Hi! I'm Taryn, a writer, designer and soon-to-be-bride from Atlanta, Georgia. Sit a spell with me and catch up as I plan the wedding of my beer-loving, confetti-throwing dreams to the wonderful Mr. Williford.How a Writer Crafts a Wedding Ceremony
Martha Manning via Southern Weddings
I’m a writer. I went to school for Journalism. I’ve been doing it for years. So, I think I’m pretty good at writing. If you need somebody to round up stocking stuffers under $10, or the best things to buy from IKEA, I’m your girl. But writing a wedding ceremony? That’s definitely a challenge.
I want Mr. Rooster and I to begin our marriage with words that are meaningful and powerful. I want everyone there to feel like the words we will speak on that day truly capture what we have together. It’s the kind of poignant writing that, if I’m being honest with myself, is outside of my abilities and worlds away from a roundup of office accessories.
Still, I know that I definitely want to get hands-on with our ceremony text. I just have to think of it as a new challenge. I’ll need to grow and learn new things. And the best way to learn new things is to study as much as you can and start imitating people who already know what they’re doing. I am faking my way into being a ceremony writer, and you can too!
Get Familiar
The first step to learning anything is to start looking up resources online, since I fully believe you can’t start any project with a Google search. I found lots of great information on the anatomy of a wedding ceremony (this post from Miss Cherry Pie helped a ton). I started to feel like I kind of understood what all goes into a ceremony. It turns out the bit where you do the “I do’s” is considered totally separate from your vows, and even still separated from the part where you exchange rings and kiss. Not that they have to be. Any ceremony breakdown or anatomy you find is truly just a guideline. A ceremony can be or say whatever you want it to be or say. The only thing you really need is the Question of Intent, or the “I do” part, to make it legally binding.
Collect Bits and Pieces
In the early stages of our engagement, I kept a running document in Evernote where I stockpiled bits of text I liked and could imagine as part of a ceremony. As I was reading wedding blogs or books or even a well-crafted Tweet, I copy and pasted anything I liked into one place. Every single thing went in there, one after another in no particular order. That includes full quotes and readings, of course. Plus anytime I read beautiful ceremony text from wedding blogs, I pasted it in as well. I also added to my ceremony sheet whenever I heard a new phrase or even a single word I liked. “In word and deed.” Paste. “Kin.” Paste. “There is little to say you haven’t already heard.” Paste.
Organize It
For a while, my Frankenstein Evernote document was enough. But when we booked a wedding officiant, it became clear that I would have to sort out all my virtual clippings so somebody else could try to make sense of them, too. I started a second document with headings corresponding to the parts of a ceremony, then started to move my bits of text from one to the other and placing them in the appropriate place. Through this process, I started to edit everything down. I found that some clippings could be merged and shaped into new passages, while other parts were redundant and could be left out completely.
I kept editing this new patchwork document. Reading and re-reading for parts that didn’t make sense, or stuck out with a different overall tone from what we wanted. It’s at this point that what you have is actually starting to look like a real ceremony! If you keep at the editing stage, eventually you’ll get to a finished product you can be proud of.
Polish it Off with Your Officiant
Your officiant will be an invaluable help in whittling down all your ideas into a cohesive ceremony that makes sense, flows well and (most importantly) is just as long to read as you want your ceremony to last. Now that we’ve hired our officiant, I’ve also added one more member to my ceremony writing team. A really valuable member. Officiants come in many different flavors (even beyond their religious affiliations) and may be more or less involved in the ceremony process depending on who you choose. Thankfully we hired Ed, a totally hands-on officiant that is open for anything when it comes to exchanging vows and comes equipped with dozens of sample ceremonies that he sends you via email. Jackpot!
I went through our officiant’s sample ceremonies the same way I went through everything else, pasting the bits I like into place into my patchwork master ceremony. Now all that’s left to do is polish it up together with our officiant and see our final ceremony come to life!
On Not Spoiling the Surprise with Pinterest
Roxanne Ready, Flickr via Creative Commons license
I don’t need to be the umpteenth person to tell you that Pinterest, the online inspiration board website, is an essential resource for brides to build and organize their wedding visions. If you use it right, you can capture not only the look and feel of your day, but also have a place to glance over how all the details—from bridesmaid dresses to Out of Town gift bags—fit together. It’s like your entire wedding boiled down into a single place. And that’s the problem.
A huge part of why Mr. Rooster and I decided to throw a wedding (as opposed to the anti-WIC and pro-saving money route of saying vows in a courthouse and telling people later) is that we were so excited to show our friends and family how we have a good time down South. So all of those little details that Pinterest has been helping me find? The boiled peanuts? The chalkboard that says y’all? I wanted to keep them a secret from our guests. So I decided that a secret Pinterest board was the only way to go.
