The Design Boards: All in the Details....Part Two

The theme of my wedding was “vintage garden party” which you can image requires a great many hours spent on ebay and rummaging in thrift stores to find beautiful “vintage” things.

In lieu of renting our silverware we bought vintage silverware, the cost was comparable to renting and we are now the proud owners of 60+ place settings of mixed vintage silverware!

We did the same with our linens, all the napkins came from ebay and thrift stores. I am a big believer in using cloth whenever possible (it takes us 2-3 months to go through a roll of paper towels, I am not exaggerating!) so now whenever we entertain we pull out our vintage linens!

We rented burlap tablecloths for all the tables, I loved the look it gave to the reception.

I somehow got the idea of using wine boxes for centerpieces. My plan was to age them and stain them and then put them in the middle of the tables filled with milk glass vases, and candlesticks and mason jars filled with flowers.

We had a slight panic attack about 2 weeks before the wedding when Mike attempted to stain one and it didn’t turn out anything like we envisioned it. Luckily, my step dad swooped in to save the day (as he usually does when we get stuck in the middle of a project) and took all the boxes, cut them down (wine crates are huge!) and stained them. They turned out even more beautiful than I imagined they could (thank you Rod!) I now want to use them in my house somehow, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

Mike and I both love to cook, it’s a big hobby of ours and it’s a way that we connect with each other and with our family and friends. So, for our wedding favor, we compiled a list of our favorite recipes and made them into a cookbook using Blurb.

This may seem like a daunting and expensive task but it was actually neither. We received a great price break because of the quantity ordered and we gave them out to couples instead of to each individual person.

Throughout our wedding I was constantly thinking, is this something we really need, can we use it again, will it go to waste after the wedding? I feel that often times, wedding favors can become an after thought and something that people don’t really want, we wanted to make something that our guests would actually use, hopefully we accomplished that!

My mom baked and iced 150 cupcakes for the wedding (she is my hero!) The smell of buttercream that came from that table all night was intoxicating, people couldn’t wait to try one!

On another 'save the day mission', my step dad built 2 cupcake stands out of vintage glassware scoured from thrift stores. He worked off of a picture my mom and I took of something we saw at Anthropologie.

I bought vintage cake toppers from Ebay to place on the tops of the stands.

I bought all the flowers for my wedding for under $200 which included dried lavender bundles for me and my maid of honor. My aunt gave me a cameo from my grandmother’s collection to pin on my bouquet.

My grandmother did all the flower arrangements and the pictures don’t even do them justice. They were so incredibly beautiful.

We used mason jars and milk glass vases to hold all the flowers. The flowers were purchased from Whole Foods and Publix a few days before the wedding.

The flower in my hair came from Butterfly Enchantress Designs.

Mike and I decided to see each other before the ceremony for pictures. This is something we literally decided two weeks prior to the day. I was on the fence about it because of tradition, but honestly everything we did was non-traditional so we figured why not. I loved all of the “reveal” photos I had seen so much and after I read Kristen’s story, I thought, let’s go for it and I was so happy with our decision. It was amazing to have those few quiet moments together before the ceremony just me, him, and the photographer. The photographer got some great photos of these moments, including a great shot of my mom bringing Mike to me.

My mom could not understand why I wanted lavender shoes to wear with my wedding dress, when she saw them with the dress, she agreed that they looked beautiful. I got these shoes from Payless for $20! The best part is, I can wear them again!

One of my favorite details at our wedding was our craft beer selection! I am from Alaska, Mike is from Germany and we lived in New York City together. We had beers from each location. You have no idea how difficult and expensive it was to get Alaskan beer shipped to Florida, but totally worth it!