Nick & Allie’s Wedding ~ June 6, 2009

I can’t even believe how perfect our wedding day was! The weather was absolutely perfect and everything went so smoothly. Here are a few pictures that some friends took….

Guest Book made by my husband, Nick Garmon. He is so amazingly talented and artistic! A is for Allie. G is for Garmon. N is for Nick. It is our combined monogram. “Our brand.”

A picture of our invitation.

A picture of the front page of our program. Thanks for the great “stick” idea, Nancy!

Picture of table and centerpiece. My best friends mom did  my centerpieces and they were beautiful. Thank you, Linda!

Under the tent.

Outside the tent.

The delicious cake from the Flour Shop in Brentwood, TN.

Get-away car courtesy of a friend of the Garmon’s.

picture before the wedding.

Riding in with great friend, Casey Buttrey.

The Ceremony.

We released 6 homing pigeons at the end of the ceremony.

Recessional.

First Dance.

Hopefully I will be able to post some more soon. I can’t wait to see what Mark & Noelle McCoy, our photographers, captured!

Here are some pictures from the morning ceremony. I loved my birdcage veil so much!

Sweet Ruthie, my flower girl, in the background.

Me and Lil Ashley! I know she reads my blog so I had to put a pic of us up! Love you girl! Thanks for being a part of our special day!

My mom, me, and my mother-in-law!

I had completely forgotten about this but have seen other blogs where brides do “the bling post” and thought I should show you our rings. Nick picked my ring out (with the help of his mom) and I must say, he did a great job. It’s gorgeous! You don’t see the wedding band in this picture, but it slides in the middle of the two bands and looks just like the other two bands with little pave diamonds all around. Its hard to tell from the picture but it is a brilliant cut pear shaped diamond. Its got an antique vibe to it and is very unique.  Love it!

And Nick’s ring is really unique as well. He wanted a tungsten carbide ring- which is an unbreakable steel, similar to titanium. The down-side of titanium is that it cannot be cut off in an emergency, but tungsten can be shattered and has the look of titanium. Tungsten carbide is four times harder than titanium, twice as hard as steel, and is virtually scratch resistant. He wanted some sort of design on the ring and was glad to find this celtic cross ring here.

So, our plans were to go to Playa del Carmen and stay at the beautiful Royal Playa del Carmen for 6 nights and 7 days. We had round trip first class seats with an all-inclusive beach front view for a great price. But then the swine flu outbreak struck and scared the heck out of me. I didn’t want to risk anything so we made a move. We are now going the Domincan Republic to stay at the all inclusive resort- Excellence Punta Cana. We had to pay a little bit more and don’t have first class seats or a beach front room, but I think it will still be fabulous. I have heard wonderful things about Punta Cana and also the resort that we will be staying in. They offer many activities such as kayaking, wind surfing, archery, horseback riding, dancing lessons, cooking lessons, yoga, and lots more. There are 10 bars, 8 restaurants,  2 huge pools, and 2 outdoor jaccuzzi’s. Since it is our honeymoon, they welcome us with a basket of fresh fruit, a bottle of sparkling wine, & rose petals in the room. The also offer us one special romantic dinner, a champagne breakfast in bed, and 15% off all spa treatments. Oh how nice! I just cannot wait to get there and RELAX.

I am so excited about our rehearsal dinner! It will be the night before the wedding at Maggiano’s Little Italy. I just love their food and their service is amazing. We have been to two rehearsal dinners there in the past and the service is so great. The food is endless, so I don’t doubt that I will be gaining 5-10 pounds that night. I better watch it if I want to fit into my dress the next day!

YUM!

The dress I selected for the rehearsal dinner is much dressier that the tone of our overall wedding weekend. I wanted one opportunity to dress  up in a cocktail dress and satin shoes and this is the perfect chance for that.

My dress is a Maggie London mesh tiered dress from Macy’s.

How cute!

