This week's Fab*Bride is quite famous! Her sister, Kelty of Portland-based Steep Street, takes absolutely phenomenal shots and is a wonderful designer, and Hannah (our Fab*Bride) is often times her muse; you can typically find Hannah modeling and showing off her b-e-a-utiful red locks. I've put together boards showcasing her wedding to her now-hubby Alex, their photographic shoot to create album art for wedding favors, a few shots of their snowing anniversary session, and lastly two very lovely modeling shots taken by Kelty. Let's dive in to all of this eye-candy because they have lots to share with all of our dedicated Fab*Bride readers! It's definitely worth the read so stay tuned til the end!
Kelty claims that..."as you can probably
tell from [her] website (TGIHs!), [she] love taking pictures of Hannah. One of the
reasons is that she's drop dead gorgeous, but the bigger reason is that she
helps me make every shoot we do together a totally fun and organic experience.
She doesn't seem to have a ton of preconceived notions about the process, which is liberating and inspiring. Her main hope for the wedding photos was that I
show her and Alex in their element with their personalities shining through.
She didn't limit me to certain "key" moments that HAD to be captured,
but wanted the photos to have a documentary feel as if it were through the eyes
of a guest, rather than the head of a giant, posed spotlight fixed on her. I
knew that she liked action photos to capture her and Alex's energy, and those
happen to be some of the most fun to shoot! When we were shooting materials for
the album covers, we turned on a Metric album super loud and I just had them
dance and do whatever came to mind. I never had to tell them when to kiss, when
to hold hands, when to jump... I guess it helps that they're both incredibly
creative, funny, and natural performers, but the lack of stage-y rules certainly
contributed to the spirit of the shoot and the resulting album covers. As a
bride, Hannah was incredibly laid back, creative, and fun-loving... which is
how I would describe her as a person as well. We've always worked well together
since our days of playing pretend as kids, and I consider myself extremely
lucky to still be able to collaborate with her on a weekly basis and even
luckier to be the one to help make her big day memorable!"
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Now it's Hannah's turn to take a stab at our grueling ten questions. (I must say she absolutely nailed it and has great advice for budding brides). Enjoy!

I've done my research a little bit, but tell our readers how you met your husband and your proposal story. How does it feel to live with your childhood sweetheart? Alex and I met on our neighborhood pool deck around 1991. Our families got to know each other because we were both on swim team, although Alex and I didn't exactly run in the same circles- he was a lifeguard, and a bit older than me at that. I was a rather outspoken nine year old swim patron, and the poor guy humored my silly stories and sass admirably. Alex went off to college a few years later and we lost touch, then both our parents moved from the neighborhood. I never expected to meet Alex again, and as I grew up, he became a distant memory of my childhood summers. Fifteen years later I was living in Barcelona, teaching English, and Alex was back in Portland, living as a starving musician/graphic designer. His brother made him a myspace page for his music, which led us to somehow bump into one another and reacquaint by email. And that was it, I guess! We wrote emails, then sent each other sound file monologues and guitar tunes, then the guitar tunes turned into love songs, then we talked by phone, then decided we had to meet. We met up in San Francisco just before Christmas and had our first date. Two years later we proposed to one another on Christmas Eve. Well, what actually happened was that Alex proposed to me while I was half asleep under the covers, and before I opened my ring box I grabbed a ring I'd bought him four months before and had hidden away in case he'd had the notion to pop the question... and gave it to him. I don't know how it worked out so well, but it was such a wonderful feeling to both be so surprised on our engagement day. I wouldn't necessarily call Alex my childhood sweetheart, but I still laugh sometimes when I think about how things have turned out. I sometimes wish I could go back in time and tell my chubby, chlorine-haired nine year old self "Hannah! You're going to MARRY Alex!". I don't think I would have believed it back then, and I still pinch myself now.
What was your number one priority throughout the wedding planning process? Our number one priority during the wedding planning process was to put together our kind of wedding: low budget, DIY and with our own distinct feel. We felt very strongly about not following tradition just for the sake of doing so, so we attempted to take what we liked from traditional weddings, add what we felt was missing for our particular one, and to respectfully leave the rest. It was a relief to come to terms with the fact that, for example, that we're just not cutting the cake kind of people, or that we didn't feel comfortable having a first dance or walking down an aisle during the ceremony. We love going to weddings that do incorporate those traditions, but it just didn't feel right for us, and I'm so glad that we stuck to our gut feeling with that. Instead, we served cupcakes as well as a Haribo candy-covered wedding cake, had a few pinatas for guests to take a whack at, said our own vows standing in hula hoops with our family/friends crowded around us, opted for Disneyland (honeymoon) donations rather than a registry, and ultimately enjoyed the unstructured, organic progression of the day. The location was also a priority for us, as we wanted to feel connected to the places where we said our vows and celebrated them. We had the ceremony under our neighborhood oak tree and the celebration at a relaxed brewery/barn nearby. We followed our own vision of what a wedding meant to us, and it turned out great.