25 June 2008

A wedding to remember

A few months ago on twitter a comment popped up from marramgrass saying "So many people keep asking me to shoot weddings, I'm starting to wonder if I should stop saying no out of hand." and a brief twitter conversation began where in summary I suggested he get a youth group to pose as a wedding party and then link it into a Bible study on Christ as the groom and the Church as the bride. A few days after suggesting it the cogs started turning in my head and I thought....

1) I could make a whole series of wedding related Bible studies out of this
2) There's bound to be some children's address potential too and most importantly.....
3) This could be a great end of year bash!

So about a month later after all this thinking I fired an email off to Mr Marramgrass who was keen to give it a go too. We set a date and the next time I met the youth group I announced it and had volunteers to be the bride and groom thus unofficially engaging them to be married in 4 weeks time. Now a lot of people have laughed at me for having had a brief engagement myself and trying to plan a wedding in such a short space of time but thankfully there wasn't as much planning for this one given that we already have a church, have halls for the catering etc, the date was set and I was ready to just wing it. The bride got a little carried away in the planning and had gone to the props department in school to try on about 12 different dresses out of the 30 or so they had (the local wedding dress shop had donated them all) and picked one and nearly each time I was speaking to her since there were conversations about how she would do her hair etc. In contrast most of the guys were wondering what food there would be lol.

Well the big day rolled round and pretty much everyone had a job, there was the bride and groom, the "minister", the organist, the father and mother of the bride, bridesmaids, best man, dj, father of the groom and me the caterer who also doubled as the mother of the groom. It was all pretty thrown together with "vows" written at the last minute and the praise and reading being sorted about half an hour before we began.

It was hilarious, the most surreal wedding I've ever been to. Well it's just funny when the bride and groom give each other jelly shaped rings vowing:
"With this ring I promise to make your finger sticky, I promise to laugh at your jokes in your speech when no one else does and I promise to eat your share of the cake"

After all that craziness we posed for some photos then went to eat and dance the night away! It was a fab day which they've been asking to do again ever since! I think I'll wait a couple of years to plan another one. in the mean time enjoy some of the fab photos Mark took for us.







The guys all waiting on the girls.... what else is new?


Here come's the bride at a million miles an hour!


This is one really casual minister...


The bride and groom....


.... you would think they actually liked each other!


Hitting the dance floor


The Wedding cake I made that was devoured in a matter of minutes


Everyone together


The plan is to prepare a series of Bible studies for the group over the summer so they will be ready in time for the Autumn when we start back again.... and maybe sneak in a few children's addresses about it over the summer.

2 comments:

That Girl said...

What a fun idea! I hope you started asking the bride when she was going to have a baby immediately after the vows ended ;-)

Ruth Strong said...

It was rather funny because a week after all this she was telling me about how she and her friends at school were talking about what they would call their kids. lol