And the shoe, which I haven’t decided if I am going to wear this or keep looking, is a bright purple satin shoe from Dillards:

Kind of sassy, right?

The food for the evening is going to be AMAZING. We are going with the following menu:

Appetizers: Calamari Fritte & Stuffed Mushrooms

Salads: Maggiano & my favorite- Tomato Caprese

Pastas: Fettuccine Alfredo with Broccoli & Penne with Marinara

Entrees: Pork Tenderloin & Lemon Herb Salmon

Desserts: I cant remember which ones we got but OH MY they all sound so good. Take a look at this listing:

Chocolate Zuccotto Cake
Chocolate cake layered with Sambucca chocolate mousse; iced with chocolate frosting and dusted with cocoa powder.

Creme Brulee
Rich and creamy vanilla custard with a hint of citrus, caramelized sugar crust, topped with fresh strawberries.

Homemade Profiteroles
Pastry shell filled with vanilla bean ice cream and topped with our own hot fudge and fresh whipped cream; dusted with cocoa powder and powdered sugar.

Maggiano’s Signature Spumoni
Maggiano’s signature spumoni made especially for us. A blend of pistachio, chocolate and cherry ice cream.

N.Y. Style Cheesecake, Seasonal Fruit
New York style ricotta cheesecake topped with fresh berries and whipped cream.

Nonna’s Pound Cake, Caramelized Bananas
Pound cake toasted and served with caramelized bananas and our own hot fudge sauce. Vanilla bean ice cream available upon request.

Tiramisu
Ladyfinger cookies soaked in espresso and coffee liquer layered with mascarpone cheese;dusted with cocoa powder and served with chocolate

Vera’s Lemon Cookies
Crescent shaped lemon cookies glazed with lemon frosting.

Apple Crostada, Caramel Sauce
Warm apple filling of Granny Smith apples, sugar, butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, baked in a pastry crust dipped in cream and crystallized sugar. Served with caramel sauce and a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Garnished with mint.

For those of you who know Nick and I, all we wear these days are boots…cowboy boots that is. Before Nick and I started dating I only owned one pair of cowboy boots and over the past 3 years I’ve accumulated almost 6 pair. Nick has more than that. To incorporate our cowboy boots into the wedding, we both, along with all of our bridesmaids, groomsmen, flower girl, and ring bearers will be sporting them throughout the event. Here are some pictures that inspired me.

both from here

from here

from here

from here

from here

Since Nick and I are having a casual outdoor affair, we thought it would be fun to reflect that in our choice of food, so we decided to go with my long time favorite place that I always said would cater my wedding one day…San Antonio Taco Company, the best Tex-Mex in Nashville. It’s been around forever. I used to go as a kid and have always loved it.

You can’t beat the price and its an all-you-can-eat deal. We will be having chips, salsa, the best cheese dip in town, chicken & steak fajitas, and all the fixin’s! YUM! I can’t wait. SATCO brings in a giant grill on a trailer and makes the fajitas right there so everything is piping hot and fresh. I am SO excited!

Our invitations are about ready to be printed and I am so excited to see them. Our stationer, Beth Buchanan of Buchanan Ink, was so helpful! She was so patient with me as I changed wording, fonts, motifs, and ideas. From the very beginning I knew I wanted an ivory deckle-edged invitation and envelope.  Below is an idea of what a deckled-edge is:

And the envelope will look something like this (in ivory):

Since we couldn’t the monogram to work out for us, we decided to do a tree at the top with some casual wording that would help set the tone for our casual outdoor country wedding:

How cute is that tree? It goes perfect with our names in the pretty calligraphy font, Copperplate Rosemary.  Everything will be written in a brown ink to give it a more earthy feel. I am in love with our invites!

