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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) red_lynx and I got married! It was a lot of fun.
( Pictures under the cut )
Thank you to everyone in this community for your kind support and ideas! (sicarii, should I just snail-mail the book back to you? We're just now digging out of wedding decorations at our house.)
Things we learned: DIY means a lot of work, and the majority of that work (that we had to do) is management. We had people specifically managing food, decorations, flowers, cleanup, dance, music, everything. Everyone pitched in, and we tried to make sure that no one person was doing too much (the most amount of food that anyone was asked to make was 1 gallon, and we provided recipes). The set-up team can be small, but the tear-down team can (and should) be large.
Spend at least an hour or more every weekend not planning your wedding. Go on a date or something.
We only had one family member in attendance (red_lynx's mother). We only invited the people we wanted to, and we didn't go into debt doing it. Although I'm almost certain we forgot to invite some people that we meant to.
Look up historical weather information for your wedding day. We had narrowed our window down to a couple of different weekends, and then we wend to Wunderground and looked at historical weather for those days. We picked the one that had the least chance of rain and the best chances of good weather, and it paid off (as our next two choices ended up cloudy and raining).
Have a day or two off after your wedding but before your honeydoom. We left for ours the very next day at noon, and we really could have used the time to get more organized and track down missing items. As it was, there wasn't any way we could get more time off, so this is what we were stuck with.
Our photographers were StoryMotion Studios (linked above). They're a husband-wife pair that have been doing this for some time, and we really liked their photojournalistic style. Having two photographers was nice, because it meant that they could be in two places at once and capture action from two different angles, or even two different lenses. Very important for our wedding, due to our ceremony approach, and also because we wanted pictures being taken in two different places at once (her primping and the Mill being set up). I highly recommend them, mostly because they are people that we found a really good connection with. Tell 'em we sent you. They're pricier than a single photographer, but much cheaper than two-camera coverage at most places ($3600). They let you get digital negatives, a requirement for both of us.
Our wedding was at Adelphi Mill, in Maryland. It's the cheapest place ($800$650) for the number of people we wanted, and other friends of ours have had weddings (and Pirate Feasts) there. The walls are an ugly painted white (pity, because it's nice old stone underneath), but there's a kitchen, danceable floors, and neat-looking mill machinery. It's also next to a pretty river and woods, as you saw.
We had a videographer, but that was more an afterthought: Dolce Video. We wanted to capture toasts and dances on film (our ceremony audio was recorded by a wearable mike I had on the whole day, courtesy of the photographers). Were it not for the fact that we would have had to ask a guest to not participate fully in the ceremony or reception, we would have asked someone to do this for us (same reason why we went with professional photographers). | 
frustrated
cheerful
