Inspiration

I've noticed that a good chunk of the posts on wedding blogs (including this one) focus on inspiration for the wedding, from color-coordinated idea boards to photos of other ceremonies to awesome vendor discoveries. That's a big part of what planning a wedding is all about, and it's so much fun to share all that.

But I haven't seen very many posts focused on inspiration for the marriage, so I thought I would write a post about mine.

My parents are high school sweethearts. They got married in 1966, when my mom was just 19 and my dad had just been drafted into the Vietnam War. During the 43 years they've been married, I don't doubt that they've put every single one of their vows to the test - good times and bad times, richer and poorer, sickness and health - but they've passed all those tests together.

I hope with all my heart that in 43 years The Backyard Groom and I can say the same thing. And in the meantime, I'll keep feeling grateful for my parents' example.

Remember their four-decade-old cake topper that I mentioned in the last post? Here is a photo my mom snapped of it with her cell phone.

I can't wait to use it.

The Sweetest Things

Whenever people talk about a wedding they've been to, they usually bring up two things - the dress and the cake. Let's talk about the latter. The Backyard Groom and I are BIG fans of all things sweet. At restaurants, we may or may not have a history of ordering more desserts than there are diners at the table. And then finishing those desserts without a problem. And I may or may not be known around my office as "The Girl Who Loves Cake."

OK, I confess. It's all true. Which makes it all the more unbelievable to people when we tell them we don't care about having a wedding cake. The Backyard Groom and I have been to our fair share of weddings, and I can count on two fingers the number of weddings that had memorably good cake. As chocoholics, it seems unconscionable to us to serve our guests subpar cake, which is all our budget could afford in the grand scheme of wedding cakery.

Instead, we plan on giving our guests the best dessert money can't buy - The Backyard Groom's Grandma's Chocolate Pie. I can't recall ever having chocolate pie before I had The Backyard Groom's Grandma's Chocolate Pie. Maybe I did, but the very act of eating this chocolate pie has erased all such impostors from my memory. It is AMAZING. It's all chocolatey gooey goodness in a buttery crust without any meringue nonsense mucking it up. I searched through 20 pages of Google images trying to find a chocolate pie that even approached the yummy sight of Grandma's but I couldn't find one so this will have to do.

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Luckily, Grandma loves us both and will usually make us a chocolate pie whenever we come over for dinner. When we asked her to make chocolate pies for our wedding, she was thrilled.

Thinking about chocolate pie got us thinking about all the other homemade desserts we love. That made us hungry, but it also made us realize that a dessert buffet might be better than a plain old wedding cake. So in addition to the chocolate pies, we plan on serving that fall staple, the pumpkin pie, alongside another Lone Star State native, Texas sheet cake. For those of you unfamiliar with Texas sheet cake, it's basically a chocolate cake that's 10 times more delicious than any other chocolate cake. I'm thinking the buttermilk might have something to do with that.

(both images courtesy of The Homesick Texan, an NYC-residing Texan who posts recipes and photos that make me drool)

The Backyard Groom's mom makes a mean Texas sheet cake. She passed down some of that baking prowess to her son, which is of course one of the myriad reasons I wanted to be his Backyard Bride. He might just grace our backyard wedding with a special rendition of his infamous peach cobbler.

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Of course, peach cobbler isn't peach cobbler unless it's topped with Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla.

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Now you can definitely see why limiting our guest list was important. How else would we have time to chow down on all these yummy desserts?

But there may soon be another sweet thing to add to the list. My mom recently unearthed the cake topper from her and my dad's wedding 43 years ago. I'm such a romantic that I don't think I can pass up the chance to reuse it, which means we may be having wedding cake after all. Don't worry though. We'll make sure it's good, even if it requires us to eat an entire test cake.

THE Backyard: A Virtual Tour

I wouldn't be The Backyard Bride without this particular backyard, belonging to The Backyard Groom's generous mom. The original idea of posting photos of the backyard included carefully planned shots of each area and descriptions of how it would be used in the ceremony, but shortly after I took I out my camera, the pizza arrived and I was too distracted by the smell of hot cheesy goodness to get worthwhile shots of important things, like the covered flagstone patio (our MVP) that will serve as the area for guests to sit during the ceremony and later on transform into the dance floor, not to mention step in as the alternate reception site in the event of rain. I also forgot to get a good shot of the grassy section where we'll set up the tables for dinner. Sorry about that. Also, these pictures were taken before sunset, and it will be much darker for our ceremony and reception.

