Various Vermont + Maine venues we love

There are many venues that won’t speak to you, however if they are sites to pitch a tent, their existing structure(s) matter less to the overall quality of your wedding. Provided that these venues are open to us doing what we want in that tent, think of that venue merely as backdrop. It’s almost impossible to find the perfect venue for a weekend long wedding. However, when the wedding is planned perfectly, you will have a perfect wedding.

VERMONT

The Barn at Boyden Farm

Camp Thorpe

Farm Home Co.

Inn at Round Barn Farm

Mountain Top Inn

River Road Farm

Riverside Farm Vermont

Trapp Family Lodge

Twin Farms

White Doe Farm

Woodstock Inn

MAINE

Asticou Inn

The Barn at Flanagan Farm

Bear Mountain Inn and The Barn

Camden Harbour

Chebeague Island Inn

The Claremont Hotel

Cliff House Maine

Hardy Farm c.1750

Hidden Pond

Hitching Post of Maine

Inn at Ocean’s Edge

Marianmade Farm

Nonantum Resort

Pineland Farms

Rockcraft Lodge

The Stone Barn

White Barn - Small wedding :-)

10/10 A successful event manages to keep guests connected to the story being told.

A successful event managed to keep guests connected to the story being told.

Wedding formulas put people to sleep because they know the outcome already. Guest’s wait for the next box to be check. To avoid this you need a point of view. You can’t be everything all at once; classic but not conformist, innovative but still traditional, bright yet subtle…you know who you are. 

Are you the fun couple with doors always open? When friends need a shoulder to lean on, are you the ones they think of first? Are you the trailblazers that inspire others to follow their dreams? Are you the most simple, safe and down to earth of your friends? 

Social media has changed our thinking of events. So many think in terms of whats going to be inside that box rather than what is experienced throughout an evening. 

What are the adjectives that give energy to your intention? What is not your intention with this event? What are some analogies? Is this a journey through a season? A journey to an island? Is this a fabulous ending or an amazing beginning? Give those ideas some more language. 

Keep the night moving. I find that sometimes overtime should only be thirty minutes or not take place at all, if you have a cool after party that is ideally close by. You don’t want guests to lose their steam. You want to have their attention at the end. 

(7/10) People will remember how you made them feel, not how much your wedding was like its supposed to be.

Seven of Ten: Things you need to know when planning a wedding.

People will remember how you made them feel, not how much your wedding was like its ‘supposed to be’.

Seven of ten: Things to remember when planning a wedding...the less superficial list.

This is not to say that the ambiance and decor doesn’t evoke a feeling but impressing people is a very different intention than crafting feeling and experience.

To some degree people will feel how you feel about your wedding. They will enter the same headspace, and sense you wanted to impress and judge the same way you are judging yourself, trying to measure up.

If you are going over-budget or spending so much it makes you uncomfortable or you fear you may feel foolish after the wedding, than you have to take a step back and ask yourselves if it’s worth it.

If the answer is no, and spending what you are spending does not make you uncomfortable and spending ABC is necessary for you both to feel like you’ve created a day that truly expresses yourselves, then spend it! ✨

Less can be more and more can be more, just depends upon the song, and songs make you feel something. [Okay I tried too hard there, just couldn’t make a rhyme]

(2/10) Top 10 things to remember when planning a wedding, 2020

Top ten things to remember when planning a wedding, 2020….the less superficial list.

Two of Ten: Wedding planning takes time.

No shit Sherlock you may be saying to me in your head but it needs to be stressed. It’s not the end of the world, if you don’t have all the time in the world, to devote to your wedding planning. It will all work out in the end. Enlist a friend you trust, that listens well. You will need to talk things out often.

You need to plan ahead. Maybe you are handing off your work load to another associate in the office and you should start this process weeks earlier than you planned so that come the two weeks before your wedding, and the week of your wedding, you can truly separate. Additionally, maybe you are going on your honeymoon directly after your wedding. 

I wish this summed up all of wedding related stress but it does come close. Most don’t realize how much time it will take, nor how much time they will want to take when they become inspired. 

It’ll also take more time if you are good at handling detail and if you don’t have the help of a planner. 

Beating yourself up about not having enough time doesn’t help either. This is not the one day in your life that will matter. Have some perspective for yourself. If you are type A you don’t need anymore added pressure. Pressure is already there coursing through your veins when your morning alarm goes off. I know, I’m a wedding planning, I am type A!

With professionals on your side you don’t waste time staring too much at social media, or doing endless research we’ve already done ten times over, or putting any other cart before its horse. 

Perhaps give yourself your own boundaries by focusing on the wedding only at a certain time or on certain days rather than keeping a zillion windows open when you are at work. Let’s not get you fired while you’re engaged. A joke but I know its happened. 

MY YEAR END TOP 10 THINGS TO REMEMBER - 2020

The last year has been such a gift and I am grateful that I have been in healthy position in all senses of the word. I know that all the people reading this cannot say the same, especially those in the event industry. Oh there were blows, believe me, but perspective was sustained and silver linings appreciated. Without discrediting the hardships that others have endured in 2020, I do know whatever happens to you happens for you. This is my saying of sayings 24/7 and has been for years. You have to turn your circumstances on their head, facing you, like a box of paints standing still, waiting for you to either be reactive or create. You may have to feel a ton of shit but hard feelings don’t hurt you, they only make you stronger - it’s not feeling them, holding them, hiding that will.

Some years I post my top ten things to remember and sometimes I keep them to myself. Going all in for 2020-2021. I am in love with life and all it has to offer and all I have to offer it in return. Maybe the snow is making me glow this week - I am SO pumped.

Check back before the thirty-first, as this blog is one of two installments for New Year’s End. In the next I will tweak this life hack list and deliver you some of my subjective wedding hack lessons.

1. Whatever happens to you, happens for you.

2. Where your attention goes, energy flows, and that energy compounds and so becomes your life. Another nice way of saying, ‘the entirety of your experience will be determined by the quality of your mind’. (I meditate daily. I don’t know how I ever managed without!)

3. It’s wise to drop all stories so that you can first see things as they are. First you have to realize where you are holding stories, bringing them into rooms with yourself and other people. How are you perhaps enabling another person’s story because it serves your own story? Then when you drop them all, you realize just how much ‘okay’, ‘validation’ and ‘enough’ there truly is for everyone. 

4. There are no problems as long as there are solutions. The only problem is that you have yet to find your way to courage. 

5. Boundaries isn’t a bad word and they serves the other people as well. 

6. Long term goals are more generous than short term goals. One day it will be okay if you piss people off in the short term because you are going to create, achieve or do something that will benefit them more tomorrow. 

7. Being interested is a lot more loving, trustworthy, genuine and productive than trying to be interesting. 

8. Time and health are all we have. That is a sobering, scary and strengthening one to digest fully and reread daily on a sticky note posted to your front door…not that you should be going anywhere in 2020 except for a good long walk but you know what I mean. 

9. Show up to connect, rather than control or coerces to power.  How can you know what you are going to offer next when you have not digested what the other person has sent your way? Living generously and well is just like the craft of acting, living right in the moment. Acting powerful or being defensive is not going to protect you from anything but move you farther from you goal. The only protection from anything you will ever have is your ability to face things head on, without defense, soft. 

10. Resistance is the only pain…Another common way of saying the same thing as above. So true. And there is no BUT, only AND. 

As always, ignore my dyslexic grammar. I think pace and personality are more important anyway.

I love and forgive you 2020 just don’t come back here again.

XO

Ashley D.