A Recap of My Wedding Weekend (With Over 75 Photos!)
Indulge me while I relive some of my favorite moments and details.
My wedding took place in July of 2021, just a few months after everyone had gotten vaccinated. It was the first time most of us were congregating en masse in over a year, and was without a doubt the most gloriously overstimulating experience I’ve ever had.
I’ve posted photos of it on Instagram here and there, but I’ve never published anything in a formal sense — the opportunity came up shortly after the wedding, but it didn’t end up feeling right at the time. There is so much wedding content on the internet these days and I was conscious of how it can sometimes feel like a massive game of one-upmanship. As you’ll see when you read the rest of this newsletter, my wedding was big and kind of fancy, and I was worried that, out of my hands, it might be used to sell the idea that a wedding needs to be big and fancy in order to be great — which obviously couldn’t be further from the truth.
Now, three years later, I’ve decided to self-publish my own wedding “feature” here on Gumshoe as part of Wedding Month. I like the idea of doing it on my own small patch of internet astroturf, where I have the ability to share context like the above. Because at its best, and under the right circumstances, wedding content is of course insanely fun to consume... The chance to be a fly on the wall of someone else’s once-in-a-lifetime party and glean a little harmless gossip about their love life? Heaven. I had the best time planning my wedding and always knew I wanted to share more about it at some point — not to brag about how perfect it was, but to document it for myself and hopefully give you something fun to consume at the same time.
I’ve gone back and annotated a mix of professional photos taken by our wonderful photographer Meredith and more casual iPhone pics with details about the thought process behind some of my favorite creative decisions. In true Gumshoe fashion, I’m also sharing Etsy shopping links when relevant — including, for example, the vendor where I found the hand-dyed silk ribbon I used to tie bows around the handles of my welcome baskets (the precise kind of thing I’m inclined to obsess over).
This is a very data-heavy email because of all the photos, so make sure to click “view entire message” when it gets truncated in your inbox in order to see the whole thing.
Night One: Rehearsal Dinner and Welcome Party
We had our wedding in the backyard of my parents’ home in Newport, Rhode Island. They have a big backyard, and my mom is an enthusiastic amateur gardener and puts a lot of time and thought into taking care of it, so we felt incredibly lucky to be able to use it as our venue. It also allowed us to conserve our wedding budget for other things (in our case: lots of flowers).
Austin and I met in Newport the summer after fifth grade when both of our families were spending time there. My mom likes to brag that she knew we had crushes on each other even back then, which isn’t actually that impressive — it was pretty obvious. We were two nerds who bonded quickly over our love of lugging around thick books (I know people love to call themselves nerds but unfortunately we actually were), and neither of us had ever spent much time around members of the opposite sex before. A classic recipe for instant tweenage fireworks.
The following year, we kept in touch over AIM chat (later, he would tell me that he’d made my name his computer password at the time — hot!). Eventually we ended up at the same boarding school in Massachusetts. Austin had already been attending for a year by the time I arrived. He says that I followed him there, and while that’s not how I would put it, I’ll admit his presence was somewhat persuasive in my decision-making process. He asked me out in the fall of our freshman year.
Friday night of our wedding weekend kicked off with a quick ceremony rehearsal. I remember feeling truly giddy when I walked out the back door and saw our family and friends bathed in sunshine, my mom passing out straw hats to anyone who wanted a little bit of shade. The prior 24 hours had been a somewhat nail-biting experience as hurricane Elsa passed through the area. It was raining so hard the dinner tent that had been assembled that morning looked like it was on the verge of collapse, and the yard was completely flooded. In true New England fashion, it was iffy right up to the last minute. Luckily the storm had cleared by the late afternoon, but I still had to go barefoot for the rehearsal so my sandals wouldn’t get soaked in the grass.
My rehearsal dinner dress was from Prada — I found it online and then sealed the deal after trying it on in the store on Prince street. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my hair but I had these amazing handmade silk flower bobby pins from Jennifer Behr, so I made an “updo” appointment at a local hair salon (shoutout to Wavelengths!) and showed them this photo of Sienna Miller. My friend Jennifer Shanker, who owns the fine jewelry agency MUSE in New York, let me borrow a spectacular pair of Nikos Koulis diamond earrings, which I was terrified of losing all night.
My mom and I ordered elephant grass bolga baskets from Swahili Wholesale to use as welcome baskets. We also lined some up along our makeshift wedding aisle and filled them with petals for guests to toss after the ceremony. Each basket is handcrafted and varies slightly in appearance. We had them shipped flat to save money on shipping, so my mom and sisters and in-laws and I spent an entire morning the week before the wedding spritzing each of them with water and reshaping them with our hands.