What a ride it's been!

Happy first anniversary to us! I can hardly believe it. A year ago today we were nearing the end of one heck of a rollercoaster ride. It was such a special day - literally everything we had hoped and planned for - and such a great way to build the foundation for the rest of our lives together. I'm a detail-oriented person, so my memories of the day still include some of the DIY details of the day, but I know as time passes and the memory is more distant, what I'll remember most are the emotions I had and the faces of loved ones all around us. How I cried seeing Matt for the first look that morning, how anxious I felt to stand in the entryway of the church before walking down the aisle, how surreal it felt hearing parts of the mass and realizing it was Our Wedding not just a regular Sunday service. How we both grinned from ear to ear walking back down the aisle, standing in the chilly air to take pictures outside, mingling with our guests at cocktail hour, savoring the quality time with our wedding party before our entrances, dancing all night long surrounded by all of the special people in our lives. All wonderful memories that warm my heart whenever I think of them. 

I can't believe that I've been writing in this space for over two years. Back when I was writing that first post, I had no idea how much fun I would have, how much work it would be or how many friends and family would read along. I certainly didn't expect to make a handful of blog friends from all over the country. I'm so grateful that I had this outlet during all of the stressful planning stages and countless decisions. Thank you to all of you who followed us on this journey. 

You may not have noticed but I rushed to finish all of the recaps of our wedding day so that they'd be done before our first anniversary. I wanted to be able to know that all our DIY details and decisions were documented for anyone who was interested. If you ever need to reference the recaps quickly, I put them under the Our Wedding page in order. 

Back in January 2010, I read very few blogs regularly and thought it would be a nice way to keep our family updated on any wedding decisions we made so that we would keep everyone in the loop and avoid having the same conversations over and over again with different people. Privacy never really crossed my mind because my initial intended audience had been just family and close friends. Using our last name in the blog title (which I thought was genius!) and giving a lot of personal details was something I didn't think that much about. 

However, in a few short(!!) months, there will be a new member of our family and I'd like to start a fresh blog with a few less personal details. I still want to be able to share updates with family and friends but I don't necessarily want it tied to everything we've shared here. So this will be my last post here and I've created a new site where I hope to share our story as a young family with a new addition. If you're interested in following along, we'd be happy to have you! Please get in touch with me over the next week (it's not actually up and ready yet; give me a few days) so I can tell you the new URL (I won't be posting it here to keep them separate). If you're an internet friend and want to stick around, leave a comment and I'll know how to get a hold of you. If you read along for the wedding updates and aren't interested in what comes next for us, no hard feelings, we won't take it personally! :)

*All photos by the fabulous Leah LaRiccia Photography (who sent us our very first anniversary card, so sweet!)

Dancing the night away

Once the scheduled events were over and the cake was cut, the dancing part of the reception was all that was left. I was so excited for this - I love to dance at weddings and after all we went through to find the band, I knew it was going to be awesome. The band did NOT disappoint - we still get comments on them - they were amazing. There are some specific songs that stand out in my memory but most of it I just remember dancing around and moving from group to group of people. The dance floor was completely packed and near the end of the night, the hardwood floor was actually bouncing up and down from everyone dancing (clearly I did not need to worry about whether or not people would have a good time).

 Packed dance floor - looks like one of the slower songs (there were only a few)

 Busy at the bar

Dancing with my high school friends.

 Love the faces captured mid-sing-a-long . 

  

 Dancing with my grandmother.

One last small detail we had for our guests was a late night snack. We had been to a wedding before where there was a late night buffet of pasta and chicken fingers and it stood out in our mind as being absolutely genius. While our venue did offer options like that, it was out of budget for us. We still wanted to do something though, so we ordered individual sized bags of pretzels and peanuts from Dollar Tree to put out. Of course I couldn't help myself to decorate them, so we put them in little yellow paper bags, folded the top and sealed with a plain round white label. Then we stamped our faces on the white label (the stamp that we used on our thank you card envelopes and our ceremony programs). 

The reception was everything we hoped it would be - an amazing dance party with all of our loved ones. I had the time of my life, dancing to great music and turning around to see familiar faces everywhere I looked. It is indescribable to be surrounded by so much love and joy directed at you. This last picture is one of my favorites from the dancing set of images. It sums up so much about that part of the day - I'm staring with love at my brand new husband (who is fidgeting with his brand new wedding ring), my face has an enormous grin on it, I'm dancing with friends and having the time of my life, right next to my husband.
The reception also marked a metaphorical sigh of relief. All of the things we had to do, the planning, the researching, the budgeting, it was all behind us. We were MARRIED! The calm that washed over me was something I had been waiting for. What surprised me was that although I probably could've danced until the next morning with our family and friends, once the reception was over, I was fine with it. I was ready to get to bed, to have this day behind us, and to start the rest of our (married) lives together tomorrow. 

