working on making better choices, one day at a time. I don't know whether it will result in any weight-loss or not -- but I have a lot of confidence that each time I make a decision that's healthy, I'm doing something good for myself. And one of those healthy decisions is to love myself as a size eighteen bride in a world that says I shouldn't be okay with that.

At the Woolly Worm Festival* less than 24 hours
after the proposal, when I couldn't be happier with
myself and life!

* Why yes, my county has an annual Woolly Worm Festival, in which participants race Isabella tigermoth larvae up strings for the honor of predicting the weather for the winter.

Giving notice...

If you read this regularly, and you notice that my posts are a little different from here on out, there's a reason for that. I've been trying to make up my mind for the past month whether or not I want to apply to be a Weddingbee blogger. I've made the decision to go ahead and apply when the official time window opens up for me to send in my info (they accept bloggers who are only fewer than 8 months away from their wedding, which will be after Feb. 22 for me).
One part of their application process is to read each applicant's blog over the course of a few weeks to get a feel for their writing style, types of updates, frequency of posts, and such, and they ask that applicants take a few weeks to write exactly as they would for Weddingbee on their blog. So - I'm going to be cutting down on some of the super-personal info in the posts (I think I've already subconsciously been doing that, to an extent) and writing with this idea in the back of my mind.
Just so you know in case you think someone stole my brain. I mean, I still plan to write like me... if it sounds like some body-snatching has been going on, that'll be bad!
If you like reading wedding-related things from real brides who are pretty down to earth, DIY-friendly, with great eyes for style in the sense of "we make things pretty" more than "this came from a runway," you might enjoy reading other bloggers over at WeddingBee:



Man at work

When I'm wedding-blogging, a lot of the time I hear a Brady Bunch-esque "Meredith, Meredith, Meredith!" going off in my head -- I know I'm talking my butt off about me.  But you know something? I'm one of the dang luckiest ladies around. Because as much as I talk about me, me, me, I have a fiance who's actively involved in wedding planning.
I haven't talked about what Johnny's been contributing as much as I should because, in part, I didn't know just how much that was until this weekend. It all kind of came clear to me on Saturday night while we were over at the Outlaws' house, the second night we stayed over, visiting. Johnny pulled me aside in the bedroom with his Mom's laptop.
"I thought we could work on our registry," he said.
I'd been going round and round trying to figure out this registry business for a few weeks by now. First I just wanted to have no registry and accept cash gifts without actively asking outright for cash because that would be super-rude. Then Mom convinced me we had to do some sort of traditional registry because a lot of our older family members would find it rude of us to not include at least a few traditional options. Then I started learning about honeymoon registries and wanted to do that. I'd made us a joint Amazon account and signed up for an Amazon registry, which allows you to select items from their site as well as to add things from elsewhere on the internet using a "Universal Registy" button you can put on your browser.
In the three weeks since I'd created the registry, I'd put a total of seven items on it -- a family bible and some other marriage books (you see where my priorities lie).
At first, Johnny had been as baffled as I was about what to do, but on Saturday, he took charge. We realized we could use some sheets and started from there. When he took the laptop into the living room and we sat together in the dark watching a movie with his family, I drifted off to sleep noticing that he was adding more items -- getting past the "we don't have room for stuff" mental block that had kept me feeling ambivalent about adding anything for fear that those items would be unneccessary and too hard to store.
When we went to bed, he showed me the things he'd added -- an awesome moderately-priced knife set, a window fan, a rice cooker, good pillows, "man food" cookbooks -- all things that we can use right where we are, in Mom's house, as well as whenever we have a house of our own. It was clear from his selections how much he'd thought about what we could really use.
That really opened my eyes to how Johnny approaches wedding planning, and planning of any sort. I'm a blabbermouth - I talk through all my steps, over and over again, working them out verbally. He mulls over things in his head until he has a clear direction, then he takes that direction thoughtfully, purposefully. That purposefulness gives all the projects he works on a stable and solid feeling that I love and respect.

What else has Johnny been working on?

