Travis and Jennifer’s wedding was full of fabulous details and was made even more wonderful by the amazing photos from Katie Stoops of Open Air Photography.

Cowboy boots for the bride + a fluffy sunflower bouquet = perfection.

The Marriott Ranch was the perfect venue for the couple’s casual farm wedding.  It’s nestled in tiny Hume, VA (about an hours drive from Washington DC) at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Le sigh - look how beautiful it is!

{Read the rest of this entry…}

I’d like to thank everyone for following along with me this week during my guest blogging stint here on Elizabeth Anne Designs! I hope I’ve helped give you some ideas for DIY projects to incorporate into your own weddings. Before I return to my normal routine on my own blog, I wanted to share a few of our favorite keepsake details from our wedding.

Our wedding day was absolutely wonderful, but, as many other brides will tell you, it was also completely emotionally overwhelming and went by in a flash. Now, with the wedding more than six months behind us, we’re able to re-live parts of our wedding through the details that ended up becoming some of our most cherished keepsakes.

We tried to DIY as many of our details as possible to put our own personal spin on things, but in some cases, when we weren’t able to DIY, we went the handmade route:

Place cards designed by Nichelsons Invitations with calligraphy by the lovely Laura Hooper - she also made place cards that said “The Bride” and “The Groom,” which we happily display on a bookshelf in our living room as a wedding keepsake.

{Read the rest of this entry…}

Yesterday I featured some of our favorite DIY details from our wedding. Today, I’m focusing on our “quasi-DIY” details – projects that we assembled but didn’t make or used vintage items, but that we still count as DIY since we procured all the pieces. Just after we decided to have a vintage- and internationally-inspired wedding, I came across vintage-reproduction globes from Anthropologie that we knew would be great as reception centerpieces.

We immediately ordered about a dozen of these globes, and then spent a few months trying to figure out how to arrange them. During a trip to Ethiopia in January, I picked up one of these baskets, known as boat baskets or Gambella baskets, as a souvenir. Once I returned home, I realized that these baskets were a perfect fit for our globe centerpieces. Some friends of ours still living in Ethiopia were kind enough to send us a few extra baskets, but you can also find these baskets via ebay and other online retailers.

{Read the rest of this entry…}

As promised, here are a few more of our favorite DIY details from our wedding. As I mentioned yesterday, going the DIY route was a great way to personalize our wedding. Menus, programs, and custom coasters aren’t new ideas for a wedding, but because my husband and I were able to do them ourselves, each one of these details helped to make our wedding a true reflection of us as a couple.

Ceremony Programs
Since we were planning a small wedding, we originally didn’t plan on having ceremony programs. As we got closer to the wedding, however, we decided that it would be a good way of giving our non-Jewish guests (which included my husband’s entire family and most of our guests) the background behind the Jewish traditions that we chose to incorporate into our service.

{Read the rest of this entry…}

Right after my husband and I became engaged, we sat down together to think about our wedding – how we wanted it to feel, whether it would be formal or informal, inside or outside, etc. As I mentioned yesterday, I felt very strongly about having a Spring wedding, and my husband and I both knew that we wanted to have an informal wedding that took place entirely outdoors. We also sat down to discuss our priorities for the wedding. My father is semi-retired and my husband’s parents live on a single income, so we knew that we would have to keep our wedding budget relatively small – not the easiest thing to do in the metropolitan DC area, where wedding budgets can easily soar in to the $20,000 - $30,000 range or higher - and decided to focus the bulk of our budget on a few main priorities. We decided on photography, catering and the venue as the highest priorities, with our middle priorities on décor and flowers, followed by everything else.

And when it came to “everything else” – we were pretty open to ideas. I spent the first couple of months, in our inspiration gathering phase, going through back issues of Martha Stewart Weddings and reading wedding blogs for inspiration. Like most other brides, I put together a notebook with clippings of my favorite ideas and an inspiration board to help define the feel of our wedding:

{Read the rest of this entry…}

Hello EAD readers! My name is Nole, and a little over six months ago I was lucky enough to marry my husband on a sunny afternoon over the Memorial Day weekend at an historic manor just outside Washington, DC. I am so excited to be guest blogging this week on EAD, and to share with you some of the inspiration and planning behind our little garden wedding.

Before we get into the posts, I thought I’d tell you a bit more about us and our wedding!

My husband and I met in graduate school while studying international affairs back in 2005. We’re both complete policy wonks with a shared desire to learn and experience as much in the world as possible. Together we’ve traveled to Egypt and Peru, and separately we’ve traveled to several countries in Europe and Africa. Our shared love of all things international was a large part of the inspiration behind our wedding, from our invitations to the dinner menu. I also have a love for all things paper (particularly letterpress) and run a blog called (Oh So) Beautiful Paper dedicated to showcasing beautiful paper goods and design - from wedding invitations to note cards to calendars.

{Read the rest of this entry…}