More from Mary & Dan’s sweet indie Chicago wedding…!

“We’re a couple with a love of the vintage, the quirky, the literary, the indie. One of the ways this bubbled up was with the vintage Underwood typewriter that served as a guest book, but we also used it to type up some of our favorite passages on love and marriage from literature that we placed on tables around the venue. We hoped that these snippets of writing would add another layer of meaning to the ambiance. We also included other vintage touches, such as using a mid-century mailbox as a repository for cards, a vintage brooch in my hair piece, and vintage stamps on our invitations.”

Is this not the sweetest father-daughter photograph you’ve ever seen? That hug, oh-so sweet!

“I seriously considered baking my own wedding cake, but Dan, wisely, wanted me to keep my sanity, so we compromised. I baked one of my favorite cookies, chocolate chip cookies with fleur de sel, and packaged them up in glassine bags with hand-lettered seals made out of vintage paper for our guests to take home as favors. I actually found it very soothing to spend the day before my wedding in the kitchen, pulling batch after batch of warm cookies out of the oven.”

“We wanted our guests to be able to mingle and relax and we wanted it to be the kind of party that we wanted to attend–which meant elegant but not stuffy with good food, good wine, good music, and good company. We didn’t have a traditional seated dinner, it was a cocktail style reception where no one was stuck at a table all night and there was a bounty of food passed and at buffet tables so people could sample all sorts of things and no one left hungry.”

“Siddhanta from Roscoe Blooms listened to our wacky ideas about tea tin centerpieces in the garden and wheat grass and river stone centerpieces inside and really gave everything a rustic elegance that we loved. Charles Kim played acoustic guitar for our ceremony and I’d recommend him to anyone looking for a talented musician with a knowledge of indie rock (he did a great job with our requests for music from the Decemberists and the Magnetic Fields). We used music from the concert where we met in the ceremony and as our first dance, and we put a lot of care into choosing readings that were meaningful to us and that reflected who we are as a couple.”

“I’m a serious baker, and I wasn’t going to compromise on dessert; Pasticceria Natalina, our favorite bakery in Andersonville made our delicious cake (a seriously drool-worthy torta di ricotta e pere—I’m getting hungry just thinking about it). And I’d be seriously remiss to leave out our amazing photographer Olivia Leigh whose aesthetic meshed so perfectly with ours and who did such an amazing job even in our small venue with limited space and light (book her now, folks!).”

We asked Mary what wedding heirlooms she and Dan still enjoyed in their home: “We have our typewriter on display in our apartment. We have the little file box filled with the cards on which our guests typed special messages sitting on our shelf. A few of our guests took the table cards with their favorite literary passages on them, and it makes me smile to think that friends have taken a little piece of our wedding into their homes. And we’ll have our photo album to go with our engagement album soon. And of course we have our wedding rings and sometimes we still sit and stare at each others’ hands in amazement that we actually did this thing. Our wedding feels like it happened years ago, in a good way, as though it has always been a part of our lives.”

“My favorite moment of the day was just after the ceremony when Dan and I snuck down into the wine cellar and had a few minutes to ourselves to dance to Johnny Cash and let the enormity of everything sink in. I’ll never forget the special moments of the ceremony and reception where our family members took part—both of our parents walked each of us down the aisle, my sisters and Dan’s mother did readings, my brother sang, and my father played trumpet for the recessional, and Dan’s father and brother and my father all gave toasts. And then there was a moment a few hours into the reception, where I looked around and saw my family, my best friend from high school, friends from college and from more recent parts of my life, some of whom had traveled halfway across the country to get there, all gathered together in the same room to share this momentous occasion with us, and I was humbled and amazed that this group of people had gone to all this trouble for me.”

Thank you, Mary & Dan, for sharing your beautiful day with us! Every part is poetry. We wish you all the very best!

Tags: chicago wedding, handmade wedding, heirloom wedding, illinois wedding, modern wedding, real midwest wedding, wedding photography