Our Post-Engagement Shoot

The pictures are in! After nearly two years of being married, we finally took our engagement shoot photos or as I like to call them, our post-engagement photos. If you read this blog often, you know that I had a plan for where to go and what to do when we finally took these photos. Then, right before we actually took them, I freaked out and scrapped the plan. After much discussion, A.P. and I came up with a list of places and then narrowed it down to a few. We ended up going to five places total, but this time we felt like the places we chose had more meaning than an ice cream shop, a bowling alley, and a park. : )

We met our photographer, Theresa Scarbrough, on a warm, autumn afternoon. One of the last of the season. First up, we went to North Park Village Nature Center. Located on Chicago's northwest side, this nature preserve, which is part of North Park University, feels as if you've stepped out of the city right into a secret forest, complete with a wetland, a prairie, and even deer! There's a number of trails that weave throughout the grounds, too. We picked this place for a couple of reasons. For one, we've gone there in the past since it's near our house. For another, it looked a lot like the place where we got engaged. We spent the bulk of our shoot here and got some amazing shots.

From there, we headed to my old apartment and the site of our very first date. We, of course, could only take pictures outside the apartment, but trust me when I tell you that though this was the shortest leg of the trip, it was also the most fun. The entire time we were taking pictures, this guy was sticking his head out of the window of an apartment across the street shouting, "Hey, take my picture!" It was hilarious. We didn't stay here long, but we for sure got a few cute photos.

After my old apartment, we did a quick outfit change and took some photos in front of our current apartment.

Then, we headed over to a laundromat near our house. The second time we hung out was in this laundromat. We had agreed to make each other mix CDs and for whatever reason, I couldn't email him the one I'd made. So, I called him up and told him I'd bike it over to him. At the time, he was getting ready to go on a business trip and was at his local laundromat washing what he needed to pack. I met him there and ended up helping him fold his clothes. While we were folding and talking, A.P. jokingly asked me if I'd miss him when he was on his trip. I said yes and he thought I was kidding (we'd only gone out on one date!) and I pretended I had been. Secretly, though, I really was going to miss him. I always think back on that moment and realize that's when I knew I really liked him. (Insert collective awwww here.) So, to the laundromat we went! And I'm glad we went there because these ended up being some of my favorite photos.

The last stop for us was the south loop, where we did one last outfit change and took some shots near the train tracks with the skyline in the background. We couldn't take the photos and not acknowledge the beautiful city in which we live.

Didn't Theresa do an amazing job with these photos?? Hip, hip!

(Photos by Theresa Scarbrough)

HELP!

Guys, I am STRESSED out. Remember my brilliant plan??? Well, the more I thought about it, the more I just didn't like it. It felt...staged. It didn't feel like us. We've bowled a handful of times in our relationship. We're not bowlers. I've been to Margie's Candies before, but A.P. hasn't. We're not Margie's Candies people. We are nature lovers, but neither of us has ever been to Humboldt Park before. We're not Humboldt Parkers.

It just didn't feel right. And now, we're slated to take our photos on Saturday and I have no idea what to do. I have put off taking these photos for almost two years. I've tried to schedule these twice before. Now, we have a time/date, but no plan. I haven't lost all the weight I wanted to before taking them. I'm bloated because I'm PMSing. Ugh. And my biggest fear is to take average, ordinary engagement photos that I will hate. We are not cheesy people. Posing lovingly or jumping up and down by the lake for a photographer is not our idea of beauty. Pretending to be models in weird cityscapes doesn't feel right either. I don't know. I don't even know what I freaking want to wear. I always thought I would wear the black dress that I was supposed to wear during cocktail hour before the wedding, but now I'm not even feeling that! Ugh, ugh, ugh.

What should I do, people??? I write about this kind of stuff every day and I'm at a loss for ideas. I am sort of pooling together a bunch of props we can take, too, but I'm basically looking for Chicago locations and/or themes I could pull off in the city. I also would love wardrobe ideas, but it's too late to order anything and I don't think I have time to shop. Also, I'm pretty sure none of you know what is in my closet, so I think I'm on my own with that one. Seriously, though, anybody have any ideas for Chicago locations/themes we could do? We like vintage, retro, fun, nature/gardens, quirky, and cityscapes. We don't like ordinary, museums, monuments, the train (mostly because we already did it), or cheesy. Any help would be much appreciated!

