Hosting a wedding at home is a lot of work. Hosting a wedding at home when you're as into little details as I am is insane. It took insane amounts of work by a lot of friends and family to pull off our shindig, but it was so worth it.
We worked non-stop for several weeks leading up to the wedding. Then during the last week, when I was free from work and S was in Maine, things really came together. I keep saying that I wish we had one more day before the wedding so I could have done...well I have no idea what I would have done. The manifesto was 20 pages long and we all stuck to it like glue. The whole thing rocked.
Earlier in the week S and I set up the bathroom tent and hung hard-wired lanterns.
He also mowed acres and acres of lawn, which was quite exhausting, as you can see:
Lexi was everywhere during the set up and the wedding. I thought she would be sitting on her tuffet in the house of on the porch, but she stuck like glue through everything. She even oversaw the assembly of the big tent:
Once the tent was up we needed to hang the several hundred paper lanterns that I bought. My mom had cut 4 foot lengths of ribbon for each lanterns and S and I had attached them to the metal frames earlier in the week. Thankfully for us lantern hanging day also happened to be the day S's parents and several friends arrived in town. Little did we know that their help would be a total life saver.
While Clint and I assembled the lanterns
S and his dad figured out the best way to hang them in the tent with fishing line.
Then they got to work.
Bridesmaid A, mom and I had pedicure appointments at 3pm so we had to leave. I tried to protest, but mom insisted that I go and let the boys do the work.
We dropped some guest bags at hotels on our way to the nail salon. I can't believe how many guests bags I made! Even more shocking is how few were left over.
The guys were less than happy that they were abandoned, but I was PSYCHED when I came back and saw all the lanterns hanging beautifully (and securely) in the tent!
No rest for the weary though. As I walked around the tent bridesmaids C, S, and S arrived to help make favors, while S and his parents went out for a last supper before the last supper.
The girls and I set up shop
and bridesmaid S, a former Williams-Sonoma shop girl, perfected the design.
We worked for hours until we had enough s'mores to feed a small Navy.
After the girls left I worked into the night putting names on escort cards and songs lists on the backs of our table name cards. At 11pm I checked my email and was shocked to find that the etsy vendor who was supposed to make 100 ribbon wands would not longer be making them for us. 11pm Thursday, before a Saturday wedding. The real kicker was that the week before she emailed me to say they were almost complete. Perhaps more important, our programs had a cutesy little poem at the end of them about waving ribbon wands. What's a ribbon wand you ask? EXACTLY. Who the hell knows what a ribbon wand is?! If they were missing anyone who read the program was going to know they were missing. B*tch. In the morning I cried about it for a hot second on the phone to bridesmaid A and then set out to finish up other projects.
Our flower arranger, Lori, arrived
and set out arranging the flowers we processed earlier in the week.
I ordered our flowers from fifty-flowers.com and from flowersandfreshness.com. I highly recommend both companies. The service and quality was fabulous.
And of course, Lori's work was awesome.
Just after Lori arrived to make our bouquets, bridesmaid A pulled in the driveway. She took the day off from work, stopped at JoAnn's Fabric, bought some dowels and was wielding a hot glue gun in her hand...at 8:30 in the morning. "I'm here to make ribbon wands," she proclaimed. I have no photos, I was in a funk, so you'll just have to believe me that she sat there cutting dowels, sanding them and gluing navy ribbon in place for hours.
While Lori worked on flowers, Amy painstakingly created ribbon wands, and I wiped tears from my eyes and stuck names on escort cards, S and dad made the bonfire in the back field.
I'm not sure how it happened, but at some point the time to prepare ran out and I was rushed off to shower before our rehearsal.
and lead us through our processional and recessional several times.
After a quick run through of swords with no swords
we were off for the feast, featuring lobsters and a dinghy full of beers.
We celebrated for hours, S's dad toasted us, we toasted them, we gave our wedding party gifts and the night went on and on. In a separate post I'll have to go back and find photos of all the goodies I made for the girls. Somewhere I have photos of the sail bags, clutches, gold and crystal earrings, and flip flops that I made!
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