Since I’m a full time wedding photographer myself, it was really overwhelming trying to find the best fit for us with the photography. I salute any wedding photographer who has an easy time of picking– there’s a lot of talent out there. A lot of talented friends out there, in fact. Choosing Ken Kienow to shoot our wedding was one of the absolute best parts of all of the wedding planning process. He works in a familiar way to me. Booking him was one of the best moments in all of the wedding planning, so much so that when we took a cross-country road trip in February, we made sure to include California on our route so we could meet with him and shoot our engagement photos.
As for the details of the day, the underlying theme was music. I designed this to explain the music theme - It went on the back of 30 different postcards I created with different lyrics we loved. I also re-purposed a lot of the background text into our program, which I also designed.
We ordered the flowers from Fiftyflowers.com to save money and they turned out perfectly. I loved my flowers. Our event designers, Every Last Detail made my bouquet and seeing it was one of the best moments of the day for me. Every Last Detail surprised me with so many sweet little touches on the wedding day– music sheet wreaths, babys breath in the planters outside, and they covered the baby wipe container for the thumbprint guestbook with gray ribbon to make it look more cohesive.
I found an art deco paper on Paper Mojo that I LOVED and incorporated that into as much as possible. It was part of the centerpieces and I made a digital pattern out of it for the programs I designed. I also found a bracelet that had the exact same pattern, so that was a no-brainer.We made tea light candles out of egg shells at my bridal shower the weekend before the wedding. Since the brown kraft paper/paper mache material was such a constant theme in the design, my mom suggested we use brown eggs. It was one of the only real “DIY” projects I did that didn’t involve the computer. :)
Since we had less than 80 guests, we decided against a wedding party. It was one of the absolute best decisions we made in all of our wedding planning. Everyone there was special to us, and a bridal party just didn’t really seem to fit.
Another wonderful thing was that we were able to spend a lot of time together before the ceremony. We opened gifts together – he bought me diamond earrings, I got him a gift certificate to a tattoo shop since he’s always wanted tattoos. He’s not a diamond earring kind of guy, so it was a really special gift. I also got us the newest Pokemon games (white and black– apropos) to play on our honeymoon. :)
We had local gourmet pizza for our dinner and it was delicious. Pies and Pints has a bit of a cult-like following here in West Virginia, and we found a way to work around the fact that they don’t technically cater. We had a caterer for our cocktail hour, and they were nice enough to stick around and take care of the par-baked pizzas for dinner. We had cuban pork pie, chicken gouda, and grape pie with gorgonzola. Pies and Pints is one of the best restaurants I’ve EVER been to, so it was great to share that with our friends and family.
The dessert table was a little intense. I’ve lost almost 100 pounds and sweets are my weakness, so in that final stretch trying to lose before the wedding, I just kept adding things to the dessert table whenever I had a craving. We had local cupcakes in lieu of cake, but we also had local homemade ice cream. The ice cream store owner is a close family friend and was my boss off and on for 7 years when I worked at the ice cream shop, so we HAD to have ice cream! We had espresso oreo, vanilla, and lemon gelato. I actually bought a lot of dessert table items from etsy– tiramisu cake ball truffles, boston cream cake ball truffles, and Angry Bird cake pops. I found some chocolate cameras and video game controllers online and knew we had to have those. We had some easter candy since it was easter weekend. Bobby’s favorite treat is donuts, so we had some donuts in lieu of a groom’s cake. Chelsea from Chelsea | Events designed the spread and it was the most perfect dessert table I’ve ever seen. She’s got a real knack for beautiful dessert tables.
I saw a wedding on Hifi Weddings a few months back where the table numbers were musicians/bands, which I’d seen before, but the brilliant part was that the DJ played a song by each table artist as the cue for each table to go through the buffet line at dinner. That was the lightbulb moment for me. We had a lot of fun tables- James Brown, Daft Punk, B-52s, David Bowie. The head table was the Tears for Fears table.
Our designers painted a HUGE chalkboard with gold detailing for the seating arrangements. They also created STUNNING paintings for each side of the room – an E and a B – to cover some ugly portraits hanging in the room. This was one of my absolute favorite details of the day. Every Last Detail also created a giant chandelier made out of records I bought off of ebay. I wanted to incorporate photography as a secondary theme, so when we went on our road trip earlier this year, I made sure to take letter art photos of our names on the trip.
Instead of throwing a bouquet, I threw angry birds – they were a huge hit with the kids (I kind of love angry birds, in case it wasn’t clear). Another hit with the youngsters was the easter egg hunt we did immediately after the cocktail hour to kick off the reception. They also loved our photobooth that Mandi White set up.