Guest Blogger: Kiara King

Once again, we have a guest blogger today, Kiara King, who blogs in two places now: Henry Reigns (her former wedding planning blog) and her newest design inspiration blog titled simply, Kiara King. Kiara is beautiful (what I wouldn't kill for gorgeous, red hair like that!) and had a beautiful wedding last fall. You may remember that I posted about it. Her wedding was so thoughtful and hand-crafted that I couldn't resist asking her to post something. I gave her the choice of posting a reflection on being married or something design-related. She chose a combination of the both. I was reading her post after she sent it to me and was so flattered to think that she incorporated something I did in my wedding into hers! I had no idea! Here, she talks about the all important splurge for your wedding (and how to make it fabulous and fun): the photobooth. Enjoy!

Hands down the best thing we spent money on for our wedding was our photographer Emma Case, who has given us a beautiful set of pictures to remember the day by and they still give us a warm fuzzy feeling when we look through them 5 months later. As well as knowing we would be getting beautiful photographs we were delighted to get Emma as our photographer because she does a cracking photobooth.

When I first started looking for stuff for the wedding, there weren't that many UK photographers doing photobooths so this was a real bonus and our friends took to the concept pretty quickly. Knowing that we were going to have a photobooth, I wanted to DIY some props for it and hopefully the background, but had to think of something that would fit in our cars for the 3 hour journey to the venue and that we would be able to put together easily.

The props were easy enough with the use of lots of foam board, felt and kebab sticks we created beards (in honour of John's beard which contrary to a lot of peoples' suggestions he wasn't shaving off just for the wedding!) and bought up mini chalkboards from the pound shop, The star of the show however was Henry our huge ginger maine coon cat.

Now although Henry is a big part of our wee family we weren't ever going to go to some of the lengths mentioned here to include our pet in our wedding, especially after he looked so
miserable wearing a potential wedding bow tie, but we did want some kind of mention of him on the day. Fortunately Marty saved the day when I saw the props she created of her pets,
particularly Zuzu. I knew a giant Henry head would be perfect and it was as shown by
Henry rocking out here.

To make this prop I had to follow the cat around the kitchen for a bit to get some good head shots and then cropped and enlarged them on my computer using photoscape and printed them onto photopaper at home, cut them out and stuck them to some white foam board. This was way
easier than my first idea of getting a lifesize cut-out made and I didn't have to look like a crazy cat lady in public.

More shots of Henry in action here, here, and here.

When it came to the background, I initially had great ideas for stapling lots of crepe paper to mdf board and creating a smileboothesque experience, but I quickly realised that was not going to happen. Instead we ran with the penguin books theme that we'd used for our invitations, save the dates and thank you cards and bought these fantastic pack of 100 penguin postcards of book jackets and clipped them together with lomo fotoclips, which, in the end, gave us a colourful and easy-to-hang background!

Hopefully, this inspires some of you brides-to-be! I have to agree with Kiara, too, that the photobooth we got from Photobooth Express, and the money we spent on our photographer, Theresa Scarbrough, was by far the best money we spent! You can check out Kiara's internet obsessions at Kiara King. Check back tomorrow for the final installation of guest bloggers!

Wedding Recap: Reception

Sorry this last recap has taken me so long to post guys, but it's been a busy past couple of weeks, and on top of that, I've had some issues loading pictures to my blog. Anyway, here are the last of the wedding recaps. Enjoy!

As you know, we had Lovely cater our wedding. They prepared Coq au Riesling for our entree, which they served in individual cast iron crocks on top of our thrifted china. We didn't have a DJ or a band, but opted instead to create playlists for our iPod (really...didn't Apple pretty much neglect the need for a DJ at any wedding when they created the Genius playlists??). A.P. and I did a lot of debating over what song we should play for our first dance. Initially I wanted our song to be M. Ward's "To Go Home" (listen to it here...it will rock your world if you don't know it). When we first started dating we made each other mix CDs of our favorite music, and A.P. put that M. Ward song on my CD, and I fell in love. Plus, I loved the lyrics and felt they represented our feelings pretty accurately. Here's the thing, though, as you know, A.P. is not the strongest dancer, and while I'm not anywhere near professionally trained at all, I love to dance and can keep a beat. "To Go Home" is not a slow number, but rather a fast paced dance-y song that can be difficult to dance to if it's not your thing. Soooo...about three days before the wedding we decided we'd better choose a different song. We picked Little Joy's "Brand New Start," (listen to it here) which holds no personal significance for us, but which has a nice beat, is a lot slower, plus it has lyrics which seemed rather appropriate, and I love Little Joy. We didn't have a chance to take dance lessons or practice much, so the night before the wedding, A.P. and I danced to "Brand New Start" a million times in front of our friend, the Half-breed Swede, who gave us pointers. The result? A fairly seamless, simple dance routine that looked just fine even though we were both nervous as hell (after all, when have I ever had to dance in front of anyone, let alone EVERYONE?).

