You've seen Fancy Pony Land on offbeatbride.com before — now here's the story on Lorna's own wedding!
The offbeat bride: Lorna Leedy, fashion designer and creator of Fancy Pony Land
Her offbeat partner: Peter Maggio, Park Ranger
Location & date of wedding: 7/8/6, The Gould Community Center in Gould, CO (North-Central Colorado)
What made our wedding offbeat: We had a Frontier Pioneer themed wedding in the North Park area of North-Central Colorado, where my family has a fly-fishing ranch. It's one of the most gorgeous places on earth.
The wedding was supposed to be at my family's cabin on the Ginger Quill Ranch, overlooking the North Platte River, but torrential rain forced us to have the wedding in the reception hall, the Gould Community Center. It's an old wooden building with exposed beams and a giant fireplace. We had 175 people packed in there and the crowdedness made it really intimate and wonderful. We couldn't have planned it better.
We had a party the day before the wedding in which everyone dressed up as a character or animal from the wild west (favorites were the rattlesnake family and the furtrappers) or wore their favorite western-styled snap shirt. Toward the end of the party we held a snap shirt pageant with prizes and ribbons for the winners.
We were married by our dear friend Grayhawk Perkins, a member of the United Houma Nation of Louisiana. He did a traditional Houma wedding ceremony in which we exchanged cornbread, meat and water to symbolize how we'd provide for each other in marriage. Next we each talked about 3 objects we'd brought which symbolized what we were bringing to the marriage, like a matches for creative spark and hotness! Finally we were wrapped in a blanket made by my cousin and our wrists were bound with yellow ribbon. It was awesome and so moving.
Everyone dressed up as fancy Frontier Pioneers for the wedding — cowboys, dance hall floosies, school marms and gamblers. The reception was a barbecue put on by our friends and turned into the best dance party ever, which lasted until 2am. People danced so hard that decades of dust came up out of the floorboards and floated in the air like smoke.
I also made my wedding dress, my bridesmaid dresses, the flower girl dresses, the groomsmen shirts, customized the groomsmen pants, my mom's skirt and my dad's pants! (I make custom wedding dresses and bridesmaid dresses for other people so it was fun to do it all for my own wedding!)
Our biggest challenge: The rain.
Usually Colorado has passing thunderstorms in July, which may last half an hour and then move quickly on. We had a whole day of torrential rain like I've never seen there. My husband Peter and his groomsmen were supposed to arrive at the wedding site by canoe on the river. They had already left for the put-in and couldn't be reached. Everyone kept asking me if we were changing the location and I was totally frozen, thinking I couldn't make this huge decision without talking it over with Peter. Finally Grayhawk came to me and said "there are children and elders, we need to move the wedding indoors" and I nodded dumbly.
Meanwhile on the river, what Peter had thought was a smooth paddle turned out to contain a Class III rapid.
Meanwhile on the river, what Peter had thought was a smooth paddle turned out to contain a Class III rapid. He had 3 canoes of guys without a lot of experience, one boatload who barely knew how to hold a paddle. And they were all wearing their wedding outfits, which got totally soaked. He says that for 45 minutes he completely forgot he was getting married and just focused on getting the guys through it safely. When he got to the new wedding site Grayhawk took him aside and had him hold onto a big old pine tree to center him help him go from Outward Bound Instructor-mode to Groom-mode.
When I walked in to the Hall, I wondered why he and the other guys looked so rumpled, but didn't hear the story until later.
My favorite moment: Man, there are a couple. Riding in the car to the wedding site with my best friends Raina and Norma and singing old western songs with Raina yodeling is one.
Another is waiting in the car outside the hall while Peter and the groomsmen walked in and hearing this tremendous roar from the people inside, hooting and hollering and whistling.
Then just after we'd been declared husband and wife and kissed, Grayhawk asked us to turn around and look out over the crowd of friends and family and know that every one of these people were there to support and show their love for us. Seeing all those faces, all my favorite people in the world, with huge smiles and tears in their eyes–it was unforgettable.
My offbeat advice: The best piece of advice is something my friend Adrina told me after her wedding, which is that no matter what you think ahead of time, no matter how small or casual you think your wedding will be, it will turn into a BIG DEAL.
The other thing is that your wedding is not just about you, the bride and groom, it's about your families. You will spend a lot of time dealing with your families' needs and wrangling them. There will be stress between you and your fiancee, and between you and your mother and future mother-in-law. My mother and I had our first fight since I was 15 over my wedding. But you come out of it closer and stronger.
And finally, destination weddings are hard, especially when you do it yourself. We tried to do our wedding really inexpensively, and we mostly succeeded but at the expense of a lot of stress and exhaustion for us and our closest friends and family. It was a totally amazing event and everyone pitched in and helped make it happen.
The up side of this is that everyone felt really invested in the wedding — because they'd peeled the potatoes, set up the lights, picked up the beer kegs, delivered the speakers, decorated the Hall and cooked the dinners — and this made for a really tight-knit feeling among everyone by the end of the weekend. The down side is that my dear bridesmaids Raina and Norma and my genius chef cousin Serina, to name a few, worked their butts off and were too tired to really party much at the reception!
So I would say spend a bit more and save yourself and your friends the headache. Go ahead, hire a caterer.
Enough talk — show me the wedding porn: Cowboys! Indians! Pioneers! TRUE LOVE!
