...farewell to the best year of my life thus far...

This morning DG got up early and left long before I did.  A few minutes after he walked out the door I got this text message.  "I heart you very much. Thank you for the best year ever."  Yeah.  This is my life.

It seemed fitting that the last post of this blog land on the last day of the best year of my life.  It is long overdue, as usual, but I thought it'd be much more polite to actually provide some closure rather than letting this blog hang out here in cyberspace without a proper ending.  There are million things I wish I'd made the time to write about, but our wedding is long over, and my priorities have simply shifted away from planning a wedding to living out a marriage.

Beside the fact that the company I work for was nice enough to send everyone home a few hours early, today has been just like any other day.  Even so, the end of another year always seems like a natural opportunity for reflection.  Eight months ago tomorrow, I married my favorite person on the planet.  I suppose that was the highlight of the year...despite the rain.  But for me, 2010 was a lot more than getting married.  It held a million little moments that I wouldn't trade for a lifetime, the kind of moments that just knocked me down with the realization that I am blessed beyond what I ever could have dreamed.  It has been a good year, and 2011 is shaping up to be even better.  I wake up just about every day feeling like the luckiest girl in the world and I have no idea how I got here.  I am quite certain it is by no merit of my own.

So today I'm bringing our journey to a close.  For those of you who kept up with these ramblings, I hope you enjoyed our time together.  For those of you who may find them some day in the future, I hope something I've put down here may inspire your very own dream wedding in some small way.


Just thought I'd leave you with my last little wedding project.  Only took me seven months to get it done.  I designed and printed the photobook below using Blurb's BookSmart.  Made great Christmas gifts for family!

Racheal and David by Racheal Graham | Make Your Own Book

(All photos by Will Knowles Weddings)

Thanks for reading!!  Hope your ever after is as wonderful as mine.

Racheal

P.S.  If you just so happen to want to continue to keep up with me, you can find my singer/songwriter website at www.rachealgraham.com.

We also have some leftover wedding items for sale which you can find here if you are interested.

...wedding reception: how we brought the outdoors inside...

In case you need to catch up...we talked about settling on our reception venue  here, here, and here.

All along, DG and I really loved the idea of an outdoor reception, but we did NOT love the risk.  Considering the 500-year flood happened ON OUR WEDDING DAY…we are really glad we came up with this lovely plan B. In the end...though we were  inside and still dry...we still achieved the feel of a late-night outdoor dinner party...or something.  (Yard games and all.)

We basically dreamed up this space in our heads, called in  A LOT of favors, lit the place up and got what you’ll see here.  Let’s start at the beginning….

This is what the arena at Belmont’s Curb Event Center looks like on a normal day.

And here’s an average dinner setup.

And here’s what we did...

Day one of setup was mostly just building the space. The floor was covered and the frame of truss to hang the curtain was flown.  Lighting and sound were hung...you know...normal wedding stuff. :)

I wish I had been more diligent about taking pictures of the progression because, well, Mom's photography....not that great.  (Sorry Mom! But it's true!)  But maybe you'll get the idea...

Here the curtain is being tied on to the frame, but we haven't flown it yet.  

Dad's working hard on putting our lanterns together...looking thrilled to be doing so.  (We'll get to exactly how we made them in a post coming soon!)

Here Dad and I are working on making four GIANT pseudo-lanterns out of these 55-gallon oil drums.  We're pretty hardcore if you haven't noticed.  (Also, this was pretty much my standard uniform for that entire week. Yoga pants all the way.)

In this one you can see we've hung everything where it belongs and our lanterns are suspended over an empty room...

Soon we put the brother and sisters-in-law to work covering our tables in kraft paper.  We owe them big.  They were awesome!

Obviously there are a lot of details that I'll show you in coming posts...but here's the basic finished product!! It was a lot of work, but oh-so worth it!  Will is one talented guy, but I really just don't think a photo can do it justice.

More details to come!  Big thanks to Will at Will Knowles Weddings for all the real pictures!

...wedding reception: our grand entrance...

