Remember Megan and Mark’s awesome wedding venue in Raleigh NC? They were featured on Style Me Pretty today! They put together a wonderfully personal and unique wedding. You have to read an excerpt directly from the bride and groom (Especially the part about the bell).

We met for the first time on a coffee date on my birthday at Pazzo. We hit it off immediately. I liked him so much I cancelled my own birthday party that night so that I could have dinner with him. When deciding on a venue for our wedding, we could only think of the having our wedding at the place we met. When Mark proposed, we drove through 8 hours of snow & traffic to Seattle, where he proposed to me on the morning of my birthday.

I found a picture in an old magazine I bought at a library sale that showed old rusted out cheese graters being used as luminaries, and I fell in love with the idea. I thought it would be a nice way to subtly incorporate my love for cheese and all things food without making our wedding look like a Star Trek wedding, but with food.

We didn’t include anything in this wedding that didn’t have personal meaning to us. We didn’t do anything because you are “supposed” to do it. I walked down the aisle to “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS. My bouquet was wrapped in the very same ribbon that I used to wrap a birthday gift I gave to Mark on our first date. We had pictures of our two cats, Loki and Applejack, in their tuxedos, along with a piece of lace the bride bought in Belgium in 1997 to use in her wedding, on our guest table. We used a reading from the Velveteen Rabbit that had special meaning to the bride, and a poem the groom wrote as the bulk of our ceremony, both read by the bride’s sisters. I wore a pearl necklace with an opal stone that was an heirloom from my paternal grandmother, and a diamond ring that belonged to my late maternal grandmother. We had a tree stump engraved with M+M inside a heart, which is how the bride signs her napkin letters she puts in the groom’s lunch.

We tied our wedding rings to a small brass bell with the aforementioned ribbon. Mark and I purchased this bell months before our wedding on a trip to Astoria. Leading up to the wedding, Mark and I would ring that bell if something good happened…if he solved a problem at work, or if I made a ridiculous peach cobbler or if we wanted to tell the other one we loved them from a different room. The bell’s ringing became a sound we associated with good and happy things, so we would both know, that when my youngest niece was walking down the aisle and ringing the heck out of that bell, that all good things were about to happen. He could hear the bell from the altar, and I could hear it from the stairwell to the rooftop and we would both know that we were about to be the happiest we’ve ever been.