I have the first real wedding on the blog for you today! Needless to say, i’m ridiculously excited, and so pleased that Amy & Kenny wanted to share their special day on Handmade & Hitched. Amy got in touch with me several months back and has been busy ever since, DIYing for her big day. I was so thrilled to see the fruits of her handiwork, but most of all, they have a very magical and tear-jerking love story. It seems that fate was telling them they were just meant to be all along. I’m pretty sure you’ll find it as moving as I did (I was in buckets).

Here’s Amy to tell you more…

My bridesmaids and I. I made all of their bouquets and replaced the standard pins on their dresses with brooches.

Centrepieces made from upcycled wine bottles, vintage bottles collected by my father, flowers from my deceased mothers garden and ribbon.

My bouquet made from brooches collected from friends, family, and from thrift stores. Some items were old jewelry, pins, or fake flowers also. All put together with ribbon, foam, wire, and hot glue.

I also made my toss bouquet out of fake flowers, glue, and ribbon.

I found this at a thrift store in 2010 and finally realised its purpose as a card holder for the wedding!

Our rings on my bouquet.

Cake topper made from fake flowers, foam and ribbon.

Our love story starts with the photograph below…

The story of how I became a married woman, begins with my young, unwed mother. My mother had attended summer camp in the 1970’s on Nixon Rd, at Fitzgerald Park, in Grand Ledge, Michigan. It is over 100 miles from where I was born and raised in the city of Detroit. The last year she went there she was 22 years old. It was 1977, the year before she married my father, and 11 years before I was born. She snapped the top picture with a 35mm camera, knowing she may never see the train tracks that cross the Grand River again.

Twenty seven years later, in May 2004 I was a 15-year-old girl. I met a boy named Kenny online. He lived over 100 miles from my home, in a small town called Grand Ledge. Social media sites did not really exist yet, nor did smart phones. We met by random happenstance over my dial-up connection and started talking. Just one month later on June 28, 2004 Kenny came to pick me up from my father’s home (he was 17, and old enough to drive; I did not have a driver’s license being that I was only 15). We met in person on that day, and instantly I knew this boy would somehow be an instrumental part of my life. Kenny drove me from my metro Detroit home to Grand Ledge. The first place he took me to was Fitzgerald Park. That day, I took the two lower pictures you see above. We began dating within weeks. We were enamored with one another. We felt a mutual connection instantly, and intensely. The likes of which we had never felt with another person.

Several years passed and in 2007 I found that old image my mother had taken in 1977; it was now 30 years since she had stood on the banks of the river and captured it. I discovered it in a box in her basement and on the back it had said, “Fitzgerald, 1977.” I was very familiar with Fitzgerald Park, even though my mother had never breathed a word to me of the place, or the summer camps of her bygone years. I inquired, and when she told me what I already knew – it was the Fitzgerald Park Kenny had taken me to the first day we met – I knew he and I would be married some day. Now that’s an interesting assumption you see, because at that time in 2007 he and I had been broken up for nearly a year. We had decided to go our separate ways when I had graduated high school the previous year (2006). Kenny and I had ended on good terms, but had not even spoken since ending the relationship.

In 2008 we reunited at a concert in downtown Detroit. Within two months we moved in together, and picked up where we had left off. In 2012 he took me to Fitzgerald Park in Grand Ledge, and got on one knee on a grassy island in the center of the Grand River – the train tracks my mother and I had captured sat silently in the distance.

This year on June 28 we decided to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of our meeting by exchanging vows. It is, of course, also the 10 year anniversary of when I first visited the park, and took the image of the trestle. This strange convergence of our lives was made even more meaningful to me because my mother passed away in 2011 of breast cancer. When she and I had discovered the image in 2007 that she had taken, I remember her words. Though Kenny and I had not been together, she looked at me and said, “he is your soul mate.” It’s funny, because my mother was not one to take up with whimsical imaginings or romanticisation such as that. Before she passed in 2011 she wrote me a note which I was never made aware of. It was not until two months after my wedding to Kenny that I found it, stuffed securely in a little notebook in my nightstand (how it got there I have no idea). I opened the notebook and its contents were limited to a 3-page note from my deceased mother. A word of advice made eerie by the recent wedding read, “…be good to whoever you marry, and love them…I think it will be Kenny…” We were not even engaged at that time.

So now you have read my little love story. It is my favorite love story, not only because it is mine but because it is real and it is a living testament in my life that love will persist when it is allowed to.