Thursday 15 June 2017

Our Wedding Inspiration!

Big news everyone: last weekend I got married! It was a wonderful day that I wish I could do all over again in slow motion. My husband (!) and I have each lived in several different states over the years and it was unbelievably special to get all of our friends and family from across the country (and world!) in one place. We even had a surprise guest: our friend flew in from Tokyo!




We don't have our wedding photos back yet, but today I thought I'd share how we put together our wedding. We based our entire planning strategy on three main concepts:




1) We decided how we want our wedding to feel for us and our guests and stuck to that vision. For us that meant all of our decisions were based around creating a joyful, welcoming, modern, nature-inspired wedding.


2) Every time we hit a roadblock or stressor, we'd ask ourselves, "Will this change how we feel on our wedding day?" If the answer was no, we generally cut that thing from the wedding. If the answer was yes, it helped to reframe the reason behind why we were doing that thing which made the whole process so much more enjoyable.


3) We are environmentally conscious in our day-to-day lives, and we wanted our wedding to follow suit. This meant actively making decisions to reduce excess and waste as a byproduct of our wedding.




Once these three guidelines were established, I did as any 2017 bride would do and took to Pinterest and wedding blogs. Here are some of the inspiration images that found their way into our wedding:








I am an enormous fan of artist Zoe Pawlak. I've had this painting of hers saved for years and it served as the color palette for the wedding.





Our second biggest source of inspiration came from this gorgeous wedding of an actress and casting director. While the Palm Beach look (and large budget!) is not what we had in mind, we thought they nailed a fun and happy vibe and we gleaned a lot of DIY ideas from their photos.








Specifically, we loved the idea of potted plants as centerpieces instead of flowers. I always feel sad seeing flowers get thrown away at the end of a wedding, plus cut flowers are tough on the environment, so potted plants helped us reduce our waste. At the end of the day, our friends all took home potted plants and it's so fun seeing parts of our wedding live on in their homes! We also loved the white runner and the idea of using numbers on each plate rather than traditional table numbers.




From the above jumping-off points, we started to narrow our focus. We liked the look of a plated table with waterfall napkin like this one, and I also really liked green plants with minimal colors in the centerpieces.







The terra cotta pots here add a bit of nice dimension and earthy tones.



We ended up choosing similar plants to this image--ours were lavender, fern, and astrids.



We didn't want to go quite as minimal as the above tables, so the grey tablecloth and white runner of this image provided some pretty contrast.





I really loved the soft texture of this runner (we ended up using white cheesecloth) and how it draped over the edge with ribbons to cinch the runner.


My niece and nephew were the flower girl and ring bearer, so I made sure to include them with their own coloring books and sticker/crayon jars.




Our ceremony was held outdoors at the beautiful Grotto, which needed very little embellishment. Our only aisle décor was glass lanterns, which we filled with river rock and candles.





We had this Ikea easel set up with directions to the ceremony and a potted centerpiece of succulents.


My husband is a talented graphics whiz, so he designed and fabricated all of our paper goods as well as our wedding website. His workplace (a graphic design/manufacturing company) generously printed everything free of charge, which was awesome for our budget! We roughly based our Save the Dates off this postcard, incorporating simple language and multiple fonts that were then repeated in all of our wedding signage and invites.



For our invites we really liked the floral border and clean look of this invite, but we put our own spin on ours.

I can't wait to get our photos back so I can share how this inspiration turned into reality!



















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