My Big Fat Gay Wedding, part 2: The Little Things

As Martha Stewart once told me, through a television screen, a wedding needed to have a theme to unify elements and make the whole event cohesive.  Joseph agreed with her.  So did I, but I was too filled with ideas of what the day should look like that I couldn't pick a theme.  Joseph bought me a scrap book to mock up different wedding looks, which I did.

 At various times, I wanted to play up different things.  Once I thought I would pay homage to October with a white pumpkin wedding theme.  When I knew we were looking for a cabin, I thought a woodland theme with lots of pine cones and old camping lanterns would be nice.  And of course, I had various ideas about those things I loved like mermaids and butterflies.  

Butterflies and Pine Cones, which Hope, Joseph's Sister sent to us for our special day.

To make matters worse, Joseph thought we should use our Wizards.  To clarify, "Our Wizards" refers to these little funny wizards I drew to represent us and the products that came from our farm life on Vashon Island.  We called our farm "Rustic Charms Farm," and these wizards brought the charm to the farm.  I told Joseph the wizards were not allowed at the wedding, but maybe the save the date cards could feature them.  Well, the save the date cards made me a believer, and I couldn't refuse Joseph's one wish for the wedding theme, so we embraced those silly little guys fully.  

In the end, we kind of threw out the idea of one theme and used all of them.  The Theme was Frank and Joseph, and it thrilled me how well all those separate elements went together when we forgot what looked good in magazines and chose the things we loved.  

These are the little things that helped to make our day special:

Joseph found a website that printed personal mugs and set me to work sketching designs for favors.

As it turns out, white pumpkins, pine cones, butterflies, and lanterns look nice together.  At least I thought so.  

One of Joseph's hand made crocheted rugs represented the home we had already made together as we stood at the altar.  The altar was a simple deck table with a vase to receive roses.  

The wedding attendants (whom we called OWL's, which stood for Outstanding Wedding Ladies) each carried a couple of pink roses to the vase on the altar.  When they had all made it, the vase held 12 pink roses.  Joseph and I carried the thirteenth rose up to represent our thirteen years together.  This rose was the only red rose.  

Joseph had me sketch up more drawings and write a story so that the kids could have personalized coloring books he had printed up especially for our big day.  Of course it featured our Wizards.  Joseph made this book available to the public, click on the picture for details. 

The favors looked good on the entry table.  We also had our wizards on a printed menu to tell people about the turkey dinner they would be eating and the cheesecakes to follow.  The guest book was a photo book we had made with pictures of all our guests so they could sign in year book style.  

The wedding menu

Joseph and I wanted to give our guests tastes of our favorite things.  We stuffed the wizard mugs with our favorite Community Coffee from Louisiana.  And instead of a wedding cake, we had four flavors of Cheesecake Factory cheesecakes.  Yum! 

Not only were the cheesecakes beautiful to look at, they were much easier to take up to the mountains than a wedding cake.  They traveled frozen, then thawed in the refrigerators over the two nights before the wedding.  

Of course my wedding needed blue butterflies and a big wizard star!  Katie and I had sore shoulders taping all of this up, but we loved it.  

Feather butterflies everywhere

everywhere!