And the World’s Worst Blogger Award goes to…

Eh, never mind all that.  Here’s the truth of the matter: Enough for Ever After has been sadly neglected as I’m busying myself with actually living the Ever After.  And I think it’s time to face facts.  I am not that girl who had a wedding and fell in love with having a wedding and would love to keep talking about her wedding.  Don’t get me wrong.  It was great.  I was proud of it.  We worked hard and it paid off because our wedding was A-list in my book and I loved every last detail.  That being said, by the time we got to our wedding I was sick of it and ready to put it away.  I am ready to put it away even now, but I still owe all of you patient readers the second half of the story.

So here’s the deal.  I’m going to do my darndest to push through the reception recaps, share all the helpful info that I can, and then I’m going to say goodbye.  I’ll leave this little blog hanging out here in Cyberland for a while in hopes that some of those ladies who will be planning future Nashville weddings, or any wedding for that matter, might find a little something that can help her along the way.  We’ve still got a ways to go, so don’t get all misty-eyed on me….but I just wanted you to know where this is headed.

Anyway, back to the reception….

Last you heard from me, DG and I had recorded that fantastic little video of us just being…well, us.  Our guests all parked in the Garage at the Curb Event Center, and we led them to one particular door.  Here’s how the transformation of our entrance to the reception took place.

This is really the only shot I have of the space before it was ready to go.  It's nothing more than a back hallway of white concrete block, but thanks to my lovely MOH, a drop ceiling, and some trusty binder clips, we draped it in black fabric and added some lighting to transform it into this...

We used strips of wide ribbon and clothes pins to organize the escort cards on the wall on the right where these...

became this...

Finally, this welcome area led our guests into a fabric tunnel, lit up with rope lights, which took them into the main reception area.

And cue the spotlight.  Here we our making our grand entrance....to the Black Eyed Peas I Gotta Feeling.  Oh yes we did.  (The bridesmaids...and a little brother...insisted!)

         

Up next...how we built our reception venue from the ground up...quite literally.  Stay tuned!

Thanks to Will Knowles for these handsome photos.

...intro to our reception...

We've finally reached that point in our chronicle where we all happily pack up and move over to the reception!  Are you so excited??  I'm not going to lie, I am!  When it comes to the real hard work and creativity of our wedding, here is where the story really just begins.  We did crazy ambititious things that I totally would not recommend.  Ok, maybe I would.  The payoff was worth every minute spent slaving away.  I am hoping to do sort of a progression of each project from start to finish for you, so it will take a little work to get organized, but I think you'll appreciate seeing how we accomplished each task. 

In the meantime...this is one of my MOST FAVORITE aspects of our wedding.  Our good friend Luke over at Orange Thread Media, worked with us on a number of projects.  He designed and hosted our wedding website, put all the content together for the projectors at both our ceremony and reception, and produced this fantastic little video!!

I'll get to the aesthetics and set up of our little guest entrance to the reception next, but wanted to share this little tidbit first.  We wanted to find a way to help our guests transition from ceremony to reception.  While our ceremony was meant to be very meaningful and somewhat serious, our reception was designed to be really laid-back and lighthearted.  We needed a way to set the tone.  After DG and I did some brainstorming, we came up with this concept and Luke pulled it off FLAWLESSLY.  This video was looping in the guest entrance to welcome them into our reception.

Enjoy!!

A Fun Spin on a Wedding Video from Orange Thread Media on Vimeo.

P.S.  This is pretty much what everyday life is like in my house.  Jealous??

...ceremony details: the flowers...

I have been hesitating to write about this for the last few days because I need to tread lightly as I tell this story.  As with every wedding, ours was not without its snafus.  The situation surrounding our floral needs definitely became one of them.  This is kind of what happened in a nutshell…

DG’s sister got married a little less than a year before we did.  Her wedding was gorgeous, to say the least.  Largely due to the efforts of a distant cousin who does event design and floral for a living (and beautifully, I might add).  He was willing to basically donate his time and my SIL covered his costs and purchased the flowers at wholesale.  This equation worked really well for her, so it made perfect sense for us to do the same. 

Well, somewhere between a naïvely planned floral budget, a couple of assumptions, and some severe miscommunication…that arrangement completely fell apart, and we learned that said cousin would not be coming….PRECISELY TWO WEEKS BEFORE OUR WEDDING.  I don’t want to speak badly about him because he is family and because if I had been much smarter….I could have prevented every ounce of heartache and panic we suffered when DG and I looked at each other like WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO NOW?  In the end, everything worked out for the better.  We were able to spend less money and I could not have been happier about the way our flowers looked.

