Getting to the church on time

Well,it’s now been over a week since Mark and I have taken that next big step and gotten hitched!  It’s been a wild ride of planning and craftiness, and I would be remiss if I didn’t drag you all through the DIY that went into it – so without further ado, let’s see it all come together

Invitations

I’m generally not an artist, and can only really draw two things – stick figures and trees.  Since weddings tend to be more formal occasions, I decided to stick with the tree and go from there.  After scanning, correcting, and adding text with Picnik (my go-to design program), all that was left was researching envelopes, printing, cutting everything down to size, and assembling

Right, that was easy, wasn’t it?  Next up….

Escort cards and signage

Being the good DIY bride that I was, I immediately started leafing through issues of Martha Stewart Weddings and fell in love with these tissue paper bouquets.  But how to incorporate them….did I want to make bouquets of them?  Not really, because that seemed like alot of work.  Somewhere along the way I came up with the idea to use them as escort cards and my bridesmaid Pip joined me for some tissue paper fun

Thanks to the wine consumption of my friends Sara and Angela and their friends, I managed to get ahold of enough corks to last me a lifetime and put together the escort cards

The plus of designing our own invitations also meant I had a theme I could carry out through the wedding.  The tree I drew was used in the table cards, the guestbook sign, and the gifts.  The font I used was carried throughout on all these signs, along with the escort cards.  I used Picnik and a papercutter I got at Michaels for everything, and was really pleased with how it turned out.

As for the guestbook, we wanted to do something different.  Instead of leaving guests scrambling for something to write, I printed out a few starter phrases on cards for the guests to fill out and put in a vase – another Martha Stewart idea.  There are definitely some gems in there 🙂

Centerpieces

The other project of Martha’s that I fell in love with were the striped vellum candles, which ended up being a pretty big headache initially – I ended up trying multiple types of vellum tape, mod podge, and spray adhesive before I finally settled with double sided tape as an acceptable method of affixing the vellum to the vases.  The vases were scrounged up from Ross, Marshall’s, TJ Maxx, and Michaels (on sale!) to finally come up with this:

Yes, that’s alot of vases!  I also wanted to add some green to the table, so we decided to go with bamboo favors that would sit in colorful bowls on the tables for the guests to take home.  Which I of course did not take any pictures of 🙂

Aisle Decorations

My friend Sara, who go married last year, used pinwheels to decorate the aisle and since we weren’t doing flowers for our wedding I decided to go with her idea, at the last minute (read: 3 weeks before W-day)  I’d helped her make them before, so with some additional tips and alot of help from Mark cutting things down to size, we ended up with these:

I loved them.  I wanted them to go on chairs along the aisle, and I’m told they did.  But you know what?  I didn’t even see them 🙂

Shawls

You all remember the wedding shawl I made awhile back, right?

Well I didn’t stop there.  Oh no, I went ahead and decided to make shawls for all the bridesmaids, in a blue custom dyed for me by my friend Dani.  One shawl a month sounds reasonable right?

Two Swallowtail shawls down I began to realize just how crazy this might be.  As I started to run out of yarn, I began to panic.  I got some more dye from Dani and started alternating on the last shawl, modifying the pattern and praying.  Finally, a week before the wedding, I had 4 blue Swallowtail shawls for the bridesmaids

The Wrap Up

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bummed that it was all over.  Yes, we’ve settled back into our life now (with nicer kitchen stuff!), but there’s a part of me that misses the crafting and prep.  And a bigger part of me that misses seeing all of our friends and family.  My maid of honor said it best in her toast – in many ways, my friends have become my family (or a large part of it) since college.  We never write or call or visit as often as we’d like, and seeing everyone together in one place reminded me of how important they all are to me.  It was a beautiful day, and if anyone needs some pinwheels or vases just give me a call – we’ve got some extra 🙂