Jamie & Jason's Whimsical Faerie Wedding

The Offbeat Bride: Jamie, Administrative Assistant (and OBT member Jamie)

Her Offbeat Partner: Jason, Seafood Clerk

Location & date of wedding: Lucia Falls near Yacolt, WA — 10/14/2008

What made our wedding offbeat: With a non-existent budget and a dream to just be married in our own way we created our own little world for a day.

Nearly everything related to our wedding we made ourselves. Jason made the wings, some of the jewelery, and anything else I asked him to help with. I kept my dress simple but used fabrics that made it exactly what I wanted. I also made his sarong, shirt, and horns. Our friends helped us a lot with some of the finishing and detail work. My bouquet was Christmas ornaments, Christmas sparkly floral picks, and a few green ferns tucked in just before the ceremony. The ceremony itself was one we created together.

Since we are both bi and polyamorous we didn't want any mention of monogamy in our vows, or even anything that hinted at it. We had our poly family in attendance, as well as my mom and grandma — that was it.

We kept it small, simple, and magickal. I honestly can't come up with a single "traditional" thing we did do. Even our officiant was totally untraditional and completely wonderful.

Our biggest challenge: Throwing together a faerie wedding in three weeks with almost no budget! I spent three days searching for a specific type of filler for my bouquet before giving up and settling on something different, only to find the filler I wanted two days before the wedding. I left it alone as there was too much still not done.

More specifically the biggest challenge we had actually came in writing the ceremony. We chose clauddaugh rings to use as our engagement and wedding bands. Keeping with the traditional heart facing out means engaged and heart facing in means married. Unfortunately that also meant no ring exchange. We had to come up with our own ring ceremony in which we read a pledge to each other as we turned our rings around. It worked out perfectly.

My favorite moment: My favorite had to be when we threw our poor officiant totally off guard. There was a part in the ceremony where she was asking each of us if we were sure we were ready to marry the other. We were each supposed to respond with some form of "yes". So she asks Jason and his response? "As sure as a bear shits in the woods!". Everyone laughed, and she said she only requires some form of yes so she would accept that. Then when she turned to me with the same question my response was "As sure as a fish pisses in the sea!" That did it, it took her a few seconds to compose herself. It was perfect, that little touch of humor that is so us.

My advice for other offbeat brides: Close your eyes, picture a scene that makes you smile. It could be a place, it could be the colors, it could be the creatures that inhabit it. Now open your eyes and go out into the conventional world and look at everything with the thought of "What would that be like in my world?"

Open your imagination to the possibilities that are out there. Is it really a flower pot? Or, with a little imagination and sculpey clay, is it a Grecian urn? When you stop seeing things as what we are told they are and start seeing them as what could be, that is when the real fun begins!

Enough talk — show me the wedding porn!