• He figured out the main "dish" of our wedding -- biscuits! Biscuits are perfectly country, can be sweet or savoury, and his Mom has already agreed to help us make them in mass quantities. The first time I met Johnny's family was in October 2009, when he invited me to come make apple butter with them. I didn't know at the time that Johnny himself was the driving force behind this mission - he paid for the apples, gathered the firewood, poked and prodded his folks into helping out with their efforts and expertise. He'd love to have more homemade apple butter at the wedding, along with some jams and country ham and other biscuit-fillings. He's also given me directions to go with other food ideas: flavored sweet tea, a S'more bar, different types of cakes.
• He researched a ton of hotels in Charleston and has found all kinds of options of things for us to do, see, eat, and experience while we're there. Dinner boat tour of Charleston Harbor? Yes sir!
• Not only did he research honeymoon stuff -- he figured out how to turn the Amazon registry into a hybrid of traditional and honeymoon registries! Now we can have the best of both worlds!

Beyond the tangible decisions, Johnny has been extremely supportive of me so far and has really helped me be sane. He likes to tease me about some of the froofy detail stuff, but he makes me feel great when he does stuff like compliment my fabric flowers while talking with his Mom and tell me he's proud of me for how I've been saving and budgeting. His attitude reminds me of why we're doing all this in the first place -- it makes all the froofy details fade away like the don't-matter-in-the-long-run things they are and I see so clearly that I'm blessed to love and be loved by him and to get to spend my life doing that.

The polls are open and a secret is revealed...

I made a simple webpage last night with enough functionality for embedding videos and a poll to pull together the info for the bridesfolk in the wedding party to vote, and the votes are coming in! I put up pictures of some choices (I gave seven -- and I'd be totally cool with anyone who wanted something outside that particular set, but I wanted to give them something to go on), listed their prices and color choices, and embedded a poll that goes straight to a Google docs spreadsheet. So far, about half the votes are in, and I'm loving the results -- no one has picked the same dress, the color choices are evenly split, and everyone seems down with the idea of picking what they want and not having to match. Hooray!

After some hemming and hawing around, I finally made the decision to go ahead and tell them about sekrit part of their outfit I'm buying for them:

With the shindig being in October, I wanted the bridesfolk to have something to wrap up in (and a little bit of color to wear during the ceremony). And what do you know... there's a handy Youtube tutorial video for just about everything in the world:

I'm backin' up, backin' up...

I've been trying to figure out how to describe this wedding-shindig to people. The farther I go down the rabbit hole of planning, the more ground I have to cover when it comes to talking wedding with curious inquirers. Like my in-laws/outlaws, who I'll be playing Donkey Kong with this weekend, or my bosslady, or one of my favorite kooky old-lady patrons who always asks for books with sex in them.
Knowing that I'll probably end up talking planning a little bit this weekend, I've been backin' up, backin' up, backin' up in my thought process to try to put words around what I envision this wedding to be like. (I say "I" specifically because J's vision is "We get married. Yay! The End!" and I'm the one who does all the crazy details.)

• Familiar things with history and family have a big presence. Johnny's family church will be our ceremony and reception site, both our families plan to contribute with help, food, and decor, and we've envisioned this to be more like two big family reunions happening at once from the start. That's why we're not capping our guest list - there's always room for family, and we wouldn't feel right turning any of our relatives away who wanted to come. Our list of friends who could come isn't so big that we'll have to cut there.
• We both see God as a "third partner" in our marriage and see marriage as a spiritual commitment as well as a legal one, and the ceremony will be a Protestant one, in a Protestant church. This is a journey we're taking that's intimately connected to that part of our lives, maybe more than to any other part of our lives.
• My approach to coordinating things like attire and decor is like my Dad's approach to projects: "I know what I like, what I think looks good. How can I think outside the box to do something like this without going broke?" Oddly enough, it seems like this isn't as easy to understand for some folks I know as I would have expected -- I've had people seem to think I'm crazy for a) getting inspired by ideas that would probably be out of my price range to begin with (mostly family members) and b) trying to replicate those ideas in any way other than the Wedding Industrial Complex professional vendor way (a friend who is not too fond of anything DIY). Learning how to talk about planning with both these types of people has been a challenge, but I would say it's been a fun one, too.
• The look I'm going for in the design elements of wedding-stuff has warm tones and neutrals and is casual. I like using the word "rustic" - it combines the country/homemade/casual elements together in a way I like, and when I use it with other wedding-brain people, they know what I mean. I'm looking for ways to use color, texture, and materials to make people feel warm, welcome, at home -- that's more the feel we want than trying to set a tone of "let's party" or "we're celebrating high-life style." (I also purposefully chose the colors I chose so they'd go with the church, not clash with it, and that was a hard decision to make, as someone who adores purple.).
• This "warm and welcoming" feeling is something I want to bring in for everybody involved in the wedding -- I'm doing everything I can to take effort and stress off the other people involved, including our families and our wedding party. What we want is to celebrate with the people we love - that's the important part, and what they wear and how they can contribute (with projects, with money on their attire, etc) takes a backseat to just having them there with us.
• I like incorporating handmade elements as much as possible because I like making them! All "DIY saves money" debates aside, I choose my DIY projects based on what I think the effort I put in will add to the time leading up to the day, the day itself, and our memories of it. There are various arguments for each handmade piece I'm making, but that one applies across the board.
• Most of our guests are local and related to half of the other guests, and while we don't want people to go 'round hungry, we're planning a "snack and mingle" reception so we can have more flexibility with the guest list numbers, space, and seating (along with most of the foods we plan on making being less expensive and easier to prepare!).