The next day our parents had graciously hosted a brunch for guests to enjoy so we made our way to that after waking up. It was nice to see everyone and talk about the day's events, but what I really enjoyed was driving home after and walking into our condo knowing we were husband and wife. It was nice to have that feeling of a "new normal" in our every day setting - if only for a day before we jetted off to a wonderful 10-day honeymoon in paradise.

Reception Details: Tabletop

A lot of different elements came together on our dinner tables. We created our table numbers, a part of our centerpieces, and menu cards. There were also favors at each place setting with tags that we designed. 

For the centerpieces, to try and cut down on the flower expense, we thought a grouping would be more cost effective - a candle and two small bud-sized vases. I ordered glass cylinders from the Dollar Store and taped a strip of yellow/gray paper to its middle and tied it with yellow/white twine. Then we added pillar candles to each. The bud vases were a combination of a small glass jam jar provided by our florist and an IKEA FARM vase (small and white and not sold anymore I don't think). 

Excuse the crappy phone picture [personal].

The table number was an IKEA Tolsby frame (open on both sides). We used the same yellow and gray paper that was used in our escort flag display to back it and removed the plastic. Actually we even coordinated so that if you were seated at Table 3, your escort flags were yellow and the table number backing was yellow (but I doubt anyone noticed except us).

One of my favorite things was our menu / thank you card at each place setting. After seeing the below image in a wedding feature on Once Wed, I used it as inspiration to carry our style of mixing fun fonts from our invitations to each place setting at the table.

[image source]

I designed them on my computer and we had them printed the weekend before the wedding at Staples (along with the ceremony programs). The top half is the dinner menu and the bottom half is a message to our guests to thank them for being the special people in our lives. We ordered mini clothespins to have them clipped to the napkin just like the inspiration image.

The last thing at each place setting was a favor. We wrestled with favors for a while - most non-edible favors tend to go unused and get tossed eventually. We ended up finding a decent price on buying stainless steel water bottles in bulk. Then we tied a tag to each bottle that I designed and ordered through Moo (they were the business card size). You may remember we used the same company to print small tags for our invitations, and our thank you cards. The cards were double-sided. The side shown in the image below had a picture from our engagement session with our photographer, and a message to our guests to ask them to upload any pictures they personally took of our wedding to a Picasa web album. On the back, we tied in the reasoning behind the stainless steel water bottles - as an eco-friendly favor. We strive to use reusable bottles and bags ourselves and wanted to share that "green" mentality with our guests. We started by using carbonfund.org to estimate the carbon emissions from our wedding day and then made a donation to "offset" that. We put a message on the back of the tag explaining this to our guests. 

* All photos by Leah LaRiccia Photography unless otherwise noted.

Reception Details: Banners and Poms, Oh My!

These three DIY projects were some of my favorites to create and were all pretty easy and straightforward to make. Some had a bigger influence on the reception space than others but I'm glad that they were all present, showing our hard work and personality into the reception space.

First up, yarn poms strung together as a garland. These are really simple once you get the hang of it - from this blog post, I learned that there's actually a contraption you can buy to help you make them. There are a few tutorials scattered on-line that will show you how to create them without buying the helpers, but for me, it was a no-brainer to get them. Creating them is kind of tedious - it's a repetitive motion that takes a bit of time, but I found it soothing during the crazies of wedding planning. Anyway, we strung them on a a piece of yarn to create a garland and used it to decorate the cake table. A small touch that probably went unnoticed to most, but I was happy to have this detail. And as a bonus - I still have the pom maker tools, so I'm thinking of working some poms into a certain someone's baby room.

Next up is the mini paper bunting that hung around the Just Married banner. I had a LOT of gray/yellow paper from Paper Source and saw this blog post where she created this mini bunting easily and cheaply. I loved it and ordered my own diamond paper punch. I created a bunch of the bunting on my own and then a few days before the wedding realized I need a lot more to make it work with the Just Married banner...which lead to Matt and his brother hovered over our living room coffee table trying to assembly line the paper bunting one night (easily one of my wedding week favorite memories). Again, a small detail with minimal impact but I'm glad we had it.

Lastly, an easy-to-make decoration that makes a big statement: tissue paper poms. Sometimes referred to as Mexican tissue paper flowers, you've probably made some version of this without knowing it. It's just paper, folded accordion-style (back and forth) and then gently spread open - very easy, and there are tutorials all over the internet. For weddings, they are typically used like we did - strung along fