section: guest blog  today is the fifth and final post on our wedding- and it’s time for the good stuff: food! food was probably one of the first and main things about which aaron and i agreed. we both wanted southern comfort food- something relaxed, typical of the region and delicious. and when it came to the cake? homemade comfort. we wanted something that looked and tasted delicious- no fondant, no edible sugar flowers- something that looked like a loving grandmother had made and that you couldn’t wait to eat. [all images by belathee unless otherwise noted]
 i’ll dive into our food pictures (and now i’m hungry for cake, argh) cake-first. mainly because the second we agreed savannah would be our wedding location, the first person i emailed was cheryl at back in the day bakery. cheryl was one of the first people i met in savannah and has remained a friend ever since. she’s someone i can always count on for great taste both in and out of the kitchen. after having a tasting (in cupcake form!) with my parents, aaron was able to fly down with me to taste things and pick flavors. we settled on a rich chocolate cake and cheryl’s delicious italian buttercream icing. but for me, the best part of the cake was letting cheryl have free reign over the decoration. i had my hands in almost every other part of the wedding so i wanted the cake to be a surprise. all we did was tell her our colors (shades of green) and that i liked things that looked like stitching. and then i let her have at it. luckily, i was also able to include one of my favorite southern artists, katie runnels, in the project as well. i’m a huge fan of katie’s work (and got to meet her for the first time the week before our wedding when we both spoke at scad!) and was so excited to have her work on our topper. she found a seriously gorgeous pair of vintage paper wedding figures on ebay and then turned them into a sweet topper- complete with our named embroidered in green thread underneath. when i finally got to see the cake the day before the wedding (the martha team shot a few things early) i was blown away- it was such a perfect little slice of heaven. tasty, adorable and perched atop a weathered cake stand made by paul, liz demos‘ husband. a big big thank you to all of them for making our wedding cake such a special treat. [image above left by tara donne for martha stewart weddings]
  the one vendor that was entirely new to me was chef nick mueller. our planner tricia suggested his food and after speaking with him i was sold. we shared a love of local, seasonal ingredients and nick’s family-run catering business was just the sort of local business we wanted to support. rather than meeting us at a hotel or a cold kitchen location, nick invited us to his home to taste a wide variety of options for the wedding menu (which is listed in full after the jump)- it was such a great way to get to know nick and the delicious food he cooks. there’s more of nick’s amazing food below, but if you’re in the georgia area and need a great caterer, i really suggest nick- he was so sweet (and very patient with my requests to NOT have chafing dishes and wires on tables) and now has a seriously cool restaurant on the second floor of his home. more below…. [image above left by tara donne for martha stewart weddings]
CLICK HERE for the rest of the post (including our wedding menu, betsy dunlap’s signs, and more tasty food pictures) after the jump! read more … October 9th, 2009 - 08:10am  i’ll keep it real- when it came to our wedding, the area i was most worried about was the flowers. i love savannah with all my heart, but it was tough to find a florist that worked in the style i wanted. i couldn’t afford to fly sarah from saipua down (my dream florist) so i worked with tricia to find someone that understood my love of vines, wildflowers and a mix of things that felt like they’d just been pulled from a garden. no floral balls, no red roses, no tall vases that block guests’ views- i wanted something simple and laid back. so i was thrilled to find julie and her team at garden on the square. julie really embraced our project and created loose, laid back arrangements that combined some of my favorite vines (like red jasmine) with gilded maidenhair fern fronds and a tiny baby feather here and there. the colors were so soft and perfect- it was so much more than i could have hoped for. and the wreath and chair flowers? they were so lush and gorgeous i wanted to drive them home with me- it killed me to not be able to bring them back to new york. they were too beautiful for words. before i get too carried away, i’ll jump into some of the other floral details from our big day. thanks again to julie for her incredible work and to belathee for their beautiful photos.
  the table flowers were exactly what i was hoping for- everything felt like a party, but a laid-back, garden party. the tables were covered with burlap table cloths and then topped with 10 different vintage tea linens (found on ebay). julie chose a great mix of vintage bottles and jars from the paris market and brocante to fill will a wide range of flowers, including daffodils, lilacs, pink scotch broom, scabiosa, ranunculus, sea holly, rosemary, and maidenhair ferns.
  the funny thing about my bouquet was that i barely got to spend any time with it. it was handed to me right before i walked out and then taken from me right after the ceremony. i had a brief moment to ooh and ahh over it and then- poof!- gone. so i’m really happy i have these photos to remember it by. julie did such a great job. i love the vintage velvet ribbon we used in all the bouquets. the coppery color was so nice against the pale greens and yellows.