You can use secret boards on Pinterest anytime you want to pin something, but don’t want the entire world (or any invited guests, in my case) to see what catches your eye. It’s great for a new mommy who’s excited about baby clothes and nurseries, but not ready to share the news about their bundle just yet. Or, you know, for totally private brides like me (she says, blogging about her wedding and telling the world about her secret Pinterest board).
So how do you do that? It’s easy. On a desktop, go to your Pinterest profile page and scroll all the way down to the bottom. Click “Create a Secret Board.” Boom!
On mobile, you’ll want to go to your profile page, then click the icon in the top right that lets you add a board. Tap on the Secret switch to set the board to private.
Unfortunately, you can’t hide existing boards because others might have already repinned from it. But you can re-pin items from existing boards to your new secret board. Just find the pin you want to copy, click “Pin It” and save it to the new board.
Now, keeping your Pinterest wedding board hidden isn’t a perfect solution. When our wedding coordinator asked to see my Pinterest board during our initial meeting to see what ideas we had for our wedding, I eagerly passed over my iPad. But if she wants to check back on anything, like exactly what shade of aqua was used in that amazing invite suite I pinned, it’s not readily available to her. Luckily, you can invite other Pinterest users to share your secret boards, giving them access to see the pins inside.
I think a private Pinterest board was definitely the way to go to save ideas for the wedding. This way, guests get to experience the day exactly how we’ve planned it, and we get to experience it with them for the first time. Do you think keeping a little of the mystery alive makes the day better for everyone? Or would you rather gush about every excitable little detail to anyone who will listen?
The Wedding that Almost Was
More than halfway through planning, I’m loving the way our laid-back Southern wedding is shaping up. But the truth is, we first considered something totally different. You’ll hear a lot of married couples look back and say “I wish we’d eloped.” For at least a little while, we considered taking their advice.
Issac Wu Photography
Yep, VEGAS.
Mr. Rooster and I love Las Vegas. Between the both of us, we’ve made at least a dozen trips West to visit the land of gambling and neon. Vegas is where we decided to celebrate Mr. Roo’s 30th birthday with most of his family in tow. Being the home to so many personal memories for us and so many weddings for everyone else, we thought that Las Vegas just might be the spot to make our wedding memories happen.
Jessica Marie Photos
So we would elope! Kinda.
What we envisioned for our Vegas Wedding Vacation was something between a blow-out wedding and a quiet elopement. You know how you always see those huge hotel villas in movies like The Hangover and think, “I wish I had $5,000 to blow on a night there”? We thought it too. Almost every time we visited The Strip. And we thought it again when we saw the price tags for some of the local wedding venues in Atlanta. I remember asking Mr. Rooster, “Wouldn’t you rather spend five grand on the Hangover suite instead of a stupid ballroom?”
The Skyline Terrace Suite at MGM Grand
He said yes, obviously. So with that cue, I started furiously planning our almost-elopement Vegas hotel villa wedding.
It’s not as crazy an idea as you might think. There’s tons of resources out there to help plan weddings exactly like what we had in mind. The blog Little Vegas Wedding was especially invaluable to me. Besides the inspiration of seeing how real couples pull off all sorts of Vegas weddings, there was this holy grail of a post: How to Plan a Perfect In-Suite Wedding Reception.
So I planned it, in my head. We’d go all out on a dress and suit and an incredible photographer to capture it all, but save a ton of cash on food and drink considering we’d only get a fraction of the guests to spend out on a trip to Vegas with us. My heart was already all aflutter thinking about desert-inspired details, a retro shift wedding dress and of course Elvis-and-Priscilla style wedding photos. I needed to start booking some vendors immediately.
Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel ceremony, shot by Sonya Yruel via Ruffled
Invitation Suite by Yelley Art & Design, shot by Sonya Yruel via Ruffled
Gaby J via Ruffled
Gaby J via Ruffled
But it turns out even Las Vegas, the elopement capital of the world, isn’t immune to the Wedding Industrial Complex. The villas and suites we wanted were around the price range we imagined (our first choices were the Skyline Terrace Suite at MGM Grand and the Villas at The Mirage; hello private yard!), but as soon as we said the word “wedding,” costs seemed to creep up. Not the room rate, but for all the little extras. Our hotel cocktails-and-nosh reception suddenly had a sky-high food and beverage minimum. Oh, and we would need to use the hotel photographer. Have you seen some of those photos? No thank you. I want one thing when this whole wedding shindig is said and done, and that’s amazing photos. I wanted a photojournalistic artist behind the camera, not some hotel-hired finger.
