WellWed in New York

It was during a vacation in Maine with Gavin’s family in 2009 that Gavin asked Shelly to be his wife. One morning, while the two were out for a run together, Gavin pointed out a spot where he used to catch crabs during low tide. Gavin walked a little distance away, shouting back to Shelly that he had caught one. “I raced over to where he was and asked him where it was—I didn't see anything. He paused and said, ‘It's right...it's right...there’,” says Shelly. She leaned in for a closer look just as Gavin revealed the ring that had been concealed in his hand. “He told me he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me the moment he met me,” says Shelly.

Shelly began by selecting a color palette of romantic, neutral tones before getting to work on an array of diy projects. “The ceremony programs were beautifully crafted to look like vintage books, with mismatched, vintage scrapbook paper, burlap, and bright red stitching,” says Shelly, who took charge of cutting the burlap and paper for the books while her mother sewed all 120 of them by hand. Shelly and Gavin used vintage post cards in lieu of table numbers to signify the places they had traveled together.

At each guest’s place sat homemade jars of syrup, procured from the towns the couple had grown up in. Instead of a guest book, Shelly and Gavin hung a canvas with a picture of a tree and asked guests to use leaf stamps and sign their names next to their imprints. “We wanted something we could display at all times instead of something that would sit on a book shelf,” says Shelly.