Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Category: Wedding Planning
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#8: Choosing an Officiant & Getting a Marriage License
It’s been a long time since I started these posts, but now’s as good a time as any to finish them off. The details won’t be as fresh, certainly, but those that remain will have survived three plus years’ worth of memory-winnowing. Choosing an Officiant When it came to selecting an officiant for our wedding,…
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#7: Wedding Clothing
They say that clothes make the man. Mark Twain concurred, adding helpfully that “Naked people have little or no influence on society.” While nudity is certainly the preferred mode for celebrating a wedding, we decided to conduct that part of the celebration in private and to wear clothing to our wedding and reception. We were pretty…
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#6: Choosing a Photographer & Videographer
In talking to several of our friends about planning weddings, it seems that one of the difficult and most stress-inducing experiences for many couples is choosing their wedding photographer. I suppose this is because wedding photographs are such important mementos, the tangible reminders of the day’s events, and wedding albums have certainly been one of…
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#5: Planning and Preparing Decorations
It’s been a little while since the last wedding planning post. I took some time with this one, in part because I was busy with other things, but also (I confess) because this was the aspect of the wedding planning that I felt least involved with. To paraphrase my old roommate Spencer Gardner, it wasn’t…
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#4: Planning Meals
One of the most fun (and most tricky) parts of wedding planning for us was selecting the food that we wanted to serve our guests. Weddings have historically been associated with feasting, and we were traditionally minded in at least this respect: that we wanted to share good food and drink with those we loved.…
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#3: Designing and Making Rings
Over the past few days, I’ve written several posts describing some of the choices that we made as we prepared for our marriage. One of the best choices we made was to make wedding bands for each other. Neither of us had have worked with metal in any significant way before, but making a wedding…
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#2b: Designing and Making Invitations, Part 2
This is second half of a two part post on making and designing invitations. While this post isn’t technically about invitations, it does involve design work and letter press printing, so I thought it would make a nice complement to yesterday’s post. Because Laurel and I are both poets, we decided that we wanted to…
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#2a: Designing and Making Invitations, Part 1
This is the next post in an ongoing series about Wedding Planning. In this post I’m going to describe the process by which we designed and made our wedding invitations–one of the most fun and exciting parts of the wedding planning process for me. Late last year, Laurel and I decided that we wanted to…
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#1b: Events and Venues, Part 2
Yesterday I wrote about our wedding ceremony itself and our decision about where to hold it. Today I want to finish the post by writing about the two other events we held that weekend: a pizza party on Friday evening (the night before the wedding), and our wedding reception held later in the evening on…
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#1a: Events and Venues Part 1
This is the first in a series of what I hope will be several posts looking at specific aspects of our wedding preparations. In this post I’ll describe our decisions around the events of the weekend on which we got married and the venues where we decided to hold those events. The first and most…
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One Month Later: Introducing the Wedding Planning Series
Last month, on April 21, I married my best friend Laurel Bastian in the presence of our families and a few very close friends. It was the happiest day of my life. We held the ceremony at the Gates of Heaven, a former synagogue now owned and operated by the City of Madison Parks department. The building…