'I do'-it-yourself

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Stephenie Taylor took one layer of her wedding cake out of the oven. (Fred Lynch)

How to involve the people in your life in your wedding can be a tough decision. Squeezing in men as ushers, girlfriends as guest book attendants and just hoping no one gets offended for being left out can all add to the ordinary pressures and worries of matrimony.

For newlywed Stephenie Gardiner, her wedding was almost entirely run by friends, from decorations to dining.

For the rehearsal dinner, she put the groom and his men to work with a barbecue cookoff. The men teamed up, fired up and afterward everyone helped clean up.

"We waited until the last minute to decide what to do," she said. "So we decided to do it all ourselves."

The days before the wedding, Gardiner was working around out-of-town family members and a yard-full of visiting animals, trying to bake her wedding cake. The four-layer mixed flavor cake was decorated with lilies Gardiner bought in a bouquet from Schnucks.

"The flowers really helped," she said at the reception after receiving several compliments.

"I get bored, so I like to do 80,000 things at once," Gardiner said. "And my girlfriends are really creative."

She bought her dress, paid a photographer and a DJ for the reception, but the rest of the details were taken care of by her or her friends. She said once she told people she was doing most of the wedding herself, "they all took charge."

Gardiner made her cake. Her bridesmaids made their bouquets. They bought all the materials themselves and made the arrangements in a night. They added a fall touch to the ceremony by carrying flower balls hanging from ribbons instead of conventional bouquets.

Ed Leoni, owner of Water's Edge at the Grossheider Lakes in Gordonville, Mo., said weddings in the fall differ from spring's pastel themes, even if the colors are chosen subconsciously.

Stephenie Taylor consulted her cookbook while assembling ingredients for her wedding cake. (Fred Lynch)

"We've only seen a couple, but it seems to be a more earthy feel," Leoni said.

Along with the earthy flower balls, Gardiner's bridesmaids wore rich brown dresses to accent the season.

While Leoni said the easiest way to incorporate nature into a wedding is to have it in nature, Gardiner and her fiance were married in a church.

She and her now-husband RJ Gardiner are not members of a church, so they chose Morley Baptist Church in Benton because it caught her eye driving by it one day.

"The church is just perfect," she said. She and family decorated it the night before the wedding using a friend's leftover wedding decorations.

Once they had found a church, they still needed a preacher. Stephenie found one in her office. Her coworker, Glen Cantrell, is an ordained min?ister and agreed to perform the ceremony.

Another coworker loves to cook and offered her services to cater the reception. Instead of watching her friend and coworker walk down the aisle the day of the wedding, Dwana Leible, was scurrying around the kitchen of the reception hall, baking ham and biscuits and trying to assemble a chocolate fondue fountain before guests arrived.

Gardiner said doing the wedding herself didn't really save the couple much money, but it meant more that most of her friends were directly involved instead of simply onlooking.

"It just makes it more personal," she said.

charris@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 246