ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Welcome to the fourth installment of Wedding Wednesdays. On the first and third Wednesday of each month, we will share a lovely handmade wedding with you. Check out our previous installments here from Cleveland and here from St. Paul. If you know of a wedding that we simply need to feature, please email us!

Dan Upham and Virginia Sole-Smith were each other’s first kiss during a spin the bottle game in 7th grade. After ten years, six apartments, and two cats, the couple was married this past June in Guilford, Connecticut. Determined to do things their own way (while still pleasing their relatives who had been waiting for this day for years), they planned a wedding that filled with thoughtful details and witty surprises. (P.S. They are also my best friends, so I had a lot of involvement with planning/producing their wedding and that’s me in the pink dress in the third photo!)

From Virginia:

“We threw a “vintage garden party” wedding in my mother’s (spectacular) garden in Guilford, CT. It was pretty much a given that we would have the wedding there — Dan and I both grew up in Guilford and have lots of family and friends in the area. So I thought a lot about the wedding could work with the setting, with flowers, flowers, and more flowers taking center stage. The vintage piece came about because Guilford is one of those picture-perfect historic New England towns, settled in the 1600s (my parents’ house was built in 1901 by one of the town’s founding families) and because I liked it as a way to avoid buying new where possible and incorporating things with a story or sense of history themselves.

“Dan is a stand-up comedian with a day job in communications, so the invitations are an aspect of the wedding that he really got into. He wrote all the funny copy (I did some, ahem, light editing), proofed endlessly, and was all over it when it came time to stuff envelopes. Our graphic designer, Anita Soos, who helped coordinate the entire look of the wedding— designing the invitations,making all the flower arrangements and taking our pictures— is also a stamp collector, so she let me raid her collection to supplement our postage.

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“We knew that a chess set of matching bridesmaids and groomsmen would not be for us, so we asked Dan’s brother and my sister to stand up with us (our Best Man and Best Maid) and then I asked my closest friends and soon-to-be sister-in-law to be on Team VA. (Dan had his closest friends involved too, but boys don’t do Wedding Teams.) I told them to wear whatever they wanted but they insisted on dressing in the wedding color palette and getting me to approve their ensembles (man, that bridesmaid etiquette stuff runs deep) — which was easy because they all have such great taste! And in addition to prettying up my photos, they were the very definition of model team members, helping out with anything and everything I could think up (doing my hair and makeup? check. helping me roll up 120 party crackers? check. setting up for the outdoor rehearsal dinner in a thunderstorm? check.). Getting to hang out and get dressed together before the wedding was probably one of my favorite parts of the whole day.

“We decided to hang wedding photos of our grandparents on the wall of the shed. It was nice because my dad’s parents were actually celebrating their 59th wedding anniversary that same weekend! The ceremony was below the patio, on the grass, and the mason jars lining the aisle were another vintage find. I wasn’t planning on having a guest book until my mom gave me this antique typewriter for my birthday and I decided that it would be cool to have guests type us notes. Except the typewriter had to first be made functional, and as of three days before the wedding, it was still at the repair shop. Oy. Luckily, Amy is brilliant and thought to make some lovely back-up guest books (because by that point, everyone seemed to think we couldn’t live without one) out of kraft paper Moleskin notebooks. (She used Mod Podge to secure some paper lace around the covers and added a piece of ribbon as a page marker.) And then the typewriter guy called the day of our rehearsal to say it was good as new. We have since framed a couple of the notes people typed, which became increasingly hilarious as they got drunker.

“My mom and I had collected vintage wooden boxes from flea markets and thrift stores over the past year and Anita and her assistant Dee planted each with an assortment of flowers in our color palette. My sister Caroline and I sewed the table toppers from three different but coordinating fabrics from Purl Patchwork. The metal and enamel house numbers-turned-table numbers were another vintage find sourced over the course of a few months, mostly off of eBay, though I admit to filling in the gaps with some from Anthropologie. (And now some of the numbers have a home on our living room wall, which is nice.)

“We really like to eat, so we planned out a mostly local and seasonal menu with our caterers, La Cuisine. The main dish was Wood Grilled Lamb Top Sirloin with Woodland Mushrooms and Farro with Roasted Corn. Vegetarians also had a choice between locally-caught Striped Bass or a Nicoise Bean Salad. For dessert, we had ice cream from Ashley’s, the local ice cream store where Dan and I had our first date, along with hot fudge sauce and toppings served in depression glass parfait cups (more flea market finds). My mom and I also collected vintage cake stands which held an assortment of little cakes and cookies.

“The most labor intensive project we did was to make these British style crackers that went on each place setting. (That’s our assembly line above, which took place months before the wedding.) My mom’s side of the family is British, so crackers have always been part of celebrations in our house. When we started the project I was a little worried. We really had no plan other than to copy off of pre-made crackers and it was a challenge to get the right mix of ingredients. Thankfully, with the help of Amy and Dan’s sister Becca, we managed to make the crackers…after cutting countless little squares of paper lace and kraft paper and Amy’s careful craft supervision which earned her the title of Quality Control. (Let me also say that if you need somebody to tie a bow, she’s your girl.) When it was time, everyone linked hands (crossing their own arms in front of them, holding one end of their cracker in one hand, and the end of their neighbors in the other) and pulled very hard on a count of three. Paper tends to fly about, which is fun, and then you get a paper crown to wear. Which we all did.

“The night ended, as all good parties do, on the dance floor.

“We had our friend Peter Arkle design this illustration; one version was rolled up inside each of the crackers (letting guests know that we had made a donation to the Central Asia Institute on their behalf) and we used the below version for our thank you cards. We had fun filling in Marvin’s speech bubble for each recipient: “I love toasters,” “I love Amy,” or, Dan’s favorite, “I love wedding money.” Cause who doesn’t?”