The wedding: Accessories

Nick and I made pretty much every accessory involved in the wedding.  Not only was it cheaper for us to do so, it added personality! Plus, I love creating things!

A quick note: We didn't use any real flowers in the wedding. I think flowers, especially used during weddings, are beautiful. But they are also very expensive. And then they die.  I wanted to do something unique without using real flowers since they die after a couple of days. And I also didn't want to use fake flowers, just because I don't like how that looks.

Bouquets:

 A lot of internet browsing led me to the idea of button bouquets. I tossed around the idea of doing just orange and pink, since those were my wedding colors. I also entertained the idea of using felt to create bigger flowers and leaves. But after a lot of research, I decided to stick with an assortment of different colored buttons. Nick and I spent a few hours stacking the buttons, inserting the flower wire, and wrapping the wire tight around its stem. We probably had over 200 button flowers. I wrapped each bouquet together with the green bouquet tape.  Then, for mine, I wrapped the stems with material left over from my mom's wedding dress. For my bridesmaids, I wrapped and glued either orange or pink fabric around each set of stems. I wish the bouquets could have been bigger. I really didn't want my bridesmaids to feel silly carrying such a small bouquet. But crafting together each one took so much effort, and I still had a lot of other things to take care of, so there had to be fewer flowers.

For the tossing bouquet, I had to think of something different. Obviously I couldn't toss a bouquet of buttons, that would totally take someone's eye out! So, I crafted a bouquet out of yarn ball flowers. I used these same flowers for decoration (another post for another day). I just made a ton of little yarn balls, and stuck the flower wire in them with a little hot glue. And then I glued the yarn balls together at the top and wrapped some of the leftover tulle from my dress around the stems. I was nervous about it falling apart during the toss. It did, a little bit, but I think it was okay overall. Abbey caught it, which was pretty exciting. She had said she planned to catch it much earlier when I had shown it to her and my other roomies.

Boutonnieres:

For the boutonnieres, I used the same button flowers I used for the bouquets. From Michaels, I bought a bouquet of fake flowers that had nice big leaves. I cut off the leaves and attached three button flowers, or six for Nick, using flower tape. I had to use wire cutters to cut the stems a little shorter. I glued the backs of the buttons to the leaves to keep them from getting floppy, and then attached safety pins to the backs.

Corsages:

It took me a while to figure out how to do flowerless corsages for my house party.  I ended up making fabric flowers and gluing ribbon and buttons to them, and then a safety pin to each back. Of course, they were orange and pink.

Headware:

For each girl in my wedding party, I made a flower headband. Actually, Kaitlyn helped me make them. She is splendid like that. They alternated orange and pink. I don't think any of my wedding party will wear them again, the colors are very bright, but I wanted to make sure I had something that tied all of them together since their dresses weren't the same.

Bow ties:

Nick and his groomsmen wore pink or orange bow ties that we made a couple of weeks before the wedding.  We used the same material I used to make the headbands and wrap the bouquets. Nick actually designed the bow ties, our friend Josiah ironed on the adhesive to make the fabric thicker, and I sewed them. They turned out pretty cute... I want to wear Nick's as a bow for my hair. I made sure each groomsman's tie color matched the headband and bouquet of the bridesmaid he was paired with for the ceremony.

So, I think that is all. Overall we saved hundreds of dollars by not using real flowers. And now I can have my bouquet sitting on my coffee table, looking the same as it did when we got married.

The wedding: Bridal Attire

To my faithful readers: I am sorry I haven't posted in so long! We packed up our car last weekend and, after the midnight showing of Harry Potter, headed up to Missouri to spend a couple of weeks with Nick's family and to talk to people about supporting us in Providence. So far, it's been a great time.

And now, for the actual subject of this blog post: What I wore in our wedding! The attire portion of the wedding can be so expensive! It really can be disheartening for a newly engaged bride or her bridesmaids to sift through all of the possibilities and know that it is very likely that a bunch of money is going to be spent... Especially if you don't have that kind of money.
So, I wanted to try to be sure that I, my hubby, and my wedding party looked good but weren't stressed out about it. I will also post about the wedding party and my hubby at a later time.

The Dress:
I had decided even before getting engaged that I wanted my mom and grandmothers to make my dress. My Grammy had made my mom and aunt's dresses, so I knew it was a realistic dream. But, even though I knew where I wanted the dress to come from, I still needed to figure out what I wanted it to look like. So, I perused many bridal magazines and tried on multiple dresses at David's Bridal. It was kind of awkward going into David's Bridal, knowing that I wasn't going to buy a dress there. The sales women are very persistent and really want to make sales, so it's kind of hard to like something but refuse to buy it.

