A Wedding Color Story

Photo Credit: Erica Loeks Photography

I got married kind of a long time ago.  But I still love poring over photos of weddings, especially photos of my own wedding.  One of my favorite parts of planning my wedding was choosing a color scheme.  I had a lot of different ideas floating around in my head ranging everywhere from all white to all black to everything in between.  Then one night I had a full vision: bright green and royal blue.  A week or so after my vision, Emerald green was named Pantone's color of the year.

Because I was going with such bold colors, I knew that the reception could get tricky.  How do you use  the colors without overusing the colors.  Here's where I think it's crucial to work with a wedding planner.  Wedding planners have seen it all, and they have a great knack for reigning in the crazy.  I had a fabulous wedding planner, Stephanie Johnson of Park Place Planning, who helped me see my vision without overdoing it.  I cried a lot on my wedding day, but I have to say that walking into the reception ballroom took my breath away.  It was months worth of effort and agonizing over every single decision.  When I walked into that room I saw my very vision come to life.  It was one of my favorite moments of my wedding day.

Photo: My Own
Flowers: La Petite Fleur

There were two areas of wedding planning where I really wanted to see my vision shine through: the flowers and the linens.  I am lucky enough to be friends with an amazingly talented florist, Carra Otten of La Petite Fleur.  The flowers were actually easy because I went into a meeting with Carra, told her my color scheme, told her I like sequins and shiny things, and asked her to work her magic.

Photo Credit: Erica Loeks Photography
Flowers: La Petite Fleur

The flowers were nothing short of perfection.

Having nice linens at your wedding is worth it.  It ties everything together.  I went back and forth on where I should spend my money and where I should add color.  I have one major tip for spending money on linens.  I wasn't going to do chair covers at first.  I talked to multiple people who work in the wedding industry and the answer was emphatically and unanimously the same: chair covers are a must. They can get expensive, but weddings are expensive.  And nothing can ruin all of your hard work in decorating than a gold and teal chair clashing with your pink and white color scheme.  For the love of Pete, people, use chair covers.  Or don't, whatever, it's your wedding.

I went with chair covers, and I never looked back.  In the end I chose a kelly green tablecloth for all of the round tables, white chair covers with royal blue sashes, and royal blue napkins.  Then for the head table, I decided on an all white look.  White cloths, white chair covers, and white sashes.  I think it turned out sensational.

I know this look is not everyone's cup of tea.  It's definitely bold, but that was what I wanted.  I loved the brightness and the clean lines and thought it was the perfect mix of preppy and modern.  Speaking of modern, when I was at the linen rental showroom shopping for linens, I stumbled upon these clear, acrylic candelabras that I could not live without.  We used three of them on the head table and they literally made my entire night.  Every time I see photos of them I talk about buying one for my home.

Photo Credit: Erica Loeks Photography

If you want to plan a colorful wedding, I say go bold or go home.  I also say hire a wedding planner because nothing is worse than decor that is ugly because someone took the expression go bold or go home literally.

I leave you with one last image of how color can really beautify a wedding.

Photo Credit: Erica Loeks Photography

Wedding Paper Love

When I started planning things for the wedding, I knew that I wanted to do some of the paper products on my own.  I got ideas from blogs (I swear I have looked at every wedding ever posted on Style Me Pretty) and tried to come up with the templates for things early on.  The really difficult thing about the paper products is getting the right color of paper.  Sometimes I would find an awesome color, but it would be way too expensive.  Other times, I would find a color online that looked perfect and then the sample piece would be way too dark or way too bright.  It was frustrating.  I finally settled on the above blue.  It wasn't exactly the shade I wanted, but it was close and had a very pretty shimmer to it. 

Making programs is a lot more complicated that I thought it would be.  First, if you want to do a book style, you have to print the pages out of order and on both sides of a piece of paper so that when it folds, all of the pages are in the proper order.  This turned out to be a lot tougher than I thought.  I guess it wasn't hard to figure out, just time consuming.  Secondly, the text was maddening.  I obsessed and obsessed about the punctuation and grammar.  Like, obsessed to the point where I couldn't even see obvious mistakes anymore.  It was bad.  I kept having visions of people in the church pews snickering about my bad grammar.  It was awful.  At the end of the day, I had to let it go. 

The programs were very simple.  There was just a list of the people in the wedding, the order of the ceremony and thank yous.  I also included my favorite love quote.  Have you read Rilke's essay On Love?  You should.  It's divine.

We also opted for the guest libs instead of doing a formal guest book.  I actually made the template on the computer and again obsessed and obsessed about the grammar.  This one I know there were some mistakes and people definitely pointed them out to us.  Thanks people!  I need a refresher on what a proper adverb is.  Creating a template for these was actually really simple.  It was the cutting of them that was tricky.

I knew that I needed to jazz them up so that it wasn't just a boring piece of ivory card stock.  I got a paper punch with a polka dot pattern from the lovely Martha Stewart and thought it would be smooth sailing.  It was not.  After punching through a hundred or more pieces of card stock, the paper punch was not as sharp and not punching holes quite as cleanly.  It was a lot of work and my elbows were aching afterwards.  I think I gave myself tennis elbow.  After the punches, we decided to put a thin piece of ribbon through the top holes to give it a bit more color. 

A side note about the guest libs.  I love the idea, but I think my execution was off.  A few people suggested putting them at every place setting and I went against that thinking more people would complete them if they were in the cocktail room.  I was wrong.  They definitely should go at every place setting.  Live and learn...always listen to your wedding planner. (sorry Steph!)  We did get about 70 back and they were funny...although some of them were extremely naughty. 

My last big paper project was the table numbers.  This was one of those things that my mom and Mike were both against.  I am stubborn and forged ahead.  This project took a TON of time.  Each crystal was added to the number with my own two hands.  First I printed out the word "Table" on a bunch of sheets of card stock.  Then I took a pencil and drew in the number.  I then filled in the pencil marking with the crystals.  I would say each one took at least an hour of time.  However, they looked so cool.  The little crystals caught the candle light and kind of glowed all pretty.  It was just the look that I wanted.  Now I need to think of a way to re-purpose the numbers.   

Overall, I definitely agree with people that you should not take on too many DIY projects for a wedding.  It just gets to be a lot of time and I'm not convinced that you can always do it on the cheap...unless you want it to look cheap.  These few projects were just enough (and maybe a little bit too much) for us.

I also have to say that I had a LOT of help.  My mom put in a lot of time crafting with me as did Mike and his mother.  I am lucky because my mom is really good at getting things precise, where I am not quite as good at that skill.  Mike was kind of a special helper in that I know he doesn't really get crafting, but he knew it was important to me and so not only helped me, but also worked really hard to make sure it all looked nice.