Other than that, the night saw us dancing, taking a ton of photobooth pictures with friends and family, drinking the insane amount of alcohol my brother bought (that's what happens when you put a bar owner in charge of your bar...everyone was sooooo drunk by the end of the night, everyone but us that is), and chatting with guests.

Enjoy some more of Theresa Scarbrough's lovely wedding photos! In addition, I've posted some of the better photobooth pictures. Our vendor Photobooth Express was awesome, and totally helpful in every way, shape and form!

See the look of joy on our faces? That's because we *just* got married!

It's the beautiful Brooke, one of the owners of Lovely

My mother designed both the program and menu on this antique double-sided chalkboard I bought off of eBay.
We now have the program side hanging in our living room.

Instead of table numbers, we named all our tables after skateboarding tricks, since A.P. used to be an amateur skateboarder.
After my mom saw this, she promptly asked me, "What kind of crazy names are those, anyway?"

It's me and my pops!


In lieu of a guestbook, I collected blank, vintage post cards of cities in Florida where A.P. had lived.
We then placed them on a vintage bamboo Florida tray, and after people signed them, they put them in this little mailbox A.P. constructed.
I bought the antique mailbox door off of eBay as an homage to my late grandmother, who was a U.S. Postmaster and actually had a post office in her house. So growing up, I would play and play and play in the post office. This was by far one of my favorite things in the wedding.

I took this vintage birdcage and lined it with some pretty craft paper as a catch all for people's cards.

Our photo display was housed in an antique armoire.
While some of the photos on display were framed, most of them were hung with gold paperclips on this pretty green yarn.
Interspersed between the photos were small paper hearts of various sizes, cut from floral craft paper we used throughout the wedding.

My bouquet was so beautiful and was such a steal! I have Lynn at Pollen Studios to thank for this beauty. We did the rest of the flowers ourselves, but this beauty was all Lynn!

The night before the wedding, my godmother/great aunt gave me this beautiful rosary to carry with my during the ceremony.

I wrapped it around my grandmother's vintage handkerchief. Something blue, something new!

A.P.'s father and stepmother

A.P.'s oldest brother gives a toast

My oldest brother gives a toast

B-Mac gives a toast (it made me cry)

My best friend from college gives a toast (this was the one that put me through hell before the wedding...but it all worked out in the end and she not only came, but gave a nice toast)

Another one of my three brothers gives a toast

Love this photobooth pic of B-Mac's six year old son and the giant Zuzu head (my cat)

I made a number of photobooth props including mustaches on sticks, and giant foamboard mounted photos of our pets. It was our little way of including our spoiled fur babies in our wedding.

A close up from our photobooth pictures of the past display. That's my mother when she was young on the left.

I love how she looks like she's shocked that A.P. and I are kissing in the picture on the right.

Our first dance

This is the look of shock on my face as I realize that miracles do occur. I looked over and I saw...

...My divorced, never talk to each other parents dancing!!

People lining up for the photobooth! So much fun!

Two of my friends sneaked some of the vintage salt and pepper shakers into the photobooth and did lewd things with them! Hilarious!

The beautiful dessert buffet



Our LOVELY cutting cake topped with the cake topper I made

Since we did not get to take pictures before the wedding because A.P. forgot his pants, we sneaked out of the reception, ran down the street to the Division El Stop, and took some breathtaking photos on the train platform, which was a big dream of mine. So while we didn't get our pre-wedding photos, we managed to at least do the train shots, which was awesome. Here are those photos, again all taken by Theresa Scarbrough.



























Then it was back to the reception for some more mayhem.









I hope you guys have loved the wedding. Feel free to repost, with credit to Theresa and this blog, please.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to attempt to make some changes to the blog. We'll see how that goes, but please keep stopping by. I'm going to keep blogging, if you'll keep visiting. : O )