ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Archive for the ‘Weddings’ Category

Wedding Wednesday: Virginia and Dan

Posted by Amy Palanjian to Weddings on 18 November 2009, with 3 comments so far.

Welcome to the fourth installment of Wedding Wednesdays. On the first and third Wednesday of each month, we will share a lovely handmade wedding with you. Check out our previous installments here from Cleveland and here from St. Paul. If you know of a wedding that we simply need to feature, please email us!

Dan Upham and Virginia Sole-Smith were each other’s first kiss during a spin the bottle game in 7th grade. After ten years, six apartments, and two cats, the couple was married this past June in Guilford, Connecticut. Determined to do things their own way (while still pleasing their relatives who had been waiting for this day for years), they planned a wedding that filled with thoughtful details and witty surprises. (P.S. They are also my best friends, so I had a lot of involvement with planning/producing their wedding and that’s me in the pink dress in the third photo!)

kiss

From Virginia:

“We threw a “vintage garden party” wedding in my mother’s (spectacular) garden in Guilford, CT. It was pretty much a given that we would have the wedding there — Dan and I both grew up in Guilford and have lots of family and friends in the area. So I thought a lot about the wedding could work with the setting, with flowers, flowers, and more flowers taking center stage. The vintage piece came about because Guilford is one of those picture-perfect historic New England towns, settled in the 1600s (my parents’ house was built in 1901 by one of the town’s founding families) and because I liked it as a way to avoid buying new where possible and incorporating things with a story or sense of history themselves.

invites

“Dan is a stand-up comedian with a day job in communications, so the invitations are an aspect of the wedding that he really got into. He wrote all the funny copy (I did some, ahem, light editing), proofed endlessly, and was all over it when it came time to stuff envelopes. Our graphic designer, Anita Soos, who helped coordinate the entire look of the wedding— designing the invitations,making all the flower arrangements and taking our pictures— is also a stamp collector, so she let me raid her collection to supplement our postage.

(more…)

Posted in Weddings | 3 Comments »

Wedding Wednesdays: Lindsey and Todd

Posted by Alexa Fornoff to Craft and Design and Food + Entertaining and Weddings on 4 November 2009, with no comments so far.

Welcome to the third installment of Wedding Wednesdays. On the first and third Wednesday of each month, we will share a lovely handmade wedding with you. Check out our previous installments here from St. Paul and here from Omaha. If you know of a wedding that we simply need to feature, please email us!

117518748.iuu6oxhW
(Images courtesy of Lindsey and Todd’s wonderful friend and photographer, Doug Jones. The photos also served as their wedding present from him!)

For Lindsey and Todd, their wedding day was not about the perfect hairdo or flashy tuxedos, but about family and using little touches to make it their own. With a modest budget and Lindsey at the reins, the two transformed a public space in Cleveland into an intimate get together for the people they love.

I knew right off the bat there would be no tuxedos involved. I really wanted the feeling to be sophisticated, yet casual. Both Todd and I are pretty laid back, and I think we wanted the wedding to reflect that. Todd was more than happy to let me take the reins. There were times before everything came together that he would look at the random assortment of junk inside a shopping bag and raise his eyebrows, like ‘Where is she going with this?’, though he did insist on being in charge of the adult beverages. But other than that, I just kind of ran with it. I had a picture in my head, and it was really fun to try to get to that place in real life with a very modest budget. Most of the whimsy-meets-nature decor was purchased from The Flower Factory, a wholesale supply store. We decided against traditional attendants—we knew our friends would have more fun without the stress, cost, and responsibilities of the typical bridesmaids and groomsmen, and it made planning easier as well. My mother stood for me, Todd’s father for him, my brothers walked me down the aisle, and my son Milo was the ringbearer. I bought apple green silk ties for the men and asked them to wear white button-down shirts and chocolate brown trousers. My motto through the whole planning process was to keep it simple, yet sophisticated.

(more…)

Posted in Craft, Design, Food + Entertaining, Weddings | No Comments »

Wedding Wednesdays: Julie and Jason

Posted by Alexa Fornoff to Craft and Design and Events and Weddings on 21 October 2009, with 17 comments so far.

Welcome to the second installment of Wedding Wednesdays. On the first and third Wednesday of each month, we will share a lovely handmade wedding with you. Check out our first installment here from a couple in St. Paul. If you know of a wedding that we simply need to feature, please email us!

backdrop 1
All photos from Jessica Ewald and Lindsay Trapnell.

Julie and Jason Cusack of Omaha had been together for almost six years when he proposed in February. In only eight months, the couple brainstormed, planned and put together a handmade wedding that everyone agreed was uniquely them.

Julie says of the process: “We just really understand each others’ tastes and what we like. Owning a home together really helped because the ceremony already felt like ‘us.’ I am glad that Jason made our backyard setup on his own and didn’t run the details by me. It made walking down the aisle that much more special.  It literally took my breath away—I felt like he made everything just for me.”

handmade dog tux

The couple’s three-year-old French bulldog, Arthur, even dressed up for the occasion. Julie’s mom, Judy, made a tux and a top hat for the little guy, but he ended up ditching the hat in minutes and the rest of the formal wear during the ceremony. Judy found the pattern (Simplicity 2519) at JoAnn Fabric and used knit material so the outfit would stretch a bit. She made the bow tie out of 2-inch brown ribbon.
(more…)

Posted in Craft, Design, Events, Weddings | 17 Comments »

Lynn and Scott’s DIY Wedding Extravaganza…

Posted by Andrew Wagner to Craft and Design and Events and Society Pages and Weddings on 6 October 2009, with 16 comments so far.

This past weekend my wife and I rolled out to our old Bay Area stomping grounds to attend the wedding of two good friends. We stayed at the Hotel Majestic which is where we stayed on our wedding night almost four years ago.

My wife and I were fairly crafty when we got hitched, spending weeks trolling flea markets all over the Bay Area, scavenging for funky old San Francisco post cards that we then tweaked with a Print Gocco for our save-the-dates.

SanFranciscoPostcard

I also wanted to cook pasta for the rather large wedding reception but perhaps knowing my culinary skills, all involved soon quashed that idea. The Bay Area always reminds me of nuptials for obvious reasons but one not so obvious reason is that I vividly remember reading about ReadyMade’s founder, Shoshana Berger’s wedding in the New York Times the year after my wife and I tied the knot.

With all this wedding activity swirling around it seemed perfectly natural to find an email that weekend from my good friend Emily Anderson telling me about a ceremony she had just attended in St. Paul that had her buzzing. She gave me the rundown and sent some snaps. I was impressed with all their ideas so did a little digging myself and Emily helped me convince the gracious newlyweds, Lynn Sabin and Scott Lunny, to share a bit of their story here as well as their photos taken by the talented Erin Smith:

lynn_wedding_ceremony
(more…)

Posted in Craft, Design, Events, Society Pages, Weddings | 16 Comments »