Ann's Wedding: An Introduction

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May 4

Ann's Wedding:

An Introduction

Ann and Josh

Photo by Kirsten Zarek, Love Life Images

You may have heard that our studio happens to have two brides-to-be planning their weddings; Elisha began planning hers last fall, and I got engaged in January. Jennifer put a bug in my ear some time ago to blog about the whole planning process. Well, several months later, I finally decided to get on here and give y'all an inside look into our wedding.

My fiance Josh and I are getting married late next May in Hillsboro, Oregon, a town just 20 minutes outside of Portland. "Why Portland?"

I grew up outside of Philly, and though I'm sort of a big-city girl and enjoy things like the ability to take public transportation anywhere I need to go, anytime I need to go there, I've always loved the outdoors too. The summer after my senior year in high school, I took a trip to Oregon to visit a friend (years and years before I even met Josh), and LOVED it there. The rugged beauty and clear blue skies of Oregon in June never quite left my memory - or my heart. As fate would have it, Josh is from a small town in Oregon. When he talks about home, the warm fuzzies he gets end up rubbing off a little on anyone around him.

When Josh proposed, we started talking about where we wanted to hold the wedding pretty much right away. Though work and life brought us to where we are now, here in Maryland, our friends and family are all very scattered. I'll take about any excuse I can get to visit the Northwest, and since so many of our guests would have to fly no matter where we chose - and since we wanted a rustic feel for our day - I suggested having the wedding in the Portland area. Josh was totally up for the idea, and I got my way without having to beg or plead.

Once the basic theme was decided on, I moved swiftly onto the ideas phase. Working at a photography studio, you get to see a lot of weddings. A LOT. And when you're a bride-to-be, each wedding you see is a veritable buffet of ideas. Before long, you learn that the individual touches or design elements from another person's wedding are able to be pulled very easily into your wedding vision. Other times they simply don't.

I have noticed that the weddings that I find to be most visually stunning are those that include personal touches, and those that don't quite follow the beaten path - but the most beautiful part of weddings by far is that they are so full of love that emotion is just bursting at the seams.

Which brings me to why I'm posting my experiences planning Josh and my wedding on a blog of sorts.

A marriage is about the joining of two people in love and in life, often from different worlds and from long and far away, who somehow found each other and fell madly in love. And a wedding is a celebration of this event, no matter how long it took to unfold or what came before it. It doesn't have to have all the frills to be beautiful, but lets face it: when hosting a party, second to having a good time the goal is often to wow the guests.

For some this means having food that makes you melt into your chair and want to stay a long, long while talking and laughing. For others this means having the most impressive band they can find so that guests can't help but get out of their seats and dance the night away. For me, the biggest thing (next to wanting to be sure our guests enjoy themselves, of course) is wanting the wedding details to be cohesive and representative of us; I want they day to have a very natural feeling and flow to it.

My guess is, if you've found your way to this blog, you're either a creative person yourself or appreciate creativity in its many forms. So, you can appreciate this desire to have things just work, visually and in execution. This series of posts is going to be chock-full of just that.