So the absolute hero in this story???  Our dear friend Troy.  Troy just so happened to arrange all the flowers for my MOH’s wedding back in October, and they were perfect.  He has a 9-5 just like everyone else, but he’ll do weddings here and there simply because he’s talented and he can.  So Troy had ZERO notice, but we called him up one night and said, “We need a florist.  We have $1,000.”  He was more than happy to jump in and take over.  I was blown away by how he pulled it all together.  I won’t spoil all the surprise of our details for the reception, but here’s what he did for our ceremony.

This display, welcoming our guests in the entryway, was a bit of a sneak peak of our reception decor.

Altar arrangements.

And a close up.

My bouquet.

He did a lovely job incorporating the picture of my grandma who passed away last Thanksgiving.

DG's boutonniere, #1.  Troy is so smart.  He always makes two boutonnieres for the groom, knowing that inevitably the first one will be crushed at some point by an unstoppable hugger.  DG's didn't even make it to the ceremony if I remember correctly.

More pretty bouquets for all my girls.

And here's a close up of the cute little carnation pomander Troy made for our flower girl.

Now, what have we learned?  If you are in the thick of planning and need a little guidance, learn from our mistakes and follow this advice…

1.       The first thing out of your mouth after, “Hello, my name is bride-to-be,” should be “We’re working with a budget of $X.XX, and this is what we need from that money.”  Whether you’ve gathered a group of friends to accomplish a certain task or a family member is handling a project or you’re working with a bonafide professional vendor.  DO. NOT. SKIP. THIS. STEP.  Maybe you’ll learn that you haven’t yet found the right person for the job, or maybe you’ll give that person an opportunity to find creative ways to cut extra cost.  Either way, you’ll be grateful you talked about it up front.  Like I said before, I could have prevented a lot of crying…

2.       Work with talented, creative people and set them free to create.  I know very little about flowers.  I just know what I think is pretty.  When it came to the actual design for our flowers, I gave Troy an idea of the overall aesthetic theme we were shooting for and a color palette and left the rest to him.  I understand that, to some brides, flowers are the one thing that has to be just so.  They weren’t a huge priority for me.  I didn’t have to have any one certain bloom.  I just wanted them to look nice and fit in with the other décor.  So when Troy came to me with suggestions, I said yes to every one and just let him do what he does.  That’s why we called him in the first place.  The result was SO MUCH BETTER than anything I could have dictated to him!

Finally, if you’re a bride looking for an affordable florist who is talented, oh-so-easy to work with, and is willing to work within ANY budget…please consider Troy.  He and his wife are great people and so much fun, and I promise, he’s fantastic.  In our case, he came in under our budget, even after he’d added fees for himself, but we decided to give him the full $1,000 anyway because we were so grateful and so impressed.  Troy isn’t exactly running a floral business, but he has given me permission to give out his email address to anyone who may be interested, so shoot me an email at enoughforeverafter(at)gmail.com if you want his contact info! 

As always, thanks to Will at Will Knowles Weddings for all these pretty pictures.

...best song about marriage ever...

I’ve been a little behind in blogging this week because our world sort of got turned upside down last Wednesday night when my new sister-in-law fell and broke her leg in two places.  Bless her heart, she’s a trooper.  We all rallied to make sure she was taken care of, and things are slowly returning back to normal….for the rest of us anyway. 

I have been impatiently waiting for my new Macbook to arrive, figuring I would want a thousand reasons to sit in front of it for hours when it finally arrived.  Little did I know, DG picked it up last night after work.  He randomly pulled it out of the closet after dinner.  I was so excited, I could hardly contain myself!

So this morning, anxious to put my pretty new iTouch to good use, I downloaded this album I had been wanting to purchase.  As a long time fan of Andrew Peterson, I knew to expect it to get to me.  He is a storyteller like none other, and I’ve never made it through an entire album of his without breaking down into tears.  It just happens that way.  Today was no exception.  I happily plugged my iPod into the car stereo on my way to work, and two tracks in, I was met with this song. 

