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These two brought some snuggles into the hallowed halls of MIT for their engagement session. Rawr!

It makes me giggle to imagine Nobel-prizewinning researchers, astrophysicists, and nanotechnologists peeking out from their lab window to wonder what in the world we were doing.

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Whenever I am in the same place as previous year wedding clients, I try to do a mini portrait session so they have an updated photo together. Although we only had a few minutes together during my recent visit to Austin, Texas I am really enamored with these portraits out in a field next to their apartment.

Rachel and David were married in Dallas in 2007.

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I still LOVE this photo of Julia and Andrew. It takes my breath away. And it shows their real personalities, which brings a flood of happy memories back from their wedding day.

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I photographed Anita’s wedding at their private residence in Palos Verdes, CA this past summer. What’s extra-special is that I photographed her sister Suzy’s wedding in the same house a few months prior. Someday I hope to photograph Bijan’s wedding as well, but he probably has a few years since he just started college this year. All three siblings are extremely close, and a delight to know. You should see them gang dance with the rest of their family on the dance floor!

I’m still secretly hoping for a bridal session with both Anita and Suzy sometime this year. They inspire me.

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Erica, an October bride
Northampton MA
double exposure, holga 120 film

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When I found out Diana and Micah (legacy clients from 2007) had just bought a house, I had a very specific portrait I wanted of them together in their new space. Quiet amidst the chaos of moving. Here’s the image I had in mind:

And then, of course, we played! Micah is kind of weird in the same way I am, so we have fun being nerdy together. Diana is sweet and kind and always brings laughter into the room. What a great combination!

I enjoyed getting the house and neighborhood tour, and feel confident that Groton will never be the same again.

Congratulations, you two. May the fixing up always be sexy and fun.

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Bonnie and Robert were married in Quincy on Thursday, October 1, 2009.

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I love the way he looked at her all day.

Jenny and Matt were married on a sopping wet day in Pennsylvania, the kind of rain that never ceases. The ceremony was at the historic church in Harrisburg where Jenny grew up, then the reception was at the Hershey Country Club.

Check out Jenny’s Fluevog wedding shoes!

In honor of the wedding location, we did a cool ring shot. I’m proud of this; it took about 20 minutes and an entire table full of guests to accomplish (lighting, ideas, arrangement).

[ view artist selects here ]
more images added soon.

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I am always fascinated by brides who choose to do their own flowers. Reasons for the choice can range from the lack of financial backing required to hire a wedding professional, to outrage at the cost of bouquets, all the way to brides with a serious interest and skill in arranging flowers. I’m not convinced that in most cases it actually saves money… but that’s another entry altogether.

I asked Julia, a recent bride, to share some of her strategies and thoughts after doing many of the elements of her wedding herself.  She had a lot of info to share! I thought others interested in sourcing their own local flowers might be interested in hearing what she has to say.

I am delighted that we did our own flowers, but the process was rather more stressful than it had initially seemed.  I’m not sure when the idea of buying flowers from local farms first entered my head, but it was driven by a few factors.  Firstly, florists are really expensive!  Really, really expensive.  Secondly, we try to live lightly on the earth and the thought of ordering flowers flown in from Africa or wherever they were in season at the moment made us slightly green to think about.  Buying locally assured us that we were minimizing the footprint of our flowers.  Google showed me that there are three farms in my area that sell cut-your-own-flowers.  One uses traditional farming, one uses integrated pest-management, and one is basically organic, minus the expensive organic-certification process.  While buying organic is important, we feel that buying local usually outweighs it, even if traditional fertilization and pest-management practices are used.  Thirdly, buying local allowed us to support local business and who can argue with that?  It felt like being cheap and making decisions in line with our consciences had finally aligned.

We knew we didn’t want a formal wedding.  Having the ceremony be sacred was important, but we were not interested in having a reception, but wanted a party instead.  To this end, we hired a bluegrass band and forwent speeches, tosses, and cake smashing of all kinds.  Casual flowers made sense with this in mind.

We decided that we would make three bouquets, one for me, my sister, and Andrew’s sister, and centerpieces.  We eschewed boutonnieres, as Andrew didn’t love the thought of wearing flowers, and from there decided to abandon corsages for the moms too.  The church is a very special building for me and is also just a lovely space and we thought it was entirely pretty enough without a bit of “help” from us.  For centerpieces, we decided on mason jars and bud vases.  We ended up with two masons and two bud vases per table (though we’d originally planned for 3-4 masons per table).  All of the vases were thrifted and about half the mason jars were as well.  To hold up the table names, we inserted those card-holders that come in flower vases into one mason jar per table.

