Hello everyone! Wedding season is in full swing and I’m so happy to be here on Chicken Scratch sharing a little bit about my own wedding from almost 5 years ago!
Alecia wanted us to talk about the DIY aspects to our weddings, and I feel like I spent my entire engagement in front of the tv working on crafts for the wedding, but I don’t seem to have a whole lot of pictures to show for it! So we’ll just take a quick tour of the DIY aspects with the pictures that I do have
Drew and I got married at Locust Grove, the Samuel Morse House (yes, that Morse guy) back in 2007, and we were lucky to have had a gorgeous day to get hitched on the beautiful grounds of the estate. Since there wasn’t an area meant to hold seating and have a focus point, we bought ourselves a wrought iron archway from a local flea market to use as our altar and had flower petals strewn along the “aisle”. That archway is now in our backyard and will be holding up the beans in my garden this year!
Our guest book was a coffee table book of the Hudson Valley, detailing the journey of the Hudson River from its beginnings in the Adirondacks all the way to New York Harbor. I wanted something that I can display and read and enjoy, and our friends could sign on pages that talked about favorite hikes or spots from around town. Plus, if we ever moved, this would be a souvenir in more ways than one. Most people ended up signing the inside cover, but it was a treat to look through the book afterwards to find the odd love note on a random page.
We didn’t have any flowers at the ceremony other than the bouquets, since we were in a garden anyways. For the reception, the hall had high ceilings, so I felt we needed tall centerpieces to balance out the architecture. We ended up finding semi-matching vases at HomeGoods for $10 each (score!), filled them with lemons bought wholesale, and topped it off with an arrangement from the florist. The arrangement for the cocktail hour was of the same style, but had flowers in water instead of lemons filling the vase.
One of my favorite creative bursts was for the menu. We had 4 courses for dinner, so I made little origami mouth thingies for each place setting. (didn’t we used to play M.A.S.H on these things?) I have no idea what these mouths are actually called. Anyways, each side listed a course, and you could open up the flap to see the description for the course. I made one, wrote on it, deconstructed it to where the words ended up on a flat sheet of paper, designed a template in Microsoft Word and had a bunch printed up at the local print shop. Then I sat home and folded them all into the little mouth shapes while watching a Law and Order marathon. The overall vision was for these guys to sit on each plate like lotus flowers, so I bought gold-wrapped kisses to use as the flower center.
The other creative burst I had was for our favors. Our wedding cake had cupcakes on it, so each guest’s favor was a matching cupcake packaged in a chinese take-out box and wrapped in coordinating ribbon. I made up little tags for each one that had the Chinese character for “love”, as well as a short thank you note.
The rest of the table setting included some simple tealights, rose petals from the two-toned roses featured in my bouquet, and simple table numbers that I had printed on cardstock and displayed on picture holders from Target.
That’s it! Overall, the wedding was just a casual, festive party with good food, good friends and good music. We tried to keep everything simple and elegant while incorporating our personalities, since details do matter, but not as much as the reason we were all there in the first place!
Thanks Alecia for this wonderful opportunity and Best Wishes for your wedding and your marriage! May you be the perfect blushing bride and live happily ever after!
Thanks so much for sharing your awesome ideas. I especially loved the tall lemon-filled centerpieces. I hope you guys are enjoying this series and your long weekend! Thanks to bendryl and computer hiccups that’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll have some really fun stuff coming up in the next few weeks so make sure you come back!
Previous Posts from the Wedding Bells series:
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