Category: Our Wedding

This giveaway is closed.  See who won here. 

On Wednesday, I organized the basement, which we shared yesterday.  With this weeks giveaway, you can do a little organizing in your home.  Bonita is a Thirty-One independent consultant and she offered up a fantastic organizing utility tote.

It’s large, and can be used for just about anything.  Toss papers, a computer, and office supplies in for a portable office.  Keep one in your car with emergency items.  Fill with cleaning supplies to carry around the house without running all over.  Stock the bag with your child’s daily essentials for an outing.  Or hey, pack a picnic lunch and blanket and enjoy the nice weather.  Whatever you do, your hands won’t be as full.

The black happy dot fabric will coördinate with almost everything, too.

The Goods: One organizing utility tote in black happy dot fabric from Bonita at Thirty-One.

You’ve seen our invitations, the location, and our flowers.  Now, we’re going to share the miscellaneous details and finishing touches.  Let’s start with the bridal party attire.  I found my wedding dress on my first trip out.  It is simple, off white (I look horrible in bright white) with an overlapping top and satin ribbon.  The train is short, but not too formal for an outdoor wedding.

The hairdresser I used to babysit for created the updo, a modern french twist with flowers along the right side.  As a wedding gift, she also style the bridesmaids’ hair, too.  The bridesmaids wore strapless black tea length dresses with a satin ribbon.

{From left to right, my cousin Jenna, Aunt and owner of the home, Mershawn (we call her Shawnie), my mom, my older sister Ashley, me, my younger sister Andrea, my cousin Mallory, and high school friend, Amanda}

Oddly enough, the other important ladies in my life also wore black dresses.

The men wore black tuxedos with black bowties and vests.  Ben, being the special groom, wore a silver vest and tie.

{From left to right: my dad, Ben’s youngest brother Joseph, Ben, Ben’s younger brother Nick, Ben’s older brother Luke and Ben’s dad, Robert}

By the way, my dad is a mechanic, so he is never in a suit.  Doesn’t he look handsome?!?

We got hungry while taking pictures, so we had a cheesecake snack.

Ben and I both love cheesecake, so we chose vanilla cheesecake with chocolate, strawberry or raspberry toppings.  Here is our special wedding cake, we had others too.  Sure, it’s not the prettiest, but it tasted goooooood!

For some reason, we don’t have pictures of our food, but it was delicious!  My mom’s friend, a caterer made and served the food.  To please everyone, we had penne pasta with the choice of marinara and meatballs or Alfredo sauce and grilled chicken.  Caesar salad, fruit salad, and dinner rolls completed the buffet style meal.

Guests had a sweet treat inside the gloss black favor boxes.  A mini roll of Rolo chocolate caramels wrapped in pretty paper, mints, Hershey kisses, personalized M & Ms and a string of jingle bells.  We had to use plastic dinner plates, so guests could jingle the bells if they wanted us to kiss.

We decided on a modern guest book of floral printed white card stock and white envelopes stamped with the floral stamp.

After writing a message, guests placed their message in the glass vessel, usually used for trifles.

After the wedding, I made a book to hold the cards using the leftover paper from our wedding programs.  Double sided tape holds the envelopes in place nicely.

Our wedding programs kept the same floral stamp theme going.  The outside was a piece of white linen textured card stock with two printed stamps at the top with our names and ceremony info at the bottom right corner.

The vellum printed inside sheet had the bridal party and ceremony order.  We tied the two sheets together with the same waxed string used for the favor boxes.

Just for fun, here are a few random details about our wedding:

The wedding started at four in the afternoon because the reception followed right after.

Three of Ben’s brothers served as groomsmen while both of my sisters and my cousin were bridesmaids.

Our bridal party walked out to Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.  I walked out to Canon in D by Pachelbel played by a violin duo.

Ben and I were super hungry, but barely got to eat during dinner.

The first song Ben and I danced to as a married couple was Carried Away by George Strait.  The second dance with the wedding party was When You Say Nothing At All by Keith Whitley.

