10 The North Platte Telegraph Bridal Guide
A handsewn dress and new Army uniform outfit couple for a beautiful Nebraska wedding
By Margaret Reist Lincoln Journal Star
could do it, to prove that I could do it.” And, on Dec. 1, Cicely Batie and Daniel Wardyn were married, an intimate affair at the Sherman County Courthouse, a grand old stone edifice built in 1921 with a marble staircase and wood beams. The groom — a first lieutenant in the Army reserves — wore a newly issued uniform that harkened back to the Greatest Generation, and the bride wore a silk gown reminiscent of the sleek simplicity of women’s fashion in the 1940s (with the possible exception of that low back). And it was beautiful. * * * The story begins six years earlier when Cicely and Dan met at a mutual friend’s wedding. She was living in D.C. and wasn’t much interested in him. He was persistent, and they began dating in earnest when she moved back to Nebraska to work on her master’s degree in 2019. In June, Cicely accepted a job at the state ag department, but not before telling her new boss that she had to take some time off because her boyfriend was insistent that they take a trip to Alaska (there is, according to Cicely, also a stubborn streak in her husband, which led, eventually, to the aforementioned need for compromise). Her boss agreed, the two went to Alaska and took a beautiful, four-day hike in Denali State Park, though Cicely remembers her boyfriend being uncharacteristically gruff. They took a midnight hike to see the sunset (which is when the sun sets in the vast Alaskan wilderness). It was stunning, but she’d had it with the attitude. “I said ‘Why are you being so weird? You could be a little more romantic,’ and he said ‘How’s this for romantic?’ and I turn around and he’s on his knees with a ring.”
The whole wedding dress affair — the one involving silk and design sketches and a sewing machine — began with a compromise. It may also have had something to do with the federal government, or whoever in that deep well of bureaucracy decided the U.S. Army should issue new uniforms, the pinks and greens of the World War II era to honor that part of America’s heritage. Frankly, the whirlwind of thread and fabric in a three-month time span was likely as much Cicely Wardyn’s childhood as anything, growing up on a farm near Lexington where she learned to sew in 4-H, wrestling with a sewing machine at her aunt’s house. That, and the fact that the assistant director of the Nebraska Department of Agriculture who spent a few years working in Sen. Deb Fischer’s office in Washington before coming back to Nebraska to earn her master’s degree, comes from a long line of stubborn women. So in August, Wardyn put pencil to paper and sketched out the dress of her dreams, got her hands on a sewing machine at her mom’s house, and made her own wedding dress. No matter that she had rarely sewn since high school. No matter her social calendar in the three months of planning before her wedding — four other weddings, two out of state, one out of the country, Thanksgiving, a Broadway show at the Orpheum, a new job that took her on a trade trip to Germany and helping at her family’s farm — meant lots of weekends she should have been sewing but wasn’t. “I’m just stubborn and decided I’d figure it out,” she said. “It was kind of a big puzzle. It was more just me seeing if I
She said yes, he became his normal self (minus the pre-proposal-hope-this-plan- works nerves) and now all they had to do was plan a wedding.
Dan, a traveling nurse working in COVID-19 ICU units across the
country, headed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Cicely came back to Lincoln — and ended up in tears after the first discussion about the wedding. She wanted the big wedding she’d dreamed of since childhood; he wanted no fanfare, something small. Really small. He drove to Lincoln to make sure they’d get over this first relationship bump. They agreed not to talk about it for a bit. At the end of August, they brokered a compromise over the phone (her in a hotel in Grand Island after hosting a group of Germans at the State Fair, him in Rochester, Minnesota). They set a date. They decided on a charming courthouse. She hired a photographer to capture the day. They found a perfect place for the small family group coming to the wedding to gather afterward for dinner. And Cicely decided the best way to get the dress of her dreams — probably the only way — was to make it. The 6-foot-3 woman with broad shoulders, a thin waist and a very strong 4-H background had always wanted to try making her own wedding dress. “I kind of knew what I wanted and I knew I’d never find something that would fit me in three months in a store,” she said. * * * Years ago, Cicely’s mom wisely realized that sewing lessons might go better if she wasn’t the one teaching her
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