...wedding reception: how we brought the outdoors inside...

In case you need to catch up...we talked about settling on our reception venue  here, here, and here.

All along, DG and I really loved the idea of an outdoor reception, but we did NOT love the risk.  Considering the 500-year flood happened ON OUR WEDDING DAY…we are really glad we came up with this lovely plan B. In the end...though we were  inside and still dry...we still achieved the feel of a late-night outdoor dinner party...or something.  (Yard games and all.)

We basically dreamed up this space in our heads, called in  A LOT of favors, lit the place up and got what you’ll see here.  Let’s start at the beginning….

This is what the arena at Belmont’s Curb Event Center looks like on a normal day.

And here’s an average dinner setup.

And here’s what we did...

Day one of setup was mostly just building the space. The floor was covered and the frame of truss to hang the curtain was flown.  Lighting and sound were hung...you know...normal wedding stuff. :)

I wish I had been more diligent about taking pictures of the progression because, well, Mom's photography....not that great.  (Sorry Mom! But it's true!)  But maybe you'll get the idea...

Here the curtain is being tied on to the frame, but we haven't flown it yet.  

Dad's working hard on putting our lanterns together...looking thrilled to be doing so.  (We'll get to exactly how we made them in a post coming soon!)

Here Dad and I are working on making four GIANT pseudo-lanterns out of these 55-gallon oil drums.  We're pretty hardcore if you haven't noticed.  (Also, this was pretty much my standard uniform for that entire week. Yoga pants all the way.)

In this one you can see we've hung everything where it belongs and our lanterns are suspended over an empty room...

Soon we put the brother and sisters-in-law to work covering our tables in kraft paper.  We owe them big.  They were awesome!

Obviously there are a lot of details that I'll show you in coming posts...but here's the basic finished product!! It was a lot of work, but oh-so worth it!  Will is one talented guy, but I really just don't think a photo can do it justice.

More details to come!  Big thanks to Will at Will Knowles Weddings for all the real pictures!

...ceremony details: custom built decor...

Though DG and I LOVED the look and feel of Edgefield Baptist Church in East Nashville, we had a few concerns about the space.   As you can see, there’s some really obvious gold lettering over the baptismal area.  We weren't really feelin' it, but we set out to find a solution.  The people at Edgefield were so so easy to work with, and I their wedding policies are some of the most reasonable I encountered.  That being said, they understandably have policies in place to protect the integrity of the building itself. 

We were not allowed to fix anything to the walls, no tacking things to pews, etc., so we did some brainstorming to come up with a solution.  We talked about renting columns of some kind, but we only found tacky white plastic columns or black wooden ones that were far too contemporary for our theme.  We talked about building some, but it seemed that was too big an undertaking.  Ultimately, we settled on a strategy that was two-fold.  First, we wanted to ensure our guests didn’t miss the meaning in all of the lyrics and scripture in our ceremony, so we had the friend who designed our website design content to project onto the screen.  This covered most of the lettering.  It was mostly just ambiant, abstract color and the text. Unfortunatly it wasn’t really captured in the photos, but it worked well and was both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Our other objective was simply to give our guests a focal point.  Something nice to look at.  We discussed a variety of options, and finally settled on a cross.  After a series of drafts for this project, here’s what we did.  We bought a four by eight foot piece of plywood and some simple decorative molding.  My dad and I spent an evening sometime last March measuring and cutting the moldings to fit.  The following morning my mom and I stained it to match the woodwork in the church.  Once it was dry, Dad and I assembled the entire piece.  I wish I had pictures of the whole step by step, but of course, at the time, I was more concerned with completing the project than documenting it.  We purchased this wrought iron cross for something like $10 at Hobby Lobby and sprayed it gold then mounted it in the center.  Dad used fishing line to support it at the church, and when it was all put together, it provided the perfect backdrop for our ceremony.  All in all, we probably spent about $50 or $60 on the project.  By far one of our best decisions, in my opinion!  What do you think of our finished product??

Just goes to show you that a little ingenuity can go a really, really long way!  Have any of you other brides had friends or family custom build pieces for your wedding?

...DIY aisle runner...

DG and I have pretty much been managing our wedding like a corporation.  Everything is a branding opportunity, and we are a-ok with that.  To that end, we thought it'd be nice to incorporate our monogram into the ceremony.  The aisle runner seemed like a really appropriate place to do that, so we looked into having a custom runner made.  Sounded like a great idea until I realized that we'd spend anywhere from $100-$300 to do it.  No. Thank you. 

I thought about it for about 30 seconds before I decided I was fully capable of doing it myself!  It took a little time, but I think the money we saved was well worth it!  I purchased the runner itself online for about $20 and bought our four shades of acrylic paint from Michael's for $0.69 a piece.  I like $25 a lot better than $300...and I'm sure you do too.  So I thought I'd share.  Here's what we did...

Step 1:
I utilized DG's mad skills to project the image onto the runner, which we'd taped to the wall. We had access to a video projector, so that's how we chose to do it, but you could go old-school and do it with an overhead projector. You could also achieve the same result if you printed the image onto multiple sheets like a poster (I think you can do this in MS Publisher, maybe even in Word.) which you could trace. Most runners are pretty sheer, so as long as you fix your poster to whatever surface you're working on so it doesn't wiggle, you should be good to go.