My dad’s name is Keith and I didn’t have a father daughter dance.  I wish I would have.

I made more money than Ben in the dollar dance.

My uncle, who was really stressed about the wedding in his backyard, let loose at the reception and spun around the tent pole, bending it.  Too funny.

We still have my favorite vases from our wedding.  The candles that lined our head table are in our bathroom now.

We’ve shared our invitations and wedding location, and today, the wedding celebration continues.  This time, we’re talking flowers.  In my opinion, flowers always add elegance to any occasion.  For a high impact on a low-budget, I asked my cousin, Jenna, to lend a hand to create our DIY floral arrangements.  Luckily, she said yes, so I ordered flowers through an online wholesale company.

What did we order?  Well, tulips are my favorite flower.  Unfortunately, June is not tulip season and I had a hard time finding them affordably priced.  But, we did find them, so we ordered around 150 in white, using most for the bouquets.

The bouquets were as simple as grouping the flowers in a slightly domed cluster and cutting the stems.  Then, we wrapped the stems with wide white satin ribbon and added a decorative thin black zig zag of ribbon.  Round silver pins held everything firmly in place.  My bouquet had about 45 stems and the bridesmaids had about 25 each.  Simple and stunning.

Alstromeria are beautiful filler flowers, so we ordered roughly 120 stems.  Having never ordered from this company, I ordered at least 2 bunches more of each flower than I needed, to have extras if the quality wasn’t great.  We bought 50 white roses and over 30 bunches of daisies for a grand total of $350, including shipping.  When the shipment arrived a few days early and was left at the door without being signed for (no one was home) I feared for the worst.  Luckily, everything was well packaged and in great, budding shape.

Because I’m relatively terrible at floral arrangements, I decided the way to achieve the best results would be to keep one flower type per vase, with three vases per table.  Which means we needed 45 vases.  Where did I go?  First, I searched through my sister’s kitchen and took some tall beer glasses.  Then, the thrift store and Ikea.  I didn’t want every arrangement to match, I just needed one tall, one medium and one small clear glass vessel for each table.  After finding a great assortment at the thrift store, I picked up a set of drinking glasses at Ikea.  Total spent on vases?  About 18 bucks, for everything!

Finally, flower arranging day had arrived.  First tip: Keep your flowers as cold as possible.  Second tip:  If you’re doing this yourself, keep the arrangements as simple as possible.  Third Tip:  Use interesting leaves to add greenery.  Fourth tip:  Remove all leaves that will be under water.  This will help keep the flowers alive longer.  Fifth tip:  Enlist lots of help!  We were lucky to have so many willing helpers to tackle wedding projects.  Ben’s brothers did manual labor and heavy lifting, my sisters and friends helped with flowers and set up, our aunt and uncle helped prepare their yard, and my parents coordinated everything.  A DIY wedding is definitely a team effort.

Each tall vase held four tulips and a few roses along with lemon leaf.  The middle vase held about 5 bunches of Alstromeria.  This arrangement was the easiest because we just cut the stems to length and tossed them in a vase.  The leaves on the stems were great greenery.  The small vases had a tightly clustered group of daisies and I decided to add Kermit mums to a bright green.  We also snagged hosta leaves from my mom and aunt’s gardens to use as greenery in these arrangements.

Each table had one of each, set in a cluster for maximum impact.  Four Ikea candles on each table provided warmth (not literally) and ambiance.  The head table and round tables had simple white plates, silverware champagne glasses and place cards.  See that little curled paper inside each champagne flute?  Those are place cards.  The little black boxes are favors, which we’ll share tomorrow.

With the table arrangements and bouquets done, we still had tons of flowers left over.  We made two small arrangements for either side of the fence entrance.

Two large bouquets for the head table.

Two large arrangements in flower pots filled the guest book/program/gift table.

We created most of the arrangements, but I wasn’t comfortable with the large arrangements flanking the ceremony.  We had a local floral company put these together a day before the wedding.  Surprisingly, each arrangement cost $

What did you use for your bouquet?  What is your favorite flower?