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The Offbeat Bride: Sommer
Her Offbeat Partner: Joshua, Writer
Location & date of wedding: The Alexis Hotel, Seattle WA — 12/31/2008
What made our wedding offbeat: Our wedding was on a holiday (New Year's Eve), eschewed tradition (our vows were written by a Tibetan Buddhist Monk), and our family and friends helped us keep our costs down.
Our biggest challenge: Although it was our wedding, we had a lot of input from parents.
My favorite moment: Getting married was my favorite.
A tie for second was my custom wedding hat and bouquet with feathers, roses, calla lilies, and green blackberry vines.
My advice to other offbeat brides: Do what makes you happy, but consider your mother's requests.
If you can, you should make your own wedding stationary and enlist a creative friend to do all the wedding flowers (this tip only works for certain brides).
And an easy bridesmaid dress solution is to have all the bridesmaids where a black cocktail dress — chances are they all already own one.
Care to share a few vendor/shopping links?:
My hat was made by Alice Hart Couture, she was super nice and very patient with my vision and created a beautiful wedding hat. And I designed my own invitiaitons, rsvp cards, etc and had them printed by a local print vendor.
Enough talk — show me the wedding inspo!:
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I loooooove the wedding hat!!! OMG- so fabulous!!!! You look lovely- congrats on a beautiful wedding!
I love the throwback feel and that is a stunning bouquet. It looks like you guys had a blast, congrats!
I carried around the bouquet for 2 days, and then had to leave it at home on our honeymoon – besides getting married, the bouquet and the hat were my favorites
I love love love that bouquet, and the flower girls are absolutely adorable. Love their floral hairpieces.
New Year's Eve! We're thinking about that, too. I like the idea that everyone's out of school/work anyway. But then again, after Christmas, a lot of people are too broke and tired to travel, or they've spent all their time traveling to see other family. Did you have any trouble with the date?
We invited 120 people to our wedding, 118 showed up. I would say 2/3 of our guests were local and our friends and family from out of town had no problem. – They came for Christmas and stayed for the new year. We even had a guest fly in from Japan. – Sommer
I'm planning my New Year's Eve wedding for this upcoming year! I can't wait. It's so nice to see what other people have done and get some good ideas. We also decided on black bridesmaid dresses and maybe having the girls wear white elbow length gloves. I think it is a great time because NYE will always mean something more to you and your spouse. A lot of people have said they thought it was great to have it at this time because they will have time off to come out for it. Thank you for sharing this it was beautiful!
Elbow length gloves can be purchased at Clarie's for really cheap, you cannot see the quality in the photos. All our guests had a blast and my grandparents still talk about how much fun they had
Your hat caught my attention right away. I really like it!
Congratulations on your lovely wedding.
Great hat!
Great place for a wedding. We are doing an Cocktail party wedding here!
I LOVE your bouquet. If you don't mind my asking, who did the arrangement? I'm from Seattle too, so it would be great to know what kind of shops are out there while I'm gathering information before the big day. Thanks!