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Southern Weddings

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We love Lizzie + Miles’ outdoor garden reception at the Crane Cottage almost as much as their joyous ceremony. Delicate blooms (arranged by Mardee Morris) balance the rustic vibe from the burlap tablecloths, but our very favorite detail is the lovebird-topped cake prepared by the talented staff at the Jekyll Island Club. Open Light Studio has more from this Georgia wedding waiting for you on their blog!

See all the photos from Lizzie + Miles’s wedding in their Real Wedding Gallery!

Tell us about finding your wedding dress: I wanted lots of advice so I planned a weekend of shopping with my mom, sister, and good friend in Atlanta, where my sister lives. I finally found the perfect place called Kelly’s Closet with the perfect dress, a Modern Trousseau. Everyone at Kelly’s Closet was so helpful and creative. They were able to make the dress my very own by removing the sequined sash and creating one made of the same lace from the bolero they designed. In the end, I was able to make my wedding dress uniquely mine.
Describe your wedding flowers: My florist, Mardee Morris, kept the design very organized, yet each detail had its own special “whimsy”. For example, billy button flowers and green orchids were mixed with traditional English garden roses. Inside the reception tent, each floral arrangement was formed within a different blue and white patterned porcelain container. The flowers used were hydrangea and tons of ivy and maidenhair fern, along with garden roses, orchids, beapluerum, freesia, and Casablanca lilies. Mardee collected bottles and apothecary jars for the glass topped café tables and filled them with fresh greenery and single stems of green centered sunflowers, kangaroo paw, lily grass, dahlias, lilies, orchids, and freesia. Touches of fresh lemons and Spanish moss were also placed throughout the venue. The mantles were adorned with pillar candles among more blue and white vases filled with bells of Ireland, hydrangeas, and plumosa fern.
Describe your wedding cake: Our wedding cake was sweet and simple: a lemon sponge cake with layers of Cointreau-laced, raspberry cream filling, and topped with butter cream frosting and fondant. The pastry chef at the Jekyll Island Club tied raffia around each of the four layers and our florist adorned the cake with orchids, roses, and stephanotis jasmine blossoms. My mom made the bird nest cake topper, which contained two feathered lovebirds representing Miles and me. The cake plate was a wonderful, antique, wooden serving platter, which sat upon a family heirloom linen cloth.
What was your most memorable moment about your wedding day? The most memorable moments of our wedding day—besides the ceremony, of course!—were dancing our choreographed polka to Edward Sharpe’s “Home,” the awesome band (The 8-Tracks from Savannah), going away through a gauntlet of giant sparklers on a surrey bike built for two, and the amazing feeling of being so loved!
What’s next for you as a couple? What are you looking forward to in the future? We are so excited about getting back to our lives! I’m working hard to get my graphic design business off the ground, and Miles is back to writing at the local weekly, the Mountain Xpress. We’re looking forward to settling down and possibly making Asheville our permanent home.

Written with love by Katharine
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Judging from the happy troupe of attendants parading down the aisle, Lizzie + Miles’ wedding at the Crane Cottage really must have been an all-out celebration. (And that’s precisely what we love most about Southern weddings!) Open Light Studio photographed the Jekyll Island Club wedding in Georgia, and Mardee Morris of Blooming Branches designed the sweet pastel-colored blooms. Lizzie added a little oomph to her tiered Modern Trousseau gown with a custom-made lace bolero – love! Another love? The bright pop of blue in the bridesmaids’ J. Crew dresses.

How did the two of you meet? Tell us your story. Miles and I met at our favorite dive bar in New Orleans, The Saint. We stayed up talking until the sun rose. We became good friends, but it took Hurricane Ivan in 2004 to bring us together. We ended up evacuating (separately) to Austin, TX. Miles, who didn’t own a cell phone at the time, spent the first two days using pay phones as he tried to track me down at the Austin City Limits Festival. He must have gone through handfuls of quarters! I was playing hard to get, but by the end of the festival, I was smitten.
Describe the proposal. Miles proposed to me in South China, a small town in Maine, where my family has owned a lake cottage for several generations. Growing up, I spent most of my summers there. One of my fondest childhood memories was going on “treasure hunts,” in which the adults would hide a treasure on one of the little islands in the middle of the lake for us kids to find. Fast-forward to August 2009: Miles, with the help of my parents, came up with a plan to propose to me in South China. Knowing how much I loved the treasure hunts as a child, they tricked me into thinking that Miles and I were boating out to bury a box of treasures for the kids in the community. Little did I know what was actually in the box.
Three adjectives that describe the day are: Charming, vintage, effervescent. Our friends called it the “Southern Gatsby wedding.”
Our favorite detail of the wedding was: Picking one detail is too hard! One: We loved the location! The Crane Cottage at the Jekyll Island Club made it possible for my whole family to be together under one roof. Miles’ family had a similar setup at the Cherokee Cottage, right next door. The close proximity made it so easy for our families to stroll back and forth between the two houses. Two: I loved that our six “flower girls” carried page wands with ribbons and skipped down the aisle to the beat of our “pied drummer” Dave, one of our groomsmen. Three: The flowers, graphics and photo booth, equipped with vintage costumes, created a whole turn-of-the-century vibe that Miles and I wanted to create.
What Southern details or traditions did you include in your celebration? What was Southern about your wedding? The location was key to keeping the Southern feel of the wedding. The Jekyll Island Club, on the Intracoastal Waterway, is filled with beautiful old southern homes and magnificent oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Also, I loved that we used a lot of family heirlooms and antiques like my great-grandmother’s linens, my grandmother’s blue and white Canton teacups, and my aunts’ blue and white porcelain.

Written with love by Katharine
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  1. avatar Inspiration Board #8: Best of the South « reply

    […] 3: lace dress via Southern Weddings Magazine, blue bridesmaid dress via The Dessy Group, wildflowers centerpiece & rustic country table […]

Southern Weddings reserves the right to delete comments which contain profanity or personal attacks or seek to promote a business unrelated to the post.  And remember: a good attitude is like kudzu – it spreads.  We love hearing your kind thoughts!

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