Friendly Reminder #2!

While the invitation has all the information you need to come celebrate our wedding, here are the basics:

Who: Tyler and Lindsay (if you don’t know that, you might be at the wrong wedding blog)

What: Wedding ceremony and reception — both outdoors

Where: Ashley Inn Bed and Breakfast, Bryantsville, Kentucky

When: The ceremony starts at 5:30pm on Saturday, May 12th, but please try to arrive around 5 so you can get a seat and enjoy the music!  The reception starts immediately afterwards, with a cocktail hour from 6-7, dinner and dancing until 11, with a sparkler send-off at 10:45.

Why: We want to eat, drink, and be merry with you!

Friendly Reminder!

It looks like we will have lovely weather for the wedding (knock on wood), with highs in the mid-70s and sunshine.  However, please remember that this is an outdoor wedding — ceremony and reception — and it might get chilly in the evening.  While the inn is open to our guests, we’d hate for you to have to sit inside while the rest of us are out in the pavillion (see photos below), so consider bringing a cardigan, a sweater, or any other cool-weather clothing!

 

The property also serves as an equestrian center. The carriage house in the background is where our reception will be.

 

Fingers crossed for a sunset like this!

Weather and Directions

Now that we’re getting close, it’s time to keep an eye on the weather!  Fingers crossed for 72 and sunshine…

I’ve updated the Venue page with directions from a variety of cities.  Please don’t hesitate to call or email one of us if you need help finding your way to the Ashley Inn!

About the Invitation

Some of you may be scratching your heads about our curious wedding invitations, which are based on a 19th-century newspaper (yes, we’re odd [okay, it's mostly me, not Tyler]).  We made them with Matron of Honor Erin, using the same process as the save-the-dates.

The wording of the invitation itself was based on 19th- and early 20th-century marriage announcements.  Some are sweet, and some are kind of funny…

  

In the years we’ve been dating, Tyler and I acquired two puppy pals, Henry and Flapjack (pictured below).  Like most dogs, they love to eat, and they were the perfect inspiration for the advertisement on the left side of the invitation — Dr. Henry’s Miracle Tincture (expect to see this again at the wedding reception)!  I love wording from old advertisements for medicines, which promised cure-alls in very flowery language.

The two articles on the right of the invitation represent two of our passions — space for Tyler, and baseball for myself.  At the time period we were aiming for with the invitation, the hobby of photographing the stars and planets (astrophotography) became very popular among “gentlemen scientists” and amateur astronomers.  As for the “base ball” blurb, I know the Dublin team would totally trounce the Glasgow club, but I had to make it a tie to keep the peace.   Back when it was first developed, the sport had much different rules and terms than we’re familiar with today.

Yes, it’s a little unconventional, but we feel that our invitation represents us perfectly.  We hope you enjoy it!

Wedding FAQ

With less than two months to go, questions are bound to pop up — check out our FAQ section and find some answers!  Is there anything that we didn’t cover?  Feel free to ask!

The Happy Couple Duo

What would a wedding ceremony and reception be without music?  Pretty dull, I would assume — fortunately, all of the weddings I have been to have had excellent music!  Tyler and I want the same for our celebration, and while scouring the internet for possible musicians, I stumbled across The Happy Couple Duo.  With a cute name like that, I had to check them out!  We met with the duo, Katy and Zachary, today in Lexington (they were kind enough to drive down from Cincinnati) to discuss music.

They came prepared with a huge list of songs and even a proposed reception timeline, detailed down to the minute — if you know how much I love to plan, you can imagine how happy this made me!  We worked out a schedule and some of our must-have songs, plus a few songs on the NO list (“Chicken Dance,” I’m looking at you).  The more we planned, the more excited I am for our big day — we hope you will be, too!

So, wedding guests, is there a song you want us to play at our reception?  Let us know!

What to do in Kentucky (when you’re not partying with us)

Will our wedding be your first trip to Kentucky?  If so, we hope you can spend some time enjoying what the beautiful Bluegrass State has to offer!

Perryville Battlefield

Are you into history?  Our hometown of Danville, Kentucky, is the site of the state’s constitutional conventions, leading to official statehood in 1792.  It is also where medical history was made, when Dr. Ephraim McDowell performed the world’s first successful ovariotomy (I’m partial to the McDowell House Museum, because I’ve worked there for a year and a half!).  If Civil War history is your interest, the site of the Battle of Perryville is a fifteen-minute drive west, and is now a park with interpretive signs.  There is also the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, the state capital, just an hour drive north of Danville.  Again, I’m partial to this museum, because I’ve worked there as well!