Step 2:

I had a fine point Sharpie and traced away, hoping I was at least getting close.

Step 3:

We took a second to admire our handiwork.  I wasn't too concerned about the imperfections because I knew I could smooth it all out when I started painting.  Plus, it's on the floor at a distance.  It's not like our guests are going to be analyzing it in detail.

Step 4:

I spent somewhere between three and four hours watching TV and painting over the weekend (in my PJ's...what's weird?).  I was surprised that it went pretty much according to plan.

Step 5:
I laid it out and let it dry for the rest of the day before I rolled it back up to store until the wedding.

When it was all said and done, I was pretty pleased.  In case any of you are considering taking on this project, here are a couple of lessons learned:

• I suspected that acrylic paint would work well, and it did, but you really do have to lay it on thick, and in some cases, two coats would probably be best.  If I'd had the energy, I'd probably have done two coats on the entire thing, but I just don't care that much.
• The paint will definitely bleed through the fabric, so make sure you're working on a drop cloth or something.  I sort of anticipated that it would bleed, so I was prepared....but let me also add, if you do not move the runner while your paint is still wet, it will dry and adhere to whatever surface is underneath.  I did a major portion of the painting Friday night and was disappointed the next morning to discover that I had to peel the runner off of the sheet I'd been working on.  It's thin, so it tore in a couple of places, but I was able to patch it up with some packing tape from behind and an extra layer of paint on top.  It just would have worked out better if I'd have moved the runner to another position to let it dry completely.  Don't make the same mistake.
• Finally, you'll see in the corner there where I dropped my paintbrush.  Do not drop your paintbrush.  I got lucky in that I dropped it close to the edge, where we'd already planned to crop the runner because the end was torn in shipping.  The moral of the story is, this is sort of a one chance kind of thing.  If I had really screwed it up, we would have had to chop it off and start again from step one, so be careful!

...veil fascination...

The other day DG asked me if I'd blogged recently.  I'm taking it on good faith that he probably doesn't read the blog all that often, so I'm safe to talk about my wedding day look at least a little.  (If you happen to be reading on this particular day and don't want to spoil any surprises, avert your eyes.)

Our wedding website has pointed all of our guests to this blog, so I have been hesitant to spill all my secrets about the wedding, but I guess there are a few harmless details I can share. 

Overly confident (as usual) in my ability to do things on my own, I've decided to craft my own little hairpiece, fascinator situation.  I've gathered a few elements together and plan on working it out while DG's away next weekend.  So in the meantime, let's study the inspiration.

From The Headband Shoppe on Etsy

By Portobello on Etsy

By VieModerne on Etsy

Even found a couple of tutorials on Nonpareil Magazine, a free and fabulous online DIY wedding magazine...

 Get the tutorial here.

I plan to try my hand at making my own this weekend, so we'll see how it goes!

…our electronic save the dates: a virtual reality…

We sent our Save the Dates back in December, so I'm a little behind in blogging about them... but what else is new???

I originally talked about our decision to go green/cheap/digital with our STD's and invitations here. This is a decision I absolutely do not regret. The amount of money we saved and the waste we managed to avoid by making this choice was well worth the very few complaints we received from guests who felt confused or inconvenienced by our email delivery. More often, we heard rave reviews from fellow tech-savvy and/or environmentally conscious friends.

All that being said, let me point out that this option is not necessarily a good fit for every couple. There is some somewhat meticulous maintenance and follow-up to do in order to pull it off, but thanks to a post on Elizabeth Anne Designs Weddings, I found a great resource which made all of that work pretty easy. My fellow type-A personalities will appreciate this. {Hypothetically speaking, does one classify as type-A if they manage the entire process of planning a wedding in a 13 (and counting!) sheet Excel workbook complete with pivot tables, color coding, and complex formulas?} Anyway, back to my story. I used MailChimp, a free email marketing service (up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails per month), to send and track all of our STD's. This website is genius. First of all, these people are clever, from the branding down to the instructions, it's all very tongue-in-cheek. Makes you feel like you're talking to your socially-awkward, yet adorable, IT guy-friend. I was won over from the start. We had been collecting email addresses for a while, which I obviously kept track of in my trusty spreadsheet...uh, hypothetically, I mean, I could have. Importing the guest list was as simple as a little copy and paste action.

Once the list was set up, I created our "campaign" in which we basically just designed the email and pushed send. Simple as that. As soon as guests began opening and reading and clicking, MailChimp was reporting open statistics and bounces and all sorts of helpful things, which gave us the ability to make sure no one got left out.

So enough of the technical stuff. Here's what we did….

Inspired by the amazing invitation I'd found so long ago, I wrote up the story of me and DG from way back when in a short and sweet little format. Once again our generous and talented groomsman/graphic designer worked it out. (Click the image to see it up close.)

Then I created my email campaign in MailChimp which lead our guests to our wedding website, where the PDF of our Save the Date was hosted.

(Photos by Will Knowles)

We learned a couple lessons about the process along the way, which came in handy when we got ready to send out our invitations. If, by chance, you're considering sending your STD's or invitations via email and you'd like to know more, leave me a comment or shoot me an email and I'd be happy to answer questions or give you some tips. All in all, this worked out really well for us and saved a LOT of money. J

More on our website and invitations coming soon!