It’s the kind of song you wish you’d written because it says everything you’ve been wanting to say but didn’t know how.  To some degree, I know it spoke to me so profoundly because of my situation.  And here’s the moment of honesty….I was prepared for nothing other than sheer bliss in the first months of our marriage…convinced that we would experience only utter joy and satisfaction.  Maybe I was just that naïve.  Or maybe DG and I have just come up against something more difficult than we expected.  Whatever the case, the last three months have been consumed with some very challenging, private struggles.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I think the struggle has been productive.  I think we’ve navigated it very well, and our love and the depth of our commitment are literally strengthened by the day.  I can say without a doubt that I love DG more and have a greater appreciation for and understanding of him today than I did on May 1^st.   But that being said, it has been HARD.  We have encountered moments of complete desperation, difficult misunderstandings, and painful insecurity.  Often times I really have felt like we are “dancing in the minefield.”  And really, at present, there is no relief in sight.  No real promise of when things will get better and we’ll arrive at the resolution we’ve been praying for. 

But here’s what I know…I love him.  To the depth of my soul, I love him….and at its most basic form, that love is dangerous.  There are risks.  It means giving up myself.  Putting his needs, his dreams, his desires in front of my own.  It means being more invested in his happiness than even he is…than I am in my own.  It means saying the truth even when the truth is hard, when I can’t predict his response.  It means that I keep talking when I feel like shutting down and I keep listening when I’d rather say, “Enough already.”  Love is by no means safe.  Adventurous and exciting and worth it?  Absolutely.  But it is not safe.  He holds my heart, which means he has the power to absolutely obliterate me….but he has earned my trust.   And he has demonstrated his love time and time again. 

This road is not easy.  We are clumsy, but we are making it.  And I know we are growing closer and stronger and there will come a day when we will look back with gratitude and point to this time as the thing that built our foundation.  The Ever After is unknown, and I am confident that this is not the last season of life that will push us.  Still, there is only one person I would want to travel alongside in the uncertain and sometimes heartbreaking circumstances of this life.  It just so happens I’m lucky enough to be his wife.  For me, that knowledge is enough.

For you wives who are doing your best to love your husband rightly in the midst of less than perfect circumstances…for those of you who are engaged and looking forward to the reality of marriage….for the girls who have yet to meet the man they dream of….I encourage you to really pay attention to this song.  It’s a striking portrait of the way love works in real life, on the ground.  Take it to heart.

...ceremony details: custom built decor...

Though DG and I LOVED the look and feel of Edgefield Baptist Church in East Nashville, we had a few concerns about the space.   As you can see, there’s some really obvious gold lettering over the baptismal area.  We weren't really feelin' it, but we set out to find a solution.  The people at Edgefield were so so easy to work with, and I their wedding policies are some of the most reasonable I encountered.  That being said, they understandably have policies in place to protect the integrity of the building itself. 

We were not allowed to fix anything to the walls, no tacking things to pews, etc., so we did some brainstorming to come up with a solution.  We talked about renting columns of some kind, but we only found tacky white plastic columns or black wooden ones that were far too contemporary for our theme.  We talked about building some, but it seemed that was too big an undertaking.  Ultimately, we settled on a strategy that was two-fold.  First, we wanted to ensure our guests didn’t miss the meaning in all of the lyrics and scripture in our ceremony, so we had the friend who designed our website design content to project onto the screen.  This covered most of the lettering.  It was mostly just ambiant, abstract color and the text. Unfortunatly it wasn’t really captured in the photos, but it worked well and was both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Our other objective was simply to give our guests a focal point.  Something nice to look at.  We discussed a variety of options, and finally settled on a cross.  After a series of drafts for this project, here’s what we did.  We bought a four by eight foot piece of plywood and some simple decorative molding.  My dad and I spent an evening sometime last March measuring and cutting the moldings to fit.  The following morning my mom and I stained it to match the woodwork in the church.  Once it was dry, Dad and I assembled the entire piece.  I wish I had pictures of the whole step by step, but of course, at the time, I was more concerned with completing the project than documenting it.  We purchased this wrought iron cross for something like $10 at Hobby Lobby and sprayed it gold then mounted it in the center.  Dad used fishing line to support it at the church, and when it was all put together, it provided the perfect backdrop for our ceremony.  All in all, we probably spent about $50 or $60 on the project.  By far one of our best decisions, in my opinion!  What do you think of our finished product??