If you’re a foodie, oenophile (what a fun word), bourbon fanatic, or beer aficionado, Kentucky is full of some tasty, hidden secrets.  In our area, there are two new breweries, plus a winery.  As you know, Kentucky produces world-famous bourbons – but did you know that there are currently around 5 million barrels of bourbon aging at the moment?  That’s more than one for each resident of this state!  The Bourbon Trail goes along Interstate 64, and there are plenty of distilleries in country settings that should look gorgeous in the springtime.  As for food, you might have read my previous blog entry on Kentucky cuisine, but there are some amazing restaurants in the area to check out as well!

Another springtime Kentucky favorite is horseracing.  We had originally planned on having our wedding on Saturday, May 5, until we realized that date was the 2012 Kentucky Derby.  Not wanting guests to have to compete for space or pay the inflated hotel prices for that weekend, we opted for the following week – but as you probably know, Kentuckians love their races!  There are a multitude of museums and sites relating to the horse industry – Keeneland, the Kentucky Horse Park, and, of course, Churchill Downs.

If nature is your kind of thing, Kentucky is the state for you!  With lakes, hiking trails, waterfalls, caves, and more within a few-hour radius, you won’t run out of places to explore while you’re in town for our wedding!

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace

If you have any questions about things to do before and after our wedding, please don’t hesitate to ask!  We love our home state and all it has to offer, and we hope you will too.

The Caterer

While we hope that our guests enjoy all aspects of the wedding, Tyler and I agreed that one of the most important things to us was that everyone eats well!  Having met with several caterers, we settled on Sisters & Friends Catering, whose owner Mary Helen seemed very excited to work with our plan.  Like I mentioned before, we will have a “taste of Kentucky” for our in-state guests to enjoy and our out-of-state guests to discover, like mini Hot Browns (a Kentucky speciality invented at the Brown Hotel in Louisville) and country ham on silver dollar biscuits.

Healthy eaters, have no fear — we will have plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, cheese, and other less sinful foods available.   We hope you all will love the selections we’ve made!

For those of you who didn’t realize that Kentucky had its own cuisine — and no, KFC doesn’t count — check out this list of foods.  Sorry, Brains and Eggs will NOT be served at our reception!

Mmmmmmmm… Cake

What would a wedding be without a wedding cake?  Since food is one of the things we want to make sure is memorable for our guests, we want to make sure the wedding cake is well above average.

There are several bakeries in town, however one is a bit more tailored to special engagements than the others.  We decided to meet with with Pam at The Twisted Sifter for our first tasting.  We had shopped there several times in the past to get specialty made cupcakes so we knew they were good, but we hadn’t tried one of their cakes before.

Yum!

When we got there, we were given several samples: vanilla with vanilla icing, a Suzi Q, walnut with maple frosting, Piña colada, red velvet with cream cheese icing along with an assortment of various icings and fillings.  After tasting our fill, we came up with our design.  We are thinking of a simple three-tiered cake flanked by two smaller cakes.  We will have vanilla buttercream icing over the entire cake, but some tiers will have their own fillings as well.  We are planning on plain vanilla (the top tier to be saved for our 1 year anniversary),  vanilla with strawberry filling, and chocolate with ganache.  The two flanking cakes will be vanilla with cream cheese frosting filling and chocolate with a Baileys Irish Cream filling.

We still haven’t decided to go with The Twisted Sifter yet, though they are high on our list, but we hope to decide soon.

Ooops… forgot to take a “before” picture.

The Photographer

Obviously one of the most important, but behind-the-scenes, aspects of a wedding is the photographer.  While the photographer isn’t something you will remember most about your wedding, they capture those things that you do want to remember, whether they be of the small events that take place leading up to the ceremony, the ceremony itself, or the reception after.

Because this was so important to us, we wanted to make sure we found a photographer that knew what they were doing and who we could trust to capture the right moments.  Thankfully, Centre College has an in-house photographer that takes all the wonderful photos of the campus that make their way onto the school’s website and print media — and he also does side work. (That sort of sounds like a sales pitch, eh?)

Chris met with us one evening at a local coffee shop where we discussed his rates, the process, and various other things we might not have thought about.  After some deliberation, we decided to use Chris Floyd Photography for our wedding.  We’re really looking forward to working with Chris and can’t wait to see the end result of his work.

What photographs should we be sure to have Chris take for us?  This is Lindsay’s favorite idea: