Aisle Rose Petals
T here have been many points where I was surprised by how much a certain wedding item cost – it also seems like as soon as you put the descriptive word of “wedding” with a product, it triples the cost. The most surprising had to be the cake cutting fees issued by a lot of venues (at one location, we were quoted $1.50 per slice), the champagne toast costs (quoted anywhere between $1.50 and $2.50 per glass), and the cost of “wedding” flowers. Thankfully, we were able to avoid or minimize these costs dramatically (our venue doesn’t charge a cutting fee, we’re not doing a champagne toast, and we made our own bouquets out of fake flowers). The one item that I wasn’t able to cut the cost down as much as I would have liked...
Our Hops Trellis
A friend gave us 3 hop rhizomes and we wanted to have something green and pretty (and something that represented our love of craft beer) as part of the backdrop for our ceremony – so I figured I’d build a trellis. True to my usual mission statement I over-engineered the heck out of it… 24″ deep x 8″ dia sonotubes We have more sun in the back yard because of removing a tree that was trying to grow INTO our garage – unfortunately that also meant digging around (and ultimately digging out) roots from the tree. The tube on the left we spent almost 2 hours digging the simple hole because of a 4.5″ diameter root that I had to saw out by hand. Tamped the back-fill around the tubes Picked up a nice heavy tamper today at a yard...
Ceremony “Altar”
A lthough we’re not standing at an official altar to take our vows, we did want to have some sort of pretty background to stand in front of. Columns, gauze, huge vases full of flowers, they just aren’t for us. The way our “aisle” is naturally arranged, it makes the most sense for us to stand at the corner of our garage. Just to the right of us will be our two large, white hydrangea bushes, and to the left of us is the blank slate of the the side of the garage, which I will get to our plans for that shortly. We had some unseasonably beautiful weather a few weeks back, nearly 80 degrees for several days, which spurred a lot of our plants to begin sprouting! It was wonderful to see… until we were forecasted to have freezing weather!...
It’s Official! We Have An Officiant
N either Dave nor myself have religious tendencies, so finding an “officiant” to preside over our ceremony was going to be based purely on personality alone. I browsed around at some officiant websites (wow, officiants have possibly the worst websites out of all of the vendor categories I have researched so far), but we just couldn’t get comfortable with the idea of having someone religious speak on behalf of our love for one another. For a few weeks, we warred internally about asking a friend to be our officiant – we have been trying so hard to not put any of our friends “to work,” so that they could sit back and enjoy the ceremony and reception along with us. But, after discussing it one evening, there was one friend in...
Centerpieces: Light All The Things!
I love LOVE love candles. Can I say that again? I LOVE candles. When I started looking through inspiration for centerpieces, they all seemed way too complicated and overdone for my tastes – I wanted something simple but that didn’t seem boring or “undecorated”. Even in browsing photos of candle-focused centerpieces, they all seemed more complicated than I really wanted – tiered on centerpiece candelabras, or using mirrors to reflect light, gobs of flowers or dangling crystals, etc. In light of all of this, I hesitate to call what we’ve decided on as “centerpieces” – the very word seems to invoke the idea that we’ve planned these out meticulously, and that we hold them in a high priority. Instead,...
(Updated) A Few Ceremony Touches
I n browsing around looking for ideas for my bouquet, bridesmaids bouquets, Dave’s boutonniere and the groomsmen’s boutonnieres, I’ve come across a lot of inspirational photos. But nothing really jumped out at me as being simple, but elegant enough to match the aesthetic I was going for. That was, of course, until I came across this photo: I fell head over heels in love, and knew I wanted to do something similar for my chairs. I’m pretty certain that I will be using hydrangeas in my bouquets, so doing this on the ceremony chairs will be a great way to tie the two together. I’ve been trying to avoid using real flowers, and for this use it’s no different. I found these ivory and blue silk Hydrangeas and these cream Gypsophilia...