CLICK HERE for the rest of the post (including the floral door wreath, chair swag, boutonnieres, bridesmaid bouquets, and floral hair details) and all 15 pictures after the jump! read more … October 8th, 2009 - 08:00am  today is probably my favorite day of wedding pictures- handmade projects! in honor of diy day, i’m excited to share images of all the diy projects we did for our big day. i’m also excited to link to a great slideshow of images and information that martha stewart weddings did this week with all the wedding crafters/artists with which we worked. [all images by belathee unless otherwise noted]
*click here for part 1 of the wedding (location, people, dress) and here for part 2 (vintage decor, the band and invites)*  one of my favorite projects from the wedding were these handkerchief table numbers made by the lovely sian keegan. we had leftover handkerchiefs from the invites and we thought it would be fun to use them for table numbers. sian and i flipped through books of numbers and fonts and chose one that we thought would best fit the vintage meets modern theme. then sian stenciled all the numbers on and we wrapped them around bottles of water the day of the wedding.
  our little silhouette fans had a moment in the sun yesterday on the martha stewart show and i can’t help but love these even more now. when martha said “these are so cute” i think my heart stopped beating. because savannah is normally the temperature of an oven with a dash of humidity mixed in, we thought it best to provide some “georgia air-conditioning” for the outdoor ceremony in the form of paper fans. i took profile photos of myself, ac and our 2 cats and julia turned them into adorable green silhouettes with the date of our wedding. after being printed they were passed out from a vintage wire basket from @home.
  our napkin rings were so much fun to make. i ordered a roll of vintage wallpaper from belgium and cut it in strips to be wrapped around the napkins. the wallpaper was then secured with twine strings through which we strung real wood buttons and toggles (all from m&j trimming). my favorite part of the evening was looking over to the table full of designers and design-folks and seeing them turn the buttons into rings (like rena above) and jacket accessories (that’s derek’s jacket above, with his wedding invite folded as a pocket square- so clever).
CLICK HERE for the rest of the post (including info on our drink flags, wallpaper notes, paper flowers, escort tags and vintage tea linen ceremony decoration) read more … October 7th, 2009 - 08:05am  today i wanted to share a few highlights about our wedding invitations, music, and decorations/rentals. our wedding was really about a million different people coming together to create something special and i’m excited to get to celebrate some of them here today. i wanted to start with an image of the porch in the garden of the harper fowlkes house- this was our bar for the reception and was decorated with gorgeous paper flowers created by erin heath. i’ll be posting more on those tomorrow. (click here for yesterday’s post on our location and the wedding party)
*all images above and below by belathee* ps: click here to see our full wedding playlist on the ms weddings site  first of all, i wouldn’t have been able to coordinate everything without the help of our fantastic day-of planner, tricia huddas. i knew most of the people i wanted to work with in savannah, but she pulled in some great vendors that i didn’t know, and helped us coordinate all the details i would have gone crazy planning. tricia and i met with two of my favorite shop owners, liz demos of @home vintage general and paula of the paris market & brocante to find some of the beautiful vintage pieces we used for the wedding. both liz and paula went above and beyond to lend us antique furniture for the reception and i was blown away by their generosity. above, a gorgeous vintage green planter with swinging arms that we used to hold flowers and little notes written to us by guests.
 paula at the paris market loaned us what felt like a sky-full of gorgeous antique chandeliers. there are more images of them below but i wanted to share a close-up here- they were so beautiful just hanging there in the sun, and even more gorgeous when the sun went down and we turned them on. stunning.
 our wedding band was the best wedding band ever. hands down. i found the corduroy road online and was fortunate enough to get them to make the drive down from athens, ga for our ceremony. they played our walking music (such great heights, the iron and wine version), recessional music (when you love somebody, the fruit bats) and a wonderful set of their own bluegrass music during our cocktail hour. on guitar and harmonica was ian thomas- a friend of the band’s and a phenomenal musician as well.
 i’ve been dying to share our invitations for over a year now and am so glad to finally share them! we worked with erin and nicole from bird and banner (love them!) to create invites that felt like “us”. we ended up using a series of over 75 different vintage handkerchiefs that had our invite screenprinted on the front! each one was folded around our rsvp card (which featured a black and white live oak tree silhouette) and secured with a woodgrain patterned sleeve. it was so cute to see so many of the men arrive at the wedding wearing the handkerchiefs as pocket squares.
