Jennifer and Brandon’s beautiful backyard wedding was featured on Junebug weddings last week. Check out their feature over here to get the full scoop and tons of details. My favorite paragraphs in the post are when Jennifer describes how she started to formulate and plan the overall vibe and focus for their wedding….
We really wanted to have our guests experience a profound moment and feel the love that we have for each other. To help us achieve this, we realized that my parent’s home, Sunnyside Farm, would be the perfect place for a backyard wedding. Sunnyside Farm has significant meaning to Brandon and me. Eight years ago, Brandon was dropping me off and asked me to be his girlfriend in our driveway; we shared our first kiss under the tree where we held our ceremony, and he said “I love you” for the first time at Christmas while we were sitting in the living room.
My family has a tradition of Sunday dinners where we cook a ton of food and people just show up. We wanted our wedding to be an extension of the famous Sunday Dinners. This means that good food was key! For us FOOD = LOVE. Of course we wanted the day to be special for everyone so other important factors were good music (I wanted the dance floor to be packed) and great photographers to capture the vibe and feel of our wedding.
We chose a non-traditional ceremony and asked my mom to marry us. She created a beautiful ceremony (which made Brandon and I both weep!) that incorporated a pagan hand-fasting tradition, an Adobe marriage prayer, and spoke of Islamic and Buddhist beliefs about love. My husband and I are not religious, and thought it would be nice to focus on the universal force of love.
Jennifer + Brandon: Highlight Montage from cabfare productions on Vimeo.
There are many reasons why we adore Mitch from Cabfare productions, mainly because he is calm, confident and cool. He keeps things simple with his gear and we work together in our image making. We both adore the sound of each other’s clunky film cameras. When I hear his super 8 camera cranking away I know something special is in the works. Below is the film he created from Jen and Brandon’s backyard wedding. I adore the way he isolates people’s expressions, the awkward, the nervous and the sweet little moments. After watching this a million times and getting teary eyed each time during the vows, I’ve decided it would really cool to make wedding films. Take a minute or actually 6 minutes and 9 seconds to watch this delightful wedding film by Mitch Mattraw.
Wedding Elves
Lindsay and Blake met while working as camp counselors at Camp Seymour on the Key Peninsula near Gig Harbor, Washington. When it came time to take things to the next level, it seemed like the perfect spot to gather all their loved ones for their wedding. I just love simple weddings like this that are full of spirit. Weddings where it’s all about the people and their connections and less about the details and food. Lindsay and Blake were brave, fun, carefree and playful on their wedding day, which is exactly how I always felt at summer camp. I think the cabins, canoes and woods bring that out in everyone.