Category — ceremony & reception

Lauren created these easy but beautiful table numbers using her engagement picture and Photoshop.

Print and mat on cardstock - voila!

One of the quirks of the barn is the man who oversees its rental. It’s owned by a larger group, but this guy has all the say, at least as far as I know. He’s made a couple of ridiculous rules (which seem to not always be enforced). The barn is rented with tables and chairs in it. The tables are rustic looking aged wood, while the chairs are metal and folding.

(Source: KristenHenschen on Flickr)

At first I thought that was no problem, we’d just rent different chairs. I mean, heck. Anything is better than a metal folding chair! But it turns out that they don’t allow that at all. You use the metal folding chairs… “Or nothing” isn’t even an option – we aren’t allowed to store them out of sight.

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Brooke submitted this fabulous and incredibly unique idea, a temporary painted dance floor! She says:

When weddings are done in backyards, everything needs to be temporary. But I have painted concrete slabs to look like ballroom floors, and it washes off! My mom always painted our windows with tempera paint for the holidays growing up. She added dish soap to the paint to ensure that it would wash off. Using this same logic, I added 1 part dish soap to 3 parts paint to create this beautiful and unique conversation starter.

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Nearly six months after the fact, it is fun to look back on the day and see what still stands out. Thomas and I each made a list of a few of our favorite things from the day. Maybe you could use some of these ideas as well.

My List

Greeting guests

Rather than having the guests go through a formal receiving line after the ceremony, we asked them to be seated in the church. We then re-entered the church and greeted all guests row by row for dismissal. This was a great way to personally say hello and thank you to everyone before the fun of the reception began.

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While there were some areas where we knew we wanted to try to save, there were others where we decided we would spend. Our cake was also one of the areas we decided we would spend. From the moment we saw the cakes by Alexis from Elegant Indulgences, we knew she was going to be able to carry out our vision. The best part is that not only is she an artist when it comes to decorating, she is also an artist when it comes to baking. The cake was so good that we actually took the top tier with us on our honeymoon and ate it! We weren’t about to risk leaving it in the freezer for a year and having one of our brothers tear into it.

Alexis utilized a high level of design in creating the cake. Thomas and I were also very hands on in the process. She submitted three initial designs to us after going over what we wanted. We then took those designs into Photoshop, cropped some things here, changed colors there, and voila! A cake was born.

This is the inspiration board of cake ideas we presented to Alexis when we first met. We also provided her color samples and a copy of our invitations.

These are the three designs she created based on the above board and our ideas.

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There is no doubt this in an intense time of year for all across the nation. With the future president to be decided in a few days, everyone is on edge, myself included.

However, when you are also two months out from your personal “big day” there are other debates to be had. For me it has been “to assign or not assign.” This my friends is the big question.

From the beginning of this crazy wedding planning journey I have known I did not want to have a sit down, plated dinner reception. I wanted to have several “action stations” providing us the opportunity to serve our guests many different cuisines. It served my “wannabe foodies” status quite nicely. This decision also lended itself to not assigning seats. Having grown up in the south I had been used to this methodology and never found it to be a problem. People can get their food, pull up a chair, and repeat this action as many times as they want. I felt it encouraged mingling and wasn’t as “structured.” However I began to read in various bridal publications that it wasn’t polite to leave your guests without a seating assignment, and people appreciated having a space to call their own. Thus began many months of wavering about assigning and not assigning. I polled friends, many of whom said they would appreciate and assignment. However the top voter, my mom, was adamantly against it. I fell somewhere in between.

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It’s been a real joy to be able to tell you about my experiences of planning our wedding. As a wedding planner the pressure was on from day one to produce a spectacular day (!) but I think we did an amazing job and couldn’t have done it without our friends and family behind us.

I thought I would leave you with a juicy selection of my favourite shots from our day. It’s been almost two months since we got married and it still feels so fresh. I feel really emotional pouring over these photos-hope you enjoy them…

This was taken just before the bridesmaids left the hotel for Pembroke Lodge. Nervous wasn’t the word!

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When you first get engaged, logistically you assume that the wedding is all about you. However in reality, once you’re a little further into your planning, you discover it’s 60/40 all about your guests and the further we got into our planning, the more we realised! Suddenly you’re worried about them being hungry, bored, overwhelmed-you name it.

In hindsight, there really weren’t any major problems for us and our guests had the most wonderful day (we’re still hearing about it now) but at the time it seemed all we did was worry about everyone being happy.

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I consciously wanted to avoid not only the first dance, but also all of the other obligatory dances (father-daughter, mother-son, etc.) To me there’s always something forced, and slightly uncomfortable, about them. I knew I wouldn’t enjoy it. My (now) husband agreed. So you can imagine our horror when no one would start dancing until we danced together. It was frustrating, to say the least, and even a little embarrassing, since we hadn’t planned on a first dance and the first song to come off the iPod playlist was, ahem, Neil Diamond. We tried to make the best of it.

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My husband and I agreed that we wanted a quick yet meaningful wedding ceremony. We also wanted our guests to recognize it to be unique to us. Our wedding ceremony took place in a courtyard on a warm summer day so I knew that a “ten to fifteen-minute soap opera style ceremony” suited us just fine!

(Image courtesy of Jason Q Tran Photography)

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