I visited small farm in Stow, MA during the summer and talked to the owner about what their availability would be in early September.  She rattled off the names of a few flowers, most of which I promptly forgot, and said that the 12th should be alright, because the first frost wasn’t due till the 17th or so.  Back in July this seemed like plenty of cushion, though as the day drew nearer I was convinced that all that would be left would be a few wilty black-eyed susans, half-killed by the early frost and riddled with bug-eaten holes.  I alternately whipped myself into quite the nervous frenzy and convinced myself that it would be fine and we could just go to the grocery store if things got hairy.

I have no prior experience dealing with flowers at all.  Nada.  On Wednesday evening before the wedding, it occurred to me that maybe this was a concerning fact.  In the afternoon, I went to Parlee Farms in Tyngsboro, MA and picked a bunch of zinnias to try my bouquet-making skills with.  Armed with ribbon, lots of floral tape, wire, and corsage pins, I plopped myself on my kitchen floor and went to work.  The result was an unmitigated disaster and my worst flower-assembling fears were confirmed.  Zinnias are far too fragile for my clumsy, inexperienced hands and I broke stems with abandon.  I also couldn’t figure out how to layer the flowers so the petals lay prettily.  Mild panic ensued.  There may have been some tears.  Hoping that sturdier flowers would be an answer to my teary prayers, I went to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of sunflowers and some purple asters with plans of making a practice bouquet for myself.   Within fifteen minutes or so I had a passable bouquet and felt much better about life.  I wrapped it up with my ribbon, stuck some pins in it, and exclaimed at its monstrous weight.  That thing was heavy!

A friend, Krista, and I picked all of the flowers on Friday morning.  (In the drizzle, might I add!)  We started at about 9:30 and finished around 2:30.  We brought buckets (three gallon I think?) from Home Depot to transport the flowers and borrowed my parents’ SUV so that we’d have enough room for everything (which was a good call, but oh my environmentalist’s heart was heavy at that!)  We started at small farm.  The owner was right, there was still plenty of selection.  Krista and I spent about $19 there, I think, and picked maybe two 3gal buckets and 1/2 5gal bucket worth.  They sold flowers by container– each container was $5.25 and you paid that flat rate for as many flowers as you were willing to cram into it.  Sunflowers were sold per head separately, though I now forget the cost.  It was about $0.40/head I think.  We bought all my sunflowers there.  Then we continued to Verrill Farms in Concord, MA.  We spent $21.45 there, I think.  The cost was per head, I think $0.25.  This worked out to be about the same unit price as at small farm.  Though we were concerned that we were paying more there, when we got our flowers back to the car, we had about the same amount as what we’d purchased earlier.

I had budgeted approximately $100 for flowers, and we came in at $40 for the flowers themselves and about another $40 on supplies, jars, and bud vases.

We brought all of our flowers back to my parents’ house, where we spread everything out on the living room floor, which was protected by old towels.  My sister, Gail, and Andrew pitched in and the four of us assembled all the flowers in about two hours.  It was mayhem.  Krista and Andrew did the centerpieces, Gail assembled her and Andrew’s sister Brittany’s bouquets, and I assembled my own and helped with centerpieces.  After everything was put together, we left the bouquets in mason jars full of water and Andrew drove the centerpieces to the hall sans water to minimize the risk of a flooded car and filled each jar when he got there.  Everything was stored out in the open in regular room-temperature air.  The centerpieces were stored in a dark room, my bouquet was stored in my kitchen, and the other two bouquets were stored in my parents’ kitchen.  We didn’t really take any special steps to protect them, as we were counting on their being so fresh to see them through to the next day.

Everything looked beautiful the day of.  I ended up leaving the flower-assembling “party” before everything was finished, so I never saw all the finished centerpieces until we walked into the room in front of all our guests.  They held up just fine, as did our bouquets.  Gail’s and Brittany’s bouquets had a few casualties–all zinnias–but nothing that was noticeable.  Mine looked entirely fine.  God bless those sturdy, sturdy sunflowers! It was a lot of work and a fair bit of stress, but I think it was worth it.  If we’d been having a formal affair or had been more concerned with having our flowers just so, I don’t know that this path would have worked stellarly for us.  We were fortunate .  We were fortunate in that homemade was exactly the look we were going for, so we had some leeway to just shrug and go on.

