The Wedding!

Scott and I were married on Saturday, September 27 2014 at Owls Hoot Barn (OHB) in Coxsackie, NY. It’s a small town up in the Catskills. The venue is beautiful; the owner completed renovated the property. There is the main barn with an attached outdoor pavilion, there are multiple cabins on site for 10 people to sleep (including a bridal cabin), there is a storage cabin filled with decorations that people can use, there are large fields perfect for lawn games (we played cornhole and ladderball), a fire pit, and there is a creek and lovely bridge and wildflowers everywhere. It was a splendid mini vacation! We were there from Wednesday to Sunday with family and friends and followed it up with a mini-moon, two nights in Woodstock, NY.

We knew we wanted to leave the city for our wedding. We wanted something that had an outdoor portion. We didn’t want to get married and then immediately come home to a city of millions of people, ugh. So we were looking at barn venues that allowed multiple nights of use so that we had more than one night of fun. OHB was perfect for this!

We also throw a lot of theme parties, and knew our friends would be expecting something. We didn’t want to disappoint anyone, but we didn’t want to go all out. When we visited OHB the first time, it reminded us so much of the Shire in the Lord of the Rings movies, so we decided to use LOTR/Tolkien as a theme! But only a little bit. As I said, we didn’t want to go all out.

For a start – here is our save the date card, illustrated by both of us. We’re hobbits, if that’s not obvious.

And here is the wedding invite. I wanted it to be more graphic than illustrative, but it was a challenge getting it to read like a hobbit door and not a weird sewage grate or something! There was a lot of back and forth with my dad and art friends. We knew many people attending the wedding were LOTR fans, but some people weren’t and wouldn’t recognize it for what it was…

I also made a map of the area around Coxsackie. I put it on our wedding website.

And as for actual wedding decorations, we made the table cards and a few other signs that were LOTR themed. I also walked down the aisle to “Concerning Hobbits” and right after the ceremony, the music was “Flaming Red Hair” – both great hobbit songs from Fellowship of the Ring!

Except for the first two, these photographs below were taken by our dear friend Michael Wilson – http://mwphotographic.com/. From left to right – the table list with LOTR location names, our ‘no admittance’ sign (photo by Tristina Kim), the Mordor table (haha!), the Mirkwood table, the Isengard table, the Hobbiton table (for bride and groom), more flowers! (we created them using flowers from DYI buckets by Flower Blossom Farm), another view of tables in the barn, the barn itself, a scene from the ceremony at the bridge, and OHB at night! Scott and I illustrated the icons on the table cards.

If you are planning a wedding yourself, please let me know if you have any questions about anything you’re seeing here! We didn’t hire a wedding planner, so other than asking a bunch of questions and getting answers and advice from our vendors/venue, we did everything with the help of family and friends!

The New York Times did a brief write-up about us in the “Weddings/Celebrations” section published the day after the wedding here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/fashion/weddings/elisabeth-alba-scott-murphy.html.

But the following week, they published something even more exciting! Samantha Stark, the video producer for “Vows,” had come to our house to interview us and film us at work in our studio! The video was published along with a text portion.

I used the facebook embed image :P. Click to go to the full article and video!

That was pretty exciting. It was even on the front page of NYTimes.com for a bit! We were nervous going on camera. She was actually with us for nearly 5 hours, but the video is only a little over 2 minutes and it’s fantastic! Definitely some good editing (:

Finally, a photo of us! Also taken by Michael Wilson.

Wedding details, in short: Owls Hoot Barn venue, dress by Leanne Marshall, suit by JCrew, Friday catering by Paul’s Pizza, wedding catering by Hickory BBQ, flowers from Flower Blossom Farm, maple candy wedding favors from Roxbury Mountain Maple, compostable plates/cocktail napkins/straws/hot cups by Susty Party, compostable clear cups/napkins from Fabri-kal, photography by Michael Wilson.

Well, now that all the wedding business is over with (boooo), it’s back to work on tarot cards, and also packing, as we are leaving NYC for Massachusetts in less than two weeks!