A Wedding in 4 Parts!

I am going to attempt to finish something I started a few blogs ago, talking about our wedding! Maybe I have procrastinated because there are just so many parts I can blog about, so I will start slow.

Hopefully my experiences will help a bride somewhere out there with the daunting task of planning her own wedding. For this to be accomplish Kirsten-style, she (or you) will have to be a creative, original, hands on, crafty and broke (my husband will kill me for saying that, so I will rephrase that to ‘on a tight budget’) bride to make sense of everything I have done in the last year and attempt to put it on repeat and make it her (or your) own.

Let me start by saying we did everything backwards. We first decided we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together and we wanted to shout it to the world SOON! So we got crackalacking! This meant we did not follow a logical order in planning our wedding. Proof? We first booked the venue (not engaged we would say “Ya we’re getting married the 3rd of October”). I then shopped with my MoH and chose my engagement ring. He proposed (As if he was nervous... he knew my answer!) ... and then I got rolling on THE projects!

So, unlike the planning of the wedding, lets blog logically, shall we?!
Part 1: Venue and ... priest?!
Part 2: Photographer, Deco, Food and Music
Part 3: the dreaded guest list
Part 4: Partying up the I Do!

Part 1: Venue and ... a priest?!
This was quite easy considering my man is pretty easy going. First you choose your ultimate favourite season. This was easy for us; fall, fall, fall!

Everything about fall is incredible. It’s just warm enough to wear big sweaters and cute hats, scarves and mittens with a sexy pair of boots but not cold enough to lose sight of fashion in a jacket suited for the North Pole. The colors and leaves are just so beautiful its mind blowing and breath taking, and the list goes on.

Fall is one of those seasons you take in ... in the middle of nowhere and if you ask my husband or any of our guests (after the drive there), they will tell you I sure found the “middle of nowhere” to get married!

In the last year we have been on a budget. We are also two very independent people that were determined to pay for their own wedding, no parental help. We, since living together in our own little home, have become more environmentally friendly. So our thought was local. Let’s try and spend the least amount of money so we can still have food on our plates and a roof over our heads once we are married and the money we do spend, let’s spend it locally. And this we accomplished very well.

We live in Canada, more specifically Quebec and now while that might not seem relevant to you, anyone who has ever eaten a pancake with REAL maple syrup will tell you ‘the land of Maple Syrup, Awesome & Yum!’. So we got married in a sugar shack, the home of maple syrup, a place called Sucrerie de la Montagne. There, in the middle of the woods, where buckets hang from every tree to collect the sap, they make their own maple syrup, bake everything homemade, have some of the biggest horses you have ever seen in your life and even have a friendly wolf whom just chills amongst its sugary friends.

Wanna know what it was like back in the day?!

Dirt path and foggy misty day, we walk to our loveshack in the middle of the woods! Romantic?!

A picture of moi infront of our 'maisonnette du sous-bois'

where we spent our first night as husband and wife!

Everyone whom works there are part of the same family and by the time we finished planning our wedding and becoming Mr. & Mrs. we had become part of the family too.

We are a young couple, and if any of you readers are young, you will know that often we are treated with the furthest thing from respect and priority. That’s why local businesses are often the best way to go. I can’t even express how impressed we were with our venue and they way we were treated.

We see our wedding as a sort of investment. We have reinvested our money in our home. We have supported a local business, where family work together. In return we had a wonderful wedding that was personal and cozy.

This is our best friend, Véronique! A tear in her eye while marrying us, we couldn`t have dreamt of a better way to get married. We are lucky to have such a wonderful friend!

To complete the personal factor of the wedding, we had to decide how we wanted to get married. While we don’t attend church we thought of us hypocrites to get married religiously. We know no priests personally and didn’t want a stranger marry us. So my wonderful friend Marissa suggested “why don’t you have a friend ordained?!”. While we first laughed at this thought, it soon became a serious consideration. We looked into it and here in Quebec it is possible. So we chose someone extremely dear to both of us and asked her if she would do us the honour of marrying us. With tears in her eyes she accepted. So on our wedding, in a cozy wooden shack, in the middle of the woods, in front of a warm fire place, our best friend made us husband and wife. Original, personal, cheap, cozy and full of love our venue and ‘priest’ were amazing!