CLICK HERE for more images of our invitations, the band, our favors, and the gorgeous vintage decorations we used at the reception. read more … October 6th, 2009 - 08:00am  good morning! i’m so excited to finally be able to share some images from our wedding this past april in savannah. the issue of martha stewart weddings featuring our big day is finally on stands, so this week i’ll be sharing some of our photographs (taken by our photographers, belathee).
aaron and i were married on april 25th, 2009 in savannah georgia. it was one of those days when you feel like things are so perfect you need to pinch yourself to make sure they’re real. the previous week in savannah had been blasted hot (think 95+ with humidity) and we started to get nervous that our guests were going to pass out in all that heat. but the afternoon of the wedding the sun chilled out a bit and we were lucky enough to have a beautiful 75 degree day with just enough sunshine falling through the trees.     we chose to get married in one of savannah’s many public squares. we selected orleans square because it was slightly off the beaten path, had a beautiful fountain and was right across the street from our reception location, the harper fowlkes house. we stumbled upon the harper fowlkes house a year prior to the wedding when we were visiting to consider savannah as a possible wedding location. we both loved the bricked in garden space, and the way the historic home seemed to ooze equal parts “gone with the wind” and “addams family” charm.
 at 4pm, we gathered in orleans square for the ceremony, which was officiated by aaron’s childhood friend, joel baden. our ceremony was short and sweet, held under the branches of an old live oak tree.
CLICK HERE for the rest of the post (including details on the dress, shoes, wedding party, ring pillow and more) after the jump! read more … October 5th, 2009 - 08:00am Dear d*s readers, it’s been fun posting for you on the guest blog. I hope it was good for you too. Maybe you’ll keep up with me on my blogs Reference Library and/or Stork Bites Man. It’s the end of the week and I’m off to the book fair today, korean BBQ tonight, then the weekend with my wife to celebrate our anniversary. Today’s post will be my last, a peek behind the blog curtain into our house. Per usual, I don’t say much about myself, so this is just some stuff. As is.      
More pics here (on my flickr). Thank you and have a great weekend! —Andy October 2nd, 2009 - 08:00am The NY Art Book Fair starts tomorrow at P.S.1 and I’m going to be wandering around there all weekend. I’m psyched to meet a bunch of internet friends and to put faces with all the names that are on my bookshelves. I’m most interested in meeting and reading at the tables of the many small, independent publishers that will be there hustling and trying to do their thing. Of the 200 publishers presenting, here are five of my favorites: 
Decathalon Books is a collaborative publishing project initiated by Duncan Hamilton and Peter Sutherland. The intention is to publish ten books over a two year span, featuring artists, writers and photographers that both Duncan and Peter admire. (photo from Parking Lot Hydra by Estelle Hanania)  Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey. Recently described as ‘pamphleteers,’ in 2006 Dexter Sinister established a workshop in the basement at 38 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side in New York City.
 Gottlund Verlag is a small publishing house located outside of Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Working primarily with emerging and mid-career artists, our books follow in a lineage while being innovative and forward thinking. (photo: Es Vedra Smoking, Ibiza, 2005 printed on the letterpress from a copper engraving, included in a special boxed version of the first 10 copies of Henry Roy’s Spirit.)
 J&L Books is a non-profit Atlanta / New York-based publisher of artists’ books. (photos by Michael Schmelling, The Plan on press in Long Island City, NY)
 Werkplaats Typografie will transplant its 17 international students from Arnhem to P.S.1 for their project room. Printed matter produced and designed by students, staff and alumni will cover the walls: books, stationery, posters, t-shirts, bags, typefaces. Everything on display is for sale.  October 1st, 2009 - 11:33am |