What no one can have too much of is help!  Because fresh flowers necessarily need to be done at the very end, this isn’t something you can just pound through yourself.  Things would have gone a lot faster and we would have had a lot more flowers to work with if we’d had two or maybe even three more people to help us cut the flowers.  Cutting that many flowers takes a very long time!  Much, much longer than you anticipate.  You cannot have too many hands at that point in the process.  If it hadn’t been for Krista, I would have found myself backed into a stressed-out corner very quickly.  If we’d had more personal flowers or significantly more centerpieces to assemble, I don’t know that we would have been able to pull it off with the man-power that we had.

I’m very happy that we did our flowers this way.  It spoke exactly to both our ethics and our aesthetics. It would have been a lot easier to just have a florist deliver everything ready to go the morning-of, though, so there’s certainly a trade-off to consider.  For us looking back, it was worth the stress, though while I was driving around what felt like the entire eastern half of Massachusetts in the rain in a low-level simmering sort of panic, I don’t know if I’d have answered so positively.  (A note: we were certainly helped by the fact that there were numerous options for us fairly close-by!  If there hadn’t been any convenient farms in the area, this idea would have gone no where fast.)

Some notes from Julia about her styling:

My dress is the J Crew Robin.  It was comfortable and really affordable.  I had it hemmed so that I could wear it with flats, since I went barefoot the entire party.  I’ve never understood women who dance in heels!
I worried sometimes that it was too casual a dress and that it had never really felt like “the one.”  That’s an idea that the wedding industry and that other brides even sell really hard, so I was worried that I was making some mistake and giving up too early in my quest for the world’s most perfect gown.  But that day, I didn’t feel at all a bride.  I felt like myself on the day that I happened to be getting married.  It wasn’t “the one,” but it was perfect.

My shoes I found by random chance at Banana Republic over the summer sometime.  I’d had my heart set on yellow patent leather flats, but found my search foiled at every turn.  When I saw the teal, I figured that would be a perfect substitute.  I broke them in by wearing them to work on and off in the months leading to the wedding and actually just wore them grocery shopping yesterday (who says you have to do your errands in your sweats?).  It makes me really happy that my wedding shoes are a part of my wardrobe that I get to take out, use, and enjoy for plenty of time to come!

My poof is called Marilyn and is from Sara Gabriel, who I discovered through the blog A Practical Wedding.  In her quest for a wedding headpiece, Meg listed lots of different options, one of which was this poof.  I didn’t want a traditional long veil because I felt too bride-y and not enough like me.  Bird cages weren’t working, since I wear glasses and that’s just too much happening in front of my face.  I was afraid that I’d smoosh any poor flowers that ended up attached to my head.  And yet, I didn’t want to go entirely decoration-less on my hair.  A poof seemed like just the ticket!  Sara Gabriel headpieces and veils are only sold in one store in Massachusetts, Country Weddings in Hingham, which was fortunately having a trunk show in the spring.  She really has the most fabulous assortment of veils and headpieces, some of which are really, really glamorous and other of which are totally edgy.  I thought my poof was a happy medium.  It is ridiculously fun to wear and elicited tons of compliments on all my wedding-morning errands.  I’m really disappointed that I can’t think of another place to wear it!

My jewelry came from this really fabulous designer from Austin, Texas, Tracy Tenpenny.  I know I found her through a blog, though I can’t remember which.  I called Tracy to ask about her return policy and ended up talking with her about my wedding and what I was thinking about wearing for jewelry.  She was immensely helpful and asked for pictures of my clothes and shoes, which she then replied to with a number of different suggestions for earrings and necklaces.  She showed me some pieces that weren’t listed on the site and swapped out different stones in different necklaces for me to see.  I ended up ordering a necklace and a set of earrings from her and loved them.  Both have gotten use before and after the wedding and I’m also really happy that they’ll be part of my wardrobe for years to come.  I could not have had a more pleasant experience dealing with a vendor!

In December I’m visiting a non-profit in West Virginia that I worked with for a year after college.  One of the services that they provide is free clothing to families who are in dire situations.  I’m bringing my gown and poof with me, in the hopes that they’ll bring as much happiness to someone else as they did to me.  Though I’m attached to them, I’d rather see them out there adorning another bride (brides??) than yellowing in my closet.  And hopefully they’ll remember the sound of bluegrass and be ready to party again!

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