Without further ado, here is how a small (but lovely) suburban backyard will become our perfectly intimate wedding venue.

First up is the pergola that we will be married under. (Before we started planning, I never knew a garden arch was properly called a pergola. I always called it a trellis or an arbor. Apparently I was wrong. At first, I didn't like the word because it sounded so formal, but then I thought about how Blanche, Rose and Dorothy [We'll miss you, Bea Arthur!] always called their porch a lanai, which made a boring old porch sound so glamorous. So I have embraced the pergola. )



The pergola is made out of a wood similar to driftwood that I've forgotten the name of (ooops!). The Backyard Future Mother-in-Law has one simple strand of twinkle lights at the top right now, but we'll be adding more all over it. The Backyard Groom, our officiant (more on that to come) and I will all be standing underneath it for the ceremony.

This is the one huge live oak tree in the yard. We will be lighting it up with lanterns and twinkle lights and probably running strands of lights from it to the roof of the house.

This shot from inside the pergola shows the sidewalk and fence to the side. The Backyard Groom will be standing here under the pergola when I come through the fence and up the sidewalk to meet him. We're looking into ways to add lights along the makeshift aisle, probably with small lanterns like luminarias or shepherd's hooks holding candles.

This side yard is where we will set up the food tables and the bar. Whatever we end up serving, we plan on doing it buffet style so this is where our guests will get their grub. We'll add more lights over here and set candles on all the tables. FMIL is also training some climbing roses to cover this smaller arch.

In this shot, you can see the pergola and a bit of the covered flagstone patio where our guests will be seated for the ceremony. That big clay pot is actually a fountain that will provide some nice ambient noise during the ceremony.

I will try to get over there and take more shots soon. There are gorgeous rosebushes and other plants that were overlooked as a result of my urgent need for pizza.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Unless you've been living under a landfill of plastic shopping bags, you probably heard that yesterday was Earth Day. It's still technically Earth Week, so please kindly overlook that I'm a day late chiming in on the subject.

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I'm a bit ashamed to admit that The Backyard Groom and I never intentionally planned to have an eco-friendly wedding (although we never planned to have an eco-unfriendly one either), but because it's in a backyard and because it's on a budget, it's become an unintentionally green-themed wedding. We'll be repurposing jars and Christmas lights for decorations. The flowers will be limited to my one bouquet and whatever The Backyard Groom's mom has planted in the backyard. We want to make most of the food ourselves and plan on borrowing dishes and silverware, instead of buying plastic ones. Any food we don't make will be obtained from locally-owned businesses, and the number of vendors we use will hopefully be as close to zero as possible (more on this to come).

But these are all simple and logical things that are as much dictated by a miniscule budget as they are by a desire to keep things green. So the question looms: can we morally take credit for the green theme if it wasn't intentionally green but instead budget-begotten green? Should we now go whole hog and up the green ante?

In a city like Austin, there is ample opportunity to be friendly toward the environment. Say what you will about the rest of Texas, but Austin is without a doubt green. In fact, Austin is even home to the country's only Certified Organic events facility - the beautiful Barr Mansion, where I would love to get married if (a) budget was no concern, and (b) I was comfortable with the thought of 200 guests' eyes all on me at the same time. Look at some photos of this gorgeous venue:

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(Sidenote: Another Austin bridal blogger, The Anti-Bride, is getting married there and I love reading about her planning.)

Even if we do decide to go greener, we will still have a pretty large carbon footprint from guest travel. Only three of our 15 guests live in Austin. The rest will be trucking it in from elsewhere in Texas or flying in from across the country, not to mention the two guests who will be crossing the Atlantic to attend.

I admire the brides I read about who plan on offsetting their wedding's carbon footprint somehow (like Miss Peep Toe over on Weddingbee), but that takes a hit on the budget as well.

What's an aspiring green girl to do? I'm not sure, but I guess Kermit was right. It's not easy being green.

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Falling Slowly

(I would promise not to title all my posts with puns and song titles, but I just may not be able to help myself.)

When you've lived your entire life in a state where seasons refer only to variations on the same theme of humidity and heat, you tend to romanticize what you think different times of year must look like elsewhere. Part of me is convinced that by the time Halloween rolls around, every other place but Texas looks like this:

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While I know that's not true, I am well versed in this truth: Texas is hot. For example, today it is 90 degrees in Austin. And it's only April. (What gives, Weather? Can you not be restrain yourself until at least late May?) Maybe it's because I think of fall like the photo above that it's always been my favorite season. I guess it's a case of wanting what you can't have.