 My favorite style dress was strapless and A-line, with lots of ivory tulle. I fell in love with a dress on the cover of the current "The Knot" magazine. Unfortunately, it was Vera Wang and $6,000. Not quite in my price range. But what I loved about it was the simplicity of just tulle. There was no train and no added embellishments. Just a black sash tied into a soft bow around her waste.  I just couldn't get that out of my head. So, we decided to replicate it.
The making of the dress was a little more time consuming than picking out the style. My grandmother found a pattern she thought would work for the shell and measured me from head to toe. Then, we headed to the fabric store and bought thicker fabric for the underneath part and a ton of tulle for the top. Then, my Grammy got to sewing. And there were multiple sizing meetings. I probably would have had a total meltdown if she had finished and it didn't fit. But it did.

(Photo by Meredith Bacon)

The Veil:
It took me a while to settle on an idea for a veil. I found a picture online of something I wanted, but never found it anywhere else. So, the week before the wedding, Nick and I made my veil. Nick should be credited with most of it. I had the idea, he made it reality.
For the veil, we took leftover tulle from my dress and stitched it to elastic in the back. We added a little bit more tulle to cover the elastic. Then, we stitched on a piece of lace that came from my mom's wedding dress. I love how it turned out.

(Photos by Meredith Bacon and Bryce Hamilton, respectively)

The Shoes:
Since I bought my first pair of TOMS back in 2008, I have known I wanted to wear a pair of them in my wedding. I am not a huge shoe person, and I wanted to be comfortable. Nick is also a TOMS lover, so that worked out well. His first gift to me was actually a pair of TOMS that he splatter painted himself. 
After a lot of online perusing, Nick and I both decided to order Cordones to wear for the wedding.

(Photo by Meredith Bacon)

That's about it for my attire! Stay tuned for more wedding reflections!

The wedding: Paper

To start, I figured it would be appropriate to begin with the save the dates, invitations, programs, etc. We made a very conscious effort to make these things simple and personal. And also cheap.

Save The Dates

My roommate, Rachel, gave me her secret for save the dates, and I am so so grateful. We used vistaprint.com to create our save the date post cards. Vistaprint always has sales going on. And when I say always, I mean always. We got 200 postcards for free. All we had to pay was shipping! While I had always really liked the idea of magnet save the dates, I did not like the price. Not only were these free but still of good quality, but sending them out was cheaper too, since we only needed to buy post card stamps. I highly recommend this to any bride who is looking for a bargain. 

Wedding Invitations

 Invitations took a little more work. I had something envisioned, but was having trouble making it a reality. At first, I really wanted square invitations, but I decided against it, since it costs more to send square envelopes. I also really wanted these to be personal, not generic. I looked for packaged invitations, but never fell in love with any. So we decided to make our own.

My baby brother is an artist. He does lovely work, but is not too keen on drawing by request. So it took some bribing. He now has my iPod touch. But he did a lovely job. I created the invitation on Word, and then my lovely hubby to be printed them out on a cream/tan colored resume paper. And then we cropped. 

We decided to RSVP through email for a couple of reasons. First, it saves paper. Second, it saves money. 

I found some lovely envelopes at an office supply store that happened to be discounted. Oh my, was there much rejoicing that day. So finally we stuffed, sealed, stamped, and sent those suckers out. 

Bridesmaid Brunch Invitations

I asked my other little brother to create an invitation that I could send out to my wedding party for our Friday morning get together. He is talented, too. 

Rehearsal Coffee Invitations

I asked the same little brother to do a rehearsal invitation, as well. These were also printed onto cream resume paper and then cropped. (Personal addresses have been blurred... it didn't actually look like that. ha)

 Programs

Personally, I find programs to be a waste of paper. Most people don't save them, so hundreds of papers get thrown out after the wedding. So, I decided to do something different. Instead of handing out programs, we made a slideshow. Everyone involved, including musicians and photographers were included. I put their full names, how we knew them, their role in the wedding, and then a couple of pictures.  The slideshow ran on a loop for thirty minutes before the wedding actually began. I never saw it while it was going, but I heard it served its purpose. 

Well, I think that just about covers everything in this category. I wish we had kept all of the prices we spent on everything so I could know exactly, but we didn't. But for all paper products of this nature, I would say that we spent less than $200. Which isn't half bad.

The wedding: Introduction

I am going to start a series on our wedding! I am really excited about this, and I hope our lovely readers will enjoy reading about our day!

The entire wedding was basically a giant diy project, which was super fun and also super cheap. :) I hope that perhaps these "notes" can be a service to others planning weddings. Or, at least, it will be a nice way for me to look back on our wedding day.

As a preview, some pictures.

 (photo by Meredith Bacon)

 (photo by Meredith Bacon)

 (photo by Meredith Bacon)

 (photo by Meredith Bacon)

(photo by Meredith Bacon)

 (photo by Bryce Hamilton)

 (photo by Bryce Hamilton)

(photo by Bryce Hamilton)

Can't wait to share more!