That's all I can think of at the moment... being able to sum up where I'm coming from makes talking about the details a lot easier and puts them in context that helps other folks understand where my crazy bride-brain is. (My daddy taught me good!)

So many guestbook options...

I've been seeing so many creative and awesome options for guestbooks lately that I have visions of metallic pens and beautiful paper dancing in my head.
Well, maybe I'm not that crazy. But I am seeing lots of cool ideas.
My original guestbook idea involved something I saw at the bridal show I wing-woman-ed at in South Carolina: a tree. It was in a photographer's booth -- I have no idea who the photographer was, but I remember turning to see this gorgeous tree covered in orange flowers and matted photographs of a happy couple. Right then, I thought it would be super-cool to use a tree not only for a photo display, but also as a guestbook -- guests could hang shaped paper tags with their names and wishes on them on the tree (later, I learned about "wish trees" and that plenty of folks had thought of this already). My cell phone camera picture doesn't capture what I remember and instead gives it more of a "overhead flourescent grainy" feel...

Actually, I'm not as super-thrilled with this particular tree now as I was at the time. At the time, it blew my mind, man. And early on in the wedding-planning process, I learned about various types of trees appearing at weddings (craftificus MarthaStewartis) - everything from topiaries to things like the one above that aren't really "trees" at all. But that path... that path led me to fall in love with manzanita.
What is manzanita, you ask? It's a small, hearty, dense evergreen shrub that has plenty of decorative use. Especially at weddings, where brides tend to cover it in tinsel and crystals and unicorn hair and whatnot and make it look like your guests could spend time between the ceremony and reception making Tsahaylu with it.

Weddings on Pandora...

You can see these have a little more of a tree-ish look to them than the curly branches used for the tree I saw. However, the one I saw has the advantage of being much easier to put together -- manzanita has to be set in a sturdy base with some plaster of paris in order to stand up.

If I were set on a tree, I'd probably go with the manzanita just because I think they look prettier. But I'm not even so sure now that I'm set on a tree. For the number of guests we might end up having, there would be a lot of signed tags covering the tree, and I'm not sure if the product would be worth the effort. What would we do with all the tags later? Put them in a book? A jar? That would take up a lot of space, and wouldn't be too easy to look through. That's why I'm starting to lean toward more compact ideas, like books or things to hang on a wall.

Another option I love are guestbooks that double as photo albums -- either with pictures of your guests or with pictures of the couple. I've been getting Shutterfly coupons lately, and I love some of the Shutterfly albums out there that are used like this.

From Shutterfly

Or I could go with a totally different kind of tree - a 2D kind, with leaves made out of fingerprints. Bleu de toi on Etsy sells some great ones.

From Emmaline Bride

Johnny saw a signable photo mat in Michaels one day when we were there, and he really liked that idea. I like it, too -- plus there are lots of options of what to put behind the frame. A blown-up version of your invite? Big ol' wedding picture? You could even combine that with the fingerprint tree...

This one from Luster Studios looks classy.

Lots of options -- so many ones that I like! Still not sure which one I'm leaning toward. If Johnny doesn't have a particular favorite, I have a feeling it will come down to the Money + Time Investment equation. Since he's mentioned that he likes the pictureframe idea, I'm tempted to surprise him with that! We'll see...