Homegrown Engagement Rings

When Bubbs and I first started talking about getting married and had found our perfect location (details to com), he started asking me about a ring. I had always loved my aunt's ring and told him what I wanted based on that. One afternoon, we were having lunch with my aunt, who is also a jeweler and Bubbs asked her about jewelers - long story short, she gave him the ring. THE ring that I've always loved. She offered it to him so he could use the metal to create a new ring, but once I saw it, there was no way I would let him do that. He decided to change out the stones it came with and re-do a little detail work on it before he would "officially propose."

So...here's my beautiful ring:


From Bubbs:
So, here's a little dish about the engagement ring. It is an amazing 1920's platinum setting from a family member. I chose a dark sapphire (but with a lot of fire) as the center stone and Moissanite (clear and almost as hard as diamonds but with more reflectivity) as side stones. After much research into the environmental and social damage caused by mined stones, I decided to use lab created stones from Chatham Labs here in San Francisco.


Though this is a hot new trend among us tree huggers in SF, it has been a challenge to find a good goldsmith willing to do the work. The etching and shape of the setting is quite a work of art--platinum in the 20's was a new harder precious metal that required extra skill to etch--and so I wanted someone who could restore the setting. There is a small diamond chip that needs replacing and some previous repair work was done in white gold and should be removed and replaced with platinum. Also, the palm side of the band has been worn thin from years of use (a good omen as far as I'm concerned) so had it shored up for another 70+ years.

How to have a home grown wedding

In no way am I saying that our wedding will work for everyone. But it was perfect for us. We want to share what we hope becomes a new tradition in weddings.

We live in an expensive city (San Francisco), and a lot of what made this wedding possible, was traveling three hours outside the city. Prices immediately dropped (for everything but rentals) when we got outside the traditional wedding areas.

I'll list our components here and go into more details in a future post.

Community

• Our entire guest list (except one pregnant couple) stayed with us on the site.
• While not everyone can do this, we wanted to find a place where we could host our family's accommodations. The economy has hit our family hard and wanted everyone to come celebrate for all three days. It was completely worth it, and everyone appreciated it.
  
• We grouped people together and asked them to plan their meals before the wedding which spurred amazing groupings, beautiful moments, and great food!
  
• Despite our huge families and many friends, because of space, we could only invite 80 people to our wedding. We narrowed down the guest list to people we hope will be active participants in our lives. We wanted them all to know each other, to break bread together, and to have a memorable experience in a beautiful place. According to the guests we've spoken with, it worked.

Sustainability
We did everything we could to purchase elements of our wedding locally. Bubbs and I usually try to support local business in our daily lives, but this was another element that became easier as we looked outside the traditional "wedding" vendors.

• We purchased all of our wine & beer from local organic makers
• Our caterer used local organic ingredients to make our delicious BBQ feast
• We purchased a lot of the vases and décor from local thrift shops (even though we live three hours away)
• our table runners were made from recycled burlap coffee sacks
• The candles were either made from soy (burns clean) flakes or were purchased second hand from craigslist.
• Just by alerting our guests on our blog that we were trying to have a "clean/green" wedding, we ended up really engaging them in the process (recycled gift wrap, reused gifts, carpooling, etc.)
  

Style

• We went with a simple and difficult to mess up style.
• Focused on nature, sustainability, and things that were recyclable
• Used burlap for décor (it was reused from a coffee roaster and compostable when we were done)
• Chose a location that was beautiful without a lot of distraction
• I followed blogs, looked at expensive shops to get inspiration, but ended up making a lot of the décor myself, for a teensy fraction of the retail price.

Love

• Our amazing cousin marrying us
• We wrote our vows together over many months. Not only did we spend time looking at relationships that worked, but also those that didn't. We wanted to make sure we were promising the same things to each other (no surprise vows here).
• Creating our ceremony from scratch. Looking at a lot of different vows on many different wedding websites, we took pieces of each, but our ceremony was all about letting our community understand our love and our commitment very simply and very clearly.
• Tim and I had mini vacations to plan our wedding - we went wine tasting in mendocino county and ate at different restaurants, so every element had a bit of our love and our experience in it.
• Having “wedding parties” to make music playlists, do crafts, and organize all the elements.
• Focusing on community building and having our community surround us for three days.

How it all began

Bubss (my husband) and I are always waiting for our next “mini vacay” . We live in San Francisco and during the foggy summer months we are constantly packing up the car to go spend the weekend in the sun.

One weekend it was foggy and cold at our house, so I started looking for a cheap place to stay in the Russian River area and found the Dawn Ranch Lodge. We had the cutest room, our own private beach, and a view of the pool from our room.

When we started looking around, my first thought was that I would love to get married there. My heart pitter patted when I realized what I was thinking, but the excitement just kept growing... Everyone could stay in the rooms, enjoy themselves in the pool or the river during the day and party all night long. It would be perfect!

It seemed like it would be reasonably priced (our room for the night was only $99) and it was in Guerneville, how expensive could it be?

Now, mind you, we weren’t engaged yet. We were always talking about getting married, though, but Bubbs wanted to surprise me with a ring.

I immediately came home and looked up the price of holding a wedding there. It was WAY out of our price range. We didn’t even have a price range, but I knew that their base price for just the use of the property would bankrupt us.

It was at this point that I began my secret blog stalking and search for the perfect place to gather our families for an entire weekend. There had to be a campground or something in the hills in Northern California that could host our perfect weekend getaway wedding.

One of my favorite blogs was “A Practical Wedding”. I found a wedding that looked nothing like what I wanted, but the location seemed perfect. It was perfect, it is perfect, and rather than the engagement spurring the location search, it was the location that kick started our engagement.

What is a homegrown wedding?

I remember thinking after a friend's wedding a few years ago that I would elope if I ever got married. Her wedding was amazing, but I just could not see myself in her shoes. I didn't think I'd ever feel like "a bride".

Coming from a family that always worried about money, I knew there wasn't a chunk of change waiting to be spent on a six hour party, so in the wedding of my dreams, I would elope, because if I couldn't have a beautiful-meaningful-perfect wedding, I didn't want one at all.

When I found myself engaged nine months ago, my fiance convinced me that we could have a wedding and I realized that if I wanted it to be perfect, I would have to do it myself.

So I did. Two weeks ago. And it was perfect.