Brittany & Christopher
Stationary: I carved the lobster and coral stamp myself and designed all the invitation pieces on Adobe Photoshop (Chris did most of the work). We also designed and printed Wedding Day Madlibs, guest book pages and a photo scavenger hunt for the disposable cameras, all of which turned out to be a lot of fun and a big hit with the guests. Everything was printed on recycled paper and individually hand-stamped.
Dessert buffet (cake): I gathered all the glassware from Hobby Lobby one piece at a time as they went on sale. I oogled over the Amy Atlas website what seemed like every day. Finally, when the (final) wedding date drew near, I contacted Jill DeWitt from Good Eats Boutique and I was flying high when she was on board with all my dessert requests. I had a vision of all mine and Chris’ favorite desserts on this huge table. I printed and reprinted the tags for each item about twelve times until they were perfect. I bought different sizes of Styrofoam blocks and wrapped them in plain recycled paper and stamped them with the same coral and lobster stamps to match our stationary and we used them to create different heights on the table. You can’t tell from the photos, but small cakes on each end of the buffet and the two bottom tiers of the center cake are actually cardboard hatboxes. Chris and I bought round hat boxes from Hobby Lobby and covered them in drywall spackle and spray painted them off-white to look like frosting on a cake. Jill provided the top cake tier for us to cut- a delicious pound cake with strawberry filling and whipped frosting.
Photo Booth: The original plan was to rent an actual photo booth, but due to budget constraints, we had to improvise. We bought a nautical themed shower curtain and hung it along the backside of the balcony. Guests used paper glasses as props that I ordered from Etsy and a remote to take photos of the
themselves making silly faces with Chris’ camera setup on a tripod. I also had chalkboards available for guests to write messages on.
Signs and photos: I used patterned scrapbook paper and letter stencils to create signs that we hung in the respective reception areas. For example, our recessional song was the cover of “All You Need is Love” from the musical Across the Universe (the first movie Chris and I watched together) and we hung a sign with the same words over the entryway into the reception area. Our first dance song was called “Forever Your Man” by Matt Ryczek and we hung a “Forever Yours” sign next to the dance floor and “Yummy Treats” graced the front of the dessert buffet. We also printed and hung our engagement photos, which were taken by our friend Albizu Vega, on a clothesline around the dance floor.
What advice do you have for other brides? My best advice is that a bride can spend much of the wedding planning stage soaking up all the beautiful, unique and creative ideas from magazines and blogs, but on wedding day, it’s important to remember that those are moments captured from other people’s wedding memories. They are meant to be inspiring, not duplicated. Let go of the notion of the “perfect day.” Don’t worry if you forget to lay out the hand stamped programs that took days to design and print (we did), if the week long fog finally subsides an hour before the ceremony only to appear again five minutes before your big walk (it did), or if someone in your family is unable to attend due to medical emergencies (we had a few empty seats). Your day will be perfect if it includes the people you care about and who care about you most and at the end of it all, you get to marry your best friend.
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