Sarah & Cody's eclectic purple wedding • Offbeat Wed (was Offbeat Bride)

The offbeat bride: Sarah, collection agency service clerk

Her offbeat partner: Cody, foodservice/seeking IT work

Location & date of wedding: First United Methodist Church of Mountain Home, AR & 11/10/09 =D

What made our wedding offbeat: I think the big tipoff that this wasn't going to be a cookie-cutter wedding was when people realized that I was serious about wearing purple.

At the same time, I still had the dreams of the big beautiful church and being “Princess for a Day.” So we decided to walk a middle road–we did the traditions we wanted to do, and skipped anything we felt was silly. The end result was a wedding that placed us in the area that Ariel once referred to on the site as “Offbeat Lite.”

I wore knee-high Chuck Taylors under my dress. The Maid of Awesome had her hair dyed purple the morning of the wedding and wore a purple lipring to match our colors. The bridesmaids didn't match each other. Instead of walking me down the aisle, my father played the organ for us. We served pizza at the reception. Instead of rice, we passed out sparklers for people to wave as we left the reception. There wasn't really an overall theme that just screamed “offbeat” but all the little things we did were just “one off” from tradition.

Our biggest challenge: Our biggest challenge was the origami flowers. The Saturday before the Tuesday wedding, I had something like sixty-seventy folded flowers, some wire stems, some green and silver cellophane, some ribbon, and no idea if it was actually going to work. It took some trial-and-error, but the finished product came out beautifully. (Thank God for hot glue!)

My favorite moment: As soon as we were out of the church, Cody swept me into his arms and gave me a kiss that was…well, shall we say, a little hotter than the one he gave me in front of everyone else! That moment of “OMG, we did it!!” was pretty awesome.

Also the carrying on over the garter was funny. Cody had never been to a non-courthouse wedding, and he kept asking things like “I get to do WHAT now? In front of everyone? Your dad's not going to kill me?” Then one of the groomsmen caught it, and proceeded to put it on!

My advice for offbeat brides: My extended family bristled at some of my ideas, but I just had to bear in mind that they were used to the cookie-cutter weddings (they run rampant among our family!). They couldn't see how it all looked together in my head. Once they were at the wedding, no one thought it was ridiculous that I was carrying paper flowers, and no one complained about the delicious pizza.

Always think about or research the feasibility of an idea before tossing it aside–and possibly, before you mention it to anyone. The pizza, when first discussed, got rejected by my family as too expensive and too informal. Then Cody and I stumbled across a new Italian restaurant, started going there regularly because it's the most awesome restaurant ever, and the idea kept haunting me–we asked, and they were willing to do large pizzas for six dollars apiece! Suddenly it was way easier to get people on board with the whole idea.

Care to share a few vendor/shopping links?

Dress: PJ's Bridal of Mtn. Home, AR (I showed her messy sketches and inspiration pics from the internet and she made the dress of my dreams)
Pizza: The Mob restaurant
Tuxes: Lil's Bridal & Formal Mall
Cake: Rachel Z. (She's a friend of a friend trying to start a cake business, no website yet, sorry!)
Shoes, jewelry, and lingerie and custom stickers for Hershey Kisses: eBay was my best friend
Maid of Awesome's dress: She had it custom-made in a different color scheme, and couldn't have been happier with her dress.

Enough talk — show me the wedding inspo!