Southern Weddings

To help ease you into the hot summer months, here’s a little pop of color courtesy of watermelon red Lula Kate frocks.  Add a bright orange sash and gold wedges and you’re made in the shade!  Jenny, in a sweetheart Paloma Blanca, and Brenden said “I do” at the Yew Dell Gardens in Crestwood, Kentucky.  Katie DeLuca of Bellavita Weddings planned the couple’s wedding, and photographer Todd Pellowe captured their first moments as husband and wife.  The reception awaits, so be sure to come back and see us soon!

How did the two of you meet?  Tell us your story.  After spending a few years on the West Coast, I decided to move back to Saint Louis for graduate school.  Since I had already spent four years there for college, I planned on moving again as soon as I got my Masters in Public Health.  Brendan was a year ahead of me in graduate school, and after a few months of flirting, we ended up dating.  Long story short: I ended up staying in town an extra three years while he finished medical school.  It ended up working out perfectly: we made some great friends during those years and grew a lot as a couple.
Describe the proposal.  Last summer, we spent 12 days in Oregon doing some of the things we love the most: wine tasting, hiking and camping.  After a couple of days of drinking wine in the Willamette Valley, we headed to the coast.  We spent an afternoon hiking to the top of Saddle Mountain where Brendan proposed.  I loved the ring he designed:  a canary diamond with a sapphire on each side.  I then spent the rest of our trip getting it good and dirty on our hikes and nights by the campfire!
Our favorite detail of the wedding was:  Since we come from big wine drinking families, we thought it would be fun to have wine corks as place card holders.  We insisted that all 160 be from bottles we actually enjoyed, so for about eight months we collected corks from the bottles we drank.  Brendan’s family gave us some great vintage and California wine corks and my parents collected quite a few Chilean and Argentine corks.
Tell us about finding your wedding dress: I went home a couple of times to do my dress shopping with my mom and her best friend, Gloria.  It didn’t take long before I discovered how heavy wedding dresses can be!  I knew I wanted to spend the whole night on the dance floor, so it had to be light and comfortable. I finally decided on an ivory Paloma Blanca dress.  What sealed the deal was that a portion of the proceeds for each dress went to breast cancer research.
What was Southern about your wedding?  What Southern details or traditions did you include in your celebration?  A major theme of the weekend was bourbon!  Brendan’s family is Canadian and mine is Chilean, so we had a lot of fun introducing the wedding guests to the beauty of bourbon.  We knew it went over well when the next day the wedding planner let us know that we had run out of bourbon at the reception, and she had to send someone to buy more.