For not entirely dissimilar reasons, fall is also fellow native Texan The Backyard Groom's favorite season, so the idea of having an outdoor wedding in the fall appealed to us both. But what about the cold November rain? Right now I'm not terribly concerned. By November, the weather in Austin is probably best described as slightly less sweltering. And if it does rain, The Backyard Groom insists that it won't matter, that we'll still be married and just get a little wet in the process.

And after all, that's what umbrellas are for.

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D-I-Why?

Confession time: I am not a DIY kind of person. I desperately wish I was. I envy those who are. (Yes, envy. I am a Scorpio, after all.) In all honesty, cracking open an issue of Martha Stewart Living or Real Simple (simple? seriously???) makes me a little stressed out. But the pictures are so pretty, I can't stop looking at them.

When it comes to our wedding, our budget dictates that DIY will be necessary. Although even if the budget was 10 times as big, our goal of making our wedding day a reunion of family and friends means we want to do as much ourselves and with our friends and family as we can. Lucky for us, we've got some pretty amazingly talented friends and family. I'll post about how they will be helping out soon, but in the meantime, I want to show a few of the projects this DIY novice will be attempting to tackle.

First up: the bouquet. You'll notice I used that word in its singular form. I'm planning on only having one bouquet in the entire wedding, and I'm planning on making it myself. Because the wedding will be in November, flower pickings won't be as plentiful as they are the rest of the year. I want to use flowers I'll be able to buy looking fresh and lovely at our local supermarket and with a small price tag to boot. After looking around online, I came across these gorgeous bouquets made with that old grocery store stalwart, carnations.

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Even if Charlotte York wouldn't approve, I think these carnation bouquets are sweet and simple, the exact feel I want for my wedding. Better yet, I've found a few tutorials online that make these looks not too difficult to recreate. I plan on doing a test run in the next few weeks so I'll put the photos of the process and finished product online. It seems like there are pins involved so as long as I don't end up with a bloody bouquet, I'll probably consider the experiment a success. I plan on using a solid-color selection of either cream or deep red flowers.

Next up: centerpieces. I'm still not sure how many tables we'll need to accommodate our 15 guests, plus all the yummy food and drinks, but I do know how I plan on decorating them. As soon as we picked a backyard wedding in the fall, we knew we would want to use many different light sources that could double as decorations, from strands of twinkle lights to candles. For the tables, I've fallen in love with these centerpieces.

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So pretty. And eco-friendly! I read online that this couple saved pickle and jam jars for a year before their wedding in order to have enough candleholders for their tables. With our much smaller affair, I hope we can save enough, with the help of The Backyard Bride's mom and dad, in the next seven months. And I can count it as DIY, right?

For more light sources, we want to string lights from the house to the trees, put up paper lanterns and add some candle lanterns (which I'm hoping one of us will be able to make) to hang and possibly light the aisle. Here are the photos I'm using for inspiration.

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So these are my first DIY projects. It's probably a stretch to even call the lighting DIY, but seriously, if there were remedial DIY classes, I would probably be failing those. Hopefully by the time the wedding rolls around, I'll at least be able to DIY my own dunce cap.

Guestlist Guilt

A post on Weddingbee today got me thinking about our decision to have such a small wedding. I know the size is what's right for us, both financially and emotionally (as I talked about in the last post), but I still feel guilty about who we won't be inviting.

The Backyard Groom's mom's backyard (that's a mouthful!) is beautiful but not big by any stretch. Our 15 guests will fit perfectly in the space, but adding even a few more people would make it seem crowded. And because that backyard is here in Austin, where The Backyard Groom and I have lived and worked for the past eight years, I'm worried that people will be hurt when they find out we're getting married in town, but they're not invited. Also, aside from the space issue, inviting more guests would obviously increase the budget, which we are very set against.

Does that make us selfish? Honestly, sometimes I'm not sure. It feels like a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't predicament. If we had chosen to cough up the money for a large wedding that included everyone we feel obligated to invite, I know we would end up feeling guilty every time we wrote a check or, even worse, got a credit card bill. But right now, I feel a twinge of guilt every time my co-workers ask me how the wedding plans are going, because I know they won't be invited.