We also have another invitation that will be sent out to our bridal party and immediate families.  Nick and I are doing something a little non-traditional as will be having two wedding ceremonies on June 6th. We will be having a small morning ceremony at St. Edward Catholic Church at 10 AM.  Father Patrick Breen will be performing the ceremony. Since Nick is Catholic and I am Baptist, we found this to be the best way to incorporate both denominations and have the wedding of our dreams but also a very important ceremony in the church. We are very grateful that we are able to do this and that both Father Breen and Pastor Greg Moser, who will be performing the ceremony out on the farm, agreed. The invitations for this ceremony are absolutey adorable! They are smaller than the invitation above and will also be deckle-edged and mailed in the same envelope. Take a look at how cute these are (pardon the blurriness):

I mean! Could that little chapel be any cuter????!!!!

I almost forgot to tell you WHO is doing the cake….

I started researching prices for cakes early in the planning process and was very surprised at how much a cake actually costs! After calling around to many different bakeries and finding out price points, I found that most bakeries were way out of my price range….sometimes up to $5.00 per serving not to mention delivery fees and any additional design fees.  Since we are have a pretty big guest list (we are expecting around 300 people) we had to keep the cost of the cake down. A good friend of my mom’s told me about a  small mom-and-pop bakery in Brentwood called the Flour Shop and  said they do great cakes for a very affordable price and boy was she right! For $2.50 per serving and NO delivery charges, I can get a fantastic wedding cake. Its a basic white cake with ivory butter cream frosting and white butter cream detailing. I didn’t want to get to fancy with all the fillings and flavors…sometimes it over-powers to the goodness of a plain white cake. So, Iris, owner of the Flour Shop in Brentwood is taking care of me! I am so excited to see and TASTE the final product!

For the grooms cake, Nick is planning of having some good old-fashioned peach cobbler! YUM!!!!!!!!!! I am not sure who will be making it at this point but I think he and  his family have some ideas.

I finally stumbled across the inspiration for our wedding cake the other day! I was looking through Google Images of wedding cakes and found this one. I like that it has different designs on each layer giving it unique interest and that it incorporates a little bit of color with the ribbons. Disregard the tulle all around it- I’m not a big fan of tulle.The cake will be sitting on a really cool whiskey barrel table under the tent.

For a long time, Nick has had his own brand….you know….cowboy brand….like the kind you would brand a horse or cow with. Its this really cool G that he designed and puts on lots of things…like his belt buckle, see below. I had him create a monogram for us, incorporating his G brand and this is what he came up with:

Isn’t it so cool? I love it! We planned on using it on our invitations but we couldn’t get the resolution of the image high enough for it to fit with our invites. The bakery is going to mimic it the top of our cake and we hope to use it on our programs and hopefully in other ares of the wedding as well.

Here is the belt buckle I was talking about.

Yep, he made it. How talented is he??!! Take a look at his website for more custom jewelery, art, and woodworking. If anyone needs a special gift for someone, Nick would be a great person to call.

I am so excited about the photographers for our wedding day! They are Noelle and Mark McCoy of McCoy Studios based in Franklin, TN.  They are so much fun and really great at what they do. What I like best is that they like to document then entire day, from beginning to end, so that they get almost a storybook of photos that tell about the entire event. Since both Mark and Noelle shoot the photos, we will get two different perspectives of the day. They explained in our meeting that Mark will stick with the groom and groomsmen while they are getting ready and Noelle will stay with the bride and bridesmaids. They will meet at the ceremony site and start getting pictures of all the details…everything we found important to us, they will get pictures of it. Then during the ceremony Mark will shoot the groom and his reactions as he first sees the bride and throughout the vows. Noelle will do the same for the bride. I love how they do this! Instead of one photographer catching different moments of each person, we will get to see each moment throughout the ceremony and the day! They stay throughout the reception until the party ends which is sometimes rare with photographers. Most times you are paying for a certain number of hours instead of for the entire event. They are very photo-journalistic and artistic- I just love their style. Instead of posing every picture they capture real moments and details. I am so excited to work with them! Check out their blog by clicking here and their website by clicking here. Below are some photos from their website that I just LOVE: