Our very own Toni – I call her that because you ought to recognize her as a frequent commenter — sent me a bunch of links to photos of her cousin’s recent wedding. What you may not know about Toni is that she’s a fantastic photographer who’s shot a wedding or two in her day, including the one you’re about to see.
Toni described the wedding thusly:
I love my wedding guestbook, even if our hundred guests only used about six pages of it. As it turns out, a lot of people have small handwriting even when they’re penning loving messages on huge pages. Plus, a good portion of our guests also attended the rehearsal dinner, where they were asked to sign a poster. Maybe they were all sick of writing “best wishes” and similar messages?
The fact that so many pages remained blank even after I tried filling up the unused space with cards and other stuff tells me that the guestbook idea is one that is open to extreme levels of interpretation. Before you do anything else, try to envision a guestbook without the ‘book.’ I’ve read about guests filling out postcards that are sent to the newlyweds, writing on engraveable plates and platters that can be displayed or used, and even doling out salutations on river rocks!
Mélangerie created this unique guestbook for an outdoor wedding. Attendees were encouraged to “air out” the bride and groom’s dirty laundry. The instructions were printed on a modified detergent bottle and the cards were shaped like shirts, socks, and trousers, which were then clipped to a laudry line strung up in an entranceway.
Then again, it’s hard to lose the ‘book’ completely. Things like postcards usually end up being pasted into books.
There’s nothing like looking right into someone else’s wedding. It’s what inspires us to search Flickr for photos tagged with ‘wedding,’ ‘bride and groom,’ and ‘wedding cake.’ It’s what keeps us going back to The Knot, even though said site can be irritatingly cloying. Heck, it’s what prompts me to open my e-mail every morning — whenever one of you sends me a wedding snapshot or a link to your wedding pics, I DEVOUR them.
If you’re a bride-to-be who likes to walk the road less traveled, checking out other chicks’ weddings can also help you come to terms with your own choices. There’s something comforting in knowing you’re not alone in wanting to wear green cowboy boots with your gown or proudly rock your ink.
So my newest addiction? It’s the Weddings We Loved board over at Kvetch@IndieBride. I’ve posted a selection of pics below and ask the hotlinking gods’ forgiveness. All the snaps are from different nuptials, but you can click on them to see more images from all of them.
A handful of weddings unfold perfectly, but most are marred by the little things that inevitably go wrong. And then there are the weddings that are interrupted by true tragedies…
When an earthquake hit Sichuan, China on May 12th, there were, in addition to all of the people going about their daily business, men and women poised to enter into a lifelong commitment.
Item one is a snapshot (from Slate’s Today’s Pictures feature) of a French bride-to-be making her way to the town hall in 1975. Typically, I’m not a fan of gowns embellished with lots of furry ball things, but somehow I can’t help thinking that this dress was impossibly gorgeous. Maybe it’s the wind and maybe it’s thoughts of romance, but I desperately want to see the same picture as taken from the front.
Item two is the story of Britain’s oldest bride, 94-year-old Bess Atkins. She and 86-year-old Winston Barraclough first met while he was volunteering as a driver for a hospital. During that first fateful drive, he actually stopped to buy her a box of chocolates! I hope that someone’s buying me chocolates when I’m almost halfway through my nineties.
Atkins said Barraclough proposed in January on New Year’s Day.
“I thought it was some medical problem and feared the worst,” she said. “He said: ‘Will you be my wife please. I would love to marry you.’ I was totally shocked but I said yes, that would be lovely.”
The pair married at St. Nicholas Church, the same ceremony venue at which Atkins married her first husband in 1939. She said marrying in the same church was lovely and brought back “a lot of happy memories.”
Wonderful, no?
After checking out my shortlist of ways to put some pep into wedding pics, reader Ky suggested I check out Taaz. Can I just say I love synchronicity? It just so happens that I was planning on posting about Taaz, which describes itself as a “fun, easy-to-use website that gives women the opportunity to ‘try on’ the hottest makeup and hairstyle looks from the convenience of their homes.”
I’m interested in anything I can try on without having to battle my way through throngs of fellow shoppers, so I gave it a go. My original wedding day look is on the left, and my plasticized look is on the right.
But while I love makeovers as much as the next femmey-femme, I had no intentions of discussing how one might use Taaz to try on different makeup colors and hairstyles. Nor was I planning to wax poetic about the site’s product recommendations — circumstances dictate I be a Bare Minerals girl as much as I might want to worship at the altar of Chanel.
No, I want to talk to all frazzled and fried brides-to-be about Taaz’s potential as a stress reliever. Seriously…I just spent a hilarious forty-five minutes uploading snapshots of friends, family, and pets so I could make them look like geishas, freaks, and cross dressers. No one was spared the cruelties of my dastardly broad makeup brush.
If you’re going to spend ages and ages between the ceremony and the reception posing for the camera, why not make it interesting? It’s bad enough that everyone else is off getting their pre-meal drink on at the open bar and chatting about poor Carol, the bridesmaid who just got divorced. Don’t make it worse by slapping on a frozen smile and lazily staring down your photographer. Your wedding album will be much enhanced by your decision to jazz things up a bit when it’s time to say “Cheese,” so try one of these cool poses on for size:
The jump:
From Beth Beljon — and can I just say I LOVE the bridesmaid attire?
For whatever reason, my inbox has been filled with pitches from newish companies advertising their spiffy online tools designed to make the lives of brides and grooms even easier. But are they really as spiffy as they seem? In an attempt to find out, I started signing up for some of them. I do these things so you don’t have to!
The Wedding Lens: At first I couldn’t figure out why the uploads were so dang slooooooooooow at this photo sharing service, but then I realized that the pics I’d chosen were absolutely HUGE. I’m talking file sizes that my free Flickr account would have rejected, so that’s a mark in their favor. It’s easy to create albums and name photos. At some point, however, it stopped accepting my titles and letting me add photos to sets. Hopefully, that’s just a bug that’ll be fixed soon. What’s spiffy is that your guests can upload the photos they take to your account. What’s less spiffy is the $49 price tag for six months of medium grade service and the fact that they want you to give them your loved ones’ e-mail addresses. Want to try it for free? Enter HOLYMATRIMONEY in the referral code box when signing up for “Gold” service. I’m still not sure what it can do that a Flickr group can’t do.
Since we were all chatting about regrets not so long ago, I thought I’d share one of mine. I regret not having spent more money on photography. The thing is, we didn’t have more money to spend on it…in fact we didn’t have any! The Beard’s mom covered the shutterbug’s bill, which meant that I tried to keep the photog bills on the lowish side. Poor moi, right? Anyway, had I gotten hitched in NYC with all the moolah in the world, I might have gone with the photographers of Karenscape.
If this sounds anything like your story, ask yourself what you’d do if you didn’t have to pay at all. I know what I’d do–hell, I’m tempted to restage my wedding right now because Karen of Karenscape Wedding Photography is giving away four complete wedding packages in 2008. Buuuuuut you can’t get something for nothing in this world, and Karen’s skills are no exception.
All Karen wants is for you to tell her how you met your intended…
We are searching the country for the most romantic, serendipitous, poignant, funny, and inspiring stories of how you found the one. Tell us the amazing tale of how you crossed paths with your fiancé in this big crazy world, and you’ll have a chance to win a free wedding. Make us cry. Make us laugh. Make us hope.
For more info on how to enter, check out the contest page on the Karenscape website. If you decide to enter, hit us up with a link to your entry. And if you don’t, you should still check out Karen’s sample pics anyway–they’re completely freaking awesome for both their candor and their beauty. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go cry over my cheap-ass wedding album.