Even with the guilt, I'm still committed to having the small wedding that's right for us. And in the meantime, I'll be watching for more of Miss Mary Jane's posts.

Who? Wed? Where?

Even before we were engaged, The Backyard Groom and I had talked about having a small wedding. We'd been to plenty of weddings where the bride and groom are so busy making small talk with their third-grade teachers and second cousins that they miss out on more meaningful interaction with their closest friends and family, not to mention each other. Also, we're both kind of shy except around people we know really well, and who wants to deal with social anxiety on their wedding day?

We decided to come up with a list of the people who our wedding simply wouldn't feel complete without. The list came to a grand total of 15. We also planned on paying for the wedding ourselves so budget was a big concern. With a small guest list and an even smaller budget, a destination wedding seemed like a good choice.

A couple years ago, we'd taken a trip to Ireland and fallen in love with the castles and landscapes. The idea of getting married there felt irresistably romantic. Just look at these photos that The Backyard Groom took during our trip.

The first one is Ross Castle in Killarney National Park, Co. Killarney, and the second is the small town of Cobh in Co. Cork.

I started researching small venues and hotels and came across this truly unbelievable church in Co. Cork called Gougane Barra.

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Seriously. It seems impossible to me that a place like that exists. It's too gorgeous. Unfortunately, you have to be a practicing Catholic to wed there, and although we were both raised Catholic, we've lapsed a bit in the church-going department.

I kept looking for other venues and places to stay, but when I started to factor in the cost of airfare on top of everything else, I snapped out of it and realized it was too much to ask our families and friends to travel that far.

So we started talking about stateside locations, and of course, the one that immediately sprung to mind was lovely Las Vegas. (Again photo courtesy The Backyard Groom from a past trip there.)

I've got lots of love for Las Vegas. I've been there many times, and it's always been a blast. I think you could pull off an amazing Vegas wedding with the right amount of fundage. But without it? Well, everything I looked at that was wallet-friendly felt sort of impersonal and generic. We both also worried how our older family members would like it.

As I looked online for alternative destination wedding ideas, I came across the totally inspiring 2000 Dollar Wedding blog. Not only was it a budget I could get behind, but I loved what the blogger had to say about having goals for the ceremony. Particularly No. 6:

"We will have real time to spend with guests. We want to be able to spend quality time with our friends and family. We don’t want to follow the traditional pattern of a few wedding “events” where the bride and groom only have time for a “meet and greet”: rehearsal dinner, reception, brunch the following morning. We want more of a family & friends reunion."

A family and friends reunion was EXACTLY what I wanted our wedding to feel like. A few days later, it felt a little like serendipity when we paid a visit to The Backyard Groom's mom and her recently landscaped backyard. Suddenly I could see our entire wedding in my head, all within the confines of her beautiful backyard. I filled The Backyard Groom in, he loved the idea and our easy, breezy wedding plans began.

Howdy!

When The Backyard Groom proposed two months ago, the first thoughts that went through my head pretty much went along these lines: FINALLY! *swoon* I get to spend the rest of my life with HIM! Officially! *bigger swoon* Must call Mom. Ooh! Now I can buy wedding magazines!

As a lifelong magazine junkie, I couldn't wait to get my grubby little (now diamond-adorned) hands on Martha Stewart Weddings. And Real Simple Weddings. And InStyle Weddings. And The Knot. Unfortunately, we were out of the country when said proposal occurred, and I couldn't find wedding magazines in any of the bookshops. One of my first stops when we arrived back home was the overwhelming newsstand at a chain bookstore, where I quickly stocked up on as many thick volumes as I could carry.

A funny thing happened when I plopped down on the couch to pore over those pages. I realized I didn't want a magazine wedding. I didn't want to spend an entire paycheck on a cake or centerpieces. I wanted us to start our life as husband and wife without the looming spectre of debt. I didn't want it all to be about Me!Me!Me!. I wanted it to be about us. And nothing that I saw in those wedding magazines felt like us.

I knew other girls had to feel the same way, and luckily, I found the stories of many amazing ladies online through their blogs and communities (special shout out to Weddingbee!), all of whom are more dedicated to making their weddings an expression of their love than a recreation of a page from a magazine.

After lurking on and stalking those sites and blogs, I finally decided to hop on the bandwagon and start my own. I'll talk about how I became The Backyard Bride and how I'm planning an intimate wedding on a budget less than the price of my dress.

Thanks for reading!