Chelsie & Francesco's steampunk wedding

The offbeat bride: Chelsie, Wildlife Biologist

Her offbeat partner: Francesco, Aerospace Engineer

Location & date of wedding: Dancing Horse Ranch in Paso Robles, Ca.
08 August 2008

What made our wedding offbeat: Our wedding theme was Steampunk (with a subtheme of Make New Friends!), our friend Kat officiated our wedding and we wrote our own ceremony. Also all of our "vendors" were friends! My make-up artist, the photographers, the DJ, the caterers — we all knew them and it seemed like there were no strangers at our wedding. It was wonderful to see everyone bringing their skills together to help out and contribute. Our wedding was much more about having fun than having rituals. I think that everyone there had a great time!

Our biggest challenge: Right before the wedding was about the begin we couldn't get the speakers to work with the DJ's equipment. I just said forget it and did the whole ceremony without our previously agonized over choreographed music. It went really well and thinking back on it I should have just decided early on to not have music!

My favorite moment: I have never been to a wedding before and when I walked out of the cabin across the lawn everyone stood up and waited for me. I didn't know that was going to happen and that's when it really hit me that I was getting married and everyone was here to celebrate it with me.

Francesco's favorite moment was doing the hustle for our first dance! We started out with a slow song and then the DJ slowly mixed it into the hustle and we surprised everyone!

My offbeat advice: I would say figure out what is really important to you and spend your time working on those things. For me the flowers and music and make-up were not as important as organizing the food or making the programs and writing the ceremony — so I delegated those tasks to people who I knew would do a great job (much better than I would!). That relieved a lot of stress and worrying.

Enough talk — show me the wedding porn: Click the photo below to feast your eyes uponst this super stylish wedding and the friends who helped make it all happen!

PS: I love especially this shot of the bride checking her pocket watch.