So we scrapped it. The whole thing. It wasn’t just about the photographer. We thought this almost-elopement in Las Vegas would cost less money overall and create less stress than planning a more traditional wedding in Atlanta. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
But as we turned our sights back down South, it didn’t feel like a second choice. Having a wedding in Atlanta with all of our friends and family just feels right. But I’ll never forget the wedding that almost was. And, hey… when I catch the Vegas wedding bug again in 10 years and want to plan a vow renewal in a villa on the strip, I’ll already know where to look.
How and Where to Work in a Wedding Logo
You might have noticed at the top of our WordPress wedding website is a logo that incorporates my and the mister’s initials and our state (plus a heart for good measure and because why not).
By no means do I think every wedding needs a logo, nor do I think you need to treat your wedding like a company or corporation. But as a graphic designer, I do logos for a living. And I like having an emblem to tie things together to our wedding. I created this one in Adobe Illustrator (the perks of being a designer bride—access to both the skills and the software).
In fact, now that we have a logo, I can’t stop seeing fun ways we can stamp it, print it or project it all over our (little) big bash. Here’s just a few of the ideas I’m loving:
Jayne B Photography
Projected on the Wall: Some venues have a GOBO light just for projecting words and art onto walls and floors (that’s our brewery pictured above). Getting a Gobo disc custom printed with your logo is about $60 online. But you can totally mimic this look with a regular projector: Make the background of a slide totally black from edge to edge, then add a graphic or logo in pure white in the center. It will look like a seamless Gobo since the black areas won’t project light onto the wall or floor.
J7 Creative / Lane Dittoe via The Knot / That Girl Press on Etsy
On the Out-of-Town Bags: I don’t really want to put our names or wedding date on this, since it’s purely a gift to thank our guests for coming. But I love that we can drop our logo onto a tag or card to tie it together with the rest of the weekend.
Caroline Fontenot / Melissa Schollaert via Southern Weddings
On Favors: Again, instead of slapping our names on everything, we’ll opt for putting our initial logo on wedding favors (which will probably be beer related, ’cause really, I mean…)
On Your Wedding Website: Front and center. It’s probably the first thing anyone will see, so make it count.
Invitation Suite by McMillian + Furlow via Oh So Beautiful Paper
On everything: Get a rubber stamp made and go to town. No envelope or wedding program is safe.
Where else can you use a wedding logo?
Using WordPress to Build a Wedding Website
I’m a blogger and designer by trade. I studied magazine journalism in college. But graduating into a world where people don’t read newspapers led me on the path to writing for online media, so a lot of what I know about blogging and websites is self-taught. I taught myself how to build and run a self-hosted WordPress blog when I launched the lifestyle blog Formal Fringe, for instance. And now that knowledge is coming in handy for our wedding.
Instead of using one of the out-of-the-box services for our wedding websites, I’m tackling it from scratch with WordPress. I know WordPress is a blogging platform, but it’s actually a pretty rich base for building websites. I have a self-hosted site (which means I load the WordPress files to my own server with a web hosting company, you’ll see it referred to as “WordPress.org”), but you can tackle the same thing publishing with WordPress.com (Think mywebsite.wordpress.com, although you can use a custom domain for a small extra cost).
Once you have WordPress set up or installed, all that’s needed to turn a “blog” into more of what we think of as a “website” is a good theme. It’s like the paint job on a car. Some are free, some cost a little, some cost a lot, but there’s literally a bajillion WordPress themes out there. All you have to do is look (and Google is your friend, here). Many of the paid themes also offer customer support, so amateur brides can get help when they hit a technical speed bump.
Theme Fuse
A premium wedding WordPress theme from Theme Fuse.
You don’t have to select a “wedding” theme at all. Load a theme with the style you like for your wedding, and start customizing it with your own headlines, words and photos. You’ll be impressed at how quickly and easily it comes together.
The theme I settled on for our wedsite is called Photo from WPExplorer. It’s free (awesome) and responsive, which means that the layout of each page adjusts for anybody viewing it on a phone or tablet. I just loved how clean it was, and how much room there was for photos and content without a sidebar.
You might decide you want a sidebar, or a photo gallery, or any number of things, and there’s probably a WordPress theme out there that has it. All you’ve got to do is get out there and try them on. Going the WordPress route almost guarantees you’ll never see another wedding website quite like yours, which if you ask me is a huge advantage over turn-key sites. Is there anybody else who just likes to be different?
