M + C Seattle Wedding / by Michael Johns

Casey and I got engaged on New Years Eve, while dancing to "Auld Lang Syne" during the first minutes of 2017. Shortly after we began the process of planning the wedding. I'm generally marooned on remote islands in the spring and summer, so our window was limited to the fall and winter. We were living in Fairbanks, Alaska at the time, and didn’t want to make our guests endure possible 20 below temps, so it also needed to be somewhere south. We eventually settled on Seattle for several key reasons: 1) a large selection of venues, 2) a large selection of good food and beer, 3) a big airport nearby for our out-of-town guests (which included ourselves and most everyone else), and 4) we had close friends and family in or near Seattle that could help. Here is a selection of our favorite images from what turned out to be a perfect evening, courtesy of Daniel and Lindsay, our photographers at Stark Photography.

 
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After combing through countless venues online, we finally stumbled upon MadArt Studio, an industrial loft space located in the heart of Seattle. The studio exists as an empty canvas for modern artists to create large exhibitions, and between shows the open space is advertised for events. It has huge wooden ceilings, brick walls, exposed steel beams, and massive windows that look out onto Westlake Avenue. A perk to MadArt is a huge top floor penthouse available through Airbnb, which made for the perfect refuge. 

We both wanted suits we could wear again after the wedding. I went with a blue birds eye wool suit from Suit Supply, and Casey found a brown tweed suit from Oliver Wicks, and a local Fairbanks taylor took them in to size. 

Mixed in with the rented white table cloths and wooden fold out chairs were some personal touches, such as 4 home brewed wedding beers with custom labels from our friends Kyle and Alexis, boutonnieres by our friend and speech giver Laura, and ceramic party favor plates stamped with our wedding logo made by our friend and officiant Rachel. Collecting and assembling all of the decorations and table settings was a group effort by friends and family.

We walked down the aisle to the music “Stable Song” by Gregory Alan Isakov, a song that has a lot of meaning to the two of us. The ceremony was kept short and sweet. Rachel, our officiant,  wrote a nice passage about love and relationships, we exchanged our own personal vows, said the "I dos", and each put a ring on it. 

We both think Wes Anderson films are the greatest, and choose this rendition of "Wigwam" by Bob Dylan from the soundtrack for The Royal Tennenbaums for the recessional. It was cued just before we kissed, and the trumpets kicked in as we walked out passed our guests. 

The first dance was one of those traditional wedding elements we decided to keep, and used the song "Let it be me" by Ray LaMontagne. We had willing guests join us on the dance floor half way through the song, and kicked off the live funk band Solbird immediately after. This is where my memory of the night gets fuzzy. 

photographers - Stark Photography // venue - MadArt Studio, South Lake Union Seattle, WA // catering - Madres Kitchen // band - Solbird // cake - Bakery Nouveau // event rentals - Pedersens Rentals // Mike's suit - SuitSupply // Casey's suit - Oliver Wicks // printed materials - Paperless Post //