Just goes to show you that a little ingenuity can go a really, really long way!  Have any of you other brides had friends or family custom build pieces for your wedding?

...happy birthday to me...

We interrupt your regularly scheduled wedding-related programming to talk about how utterly fabulous the people in my life are.  I mean, I’m not one to brag, but I have THE most amazing husband and family and friends one could hope for.  You wish you were me. I’ve spent all day feeling so very loved and appreciated!

It all started when DG woke rolled over first thing this morning to give me a big hug and his very best rendition of “Happty Birfday”.  It was compelling, to say the least.  At about 7:00 AM, my phone rang.  My baby brother, who is currently somewhere in Indiana called to sing Happy Birthday.  At about 7:10 AM, my best friend called to yell, “Happy Birthday!  I’ll email you shortly when I get to work!”  At about 7:15 AM, my other best friend called to sing yet another birthday song and to let me know that she had to explain to her two little ones that 6:00 AM in Toronto is 5:00 AM in Nashville, which is much too early to call Auntie Racheal and sing.  On my drive to work I got a tex mex (that’s what all the cool kids call text messaging J ) from both my sisters-in-law.  When I logged in to my email, I was met with a message from my Mimi back home explaining all about the card she’d bought that she finally put in the mail and on and on.  She’s cute.  My coworkers took me out to lunch and bought me cupcakes and a card AND! stood in a circle in the middle of all our cubicles in the office building to sing, yet again.  My sweet mother-in-law called to wish me happy birthday just a few minutes ago.  How many birthday wishes can one girl take?!  Seriously people.!

And most exciting of all…this is how much my dear husband loves me on my birthday!

And this was included as part an Apple promotion FOR FREE.  I am pretty hyped.

As I write this, it is currently  4:15 PM on August 11^th.  I know the well-wishing is not over, and I am already overwhelmed by the amount of love in my life.  Everywhere I look, I am met with people I love to my very core…who love me in return.  It is the greatest feeling in the world.  I am so grateful.  27 was a good year.  I fell even more deeply in love…got engaged…crafted the wedding of our dreams…and walked away married to the greatest man alive.  Who knows what 28 will hold?  A part of me hopes for a lot of things to dramatically change.  Another clings to hold on to what’s familiar and comfortable.  All I know is this, if these are the people I have to keep me company along the way, I’m going to be more than fine.

So yeah, Happy Birthday to me!

...our traditional wedding ceremony: part two...

After lighting the unity candle, we chose to serve communion to all of our guests.  Considering our objective was to move the focus of our away from just DG and me toward us, as a couple, within the larger context of our friends and family…and ultimately Christ and the Church…it was especially important to us to celebrate with our loved ones this way.

First, my dear, dear friend Shreyas sang this prayer. (The Lord’s Prayer by Albert Hay Malotte)

Then our officiant blessed the elements.

As our guests were served, the choir sang  Open Thou Mine Eyes by Benjamin Harlan.  Unfortunately, despite scouring the internet for a video or recording of this song…I came up empty handed.  It was by far the most contemporary and “pop-iest” piece of those I selected, but I fell in love with it a couple of years ago when I was on staff singing in a church choir back home.  The lyrics are based on a prayer by Lancelot Andrewes and I just thought they were so beautiful.

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see.

Open thou mine ears and I shall hear.

Incline my heart, I shall desire.

Order my steps and I will walk the ways of thy commandments.

Oh Lord my God, be thou to me a God that I may love you.

That I may worship you.  And adore you.

That I may follow you.  That I may look to you.

Open thou mine eyes and I shall see.

Open thou mine ears and I shall hear.

Incline my heart, I shall desire.

Order my steps and I will walk the ways of thy commandments.

After communion was our blessing and pronouncement of marriage, followed by our discreet church kiss….which may not have actually been ALL that discreet.

Our guests stood to receive the benediction as the choir sang The Lord Bless You and Keep You by John Rutter.

Then of course we took a bow.  Perfectly appropriate.

 And now we're married!

Time for the reception!  I'm so excited to share what we did.  Bear with me, because it's going to take a little time, but I think you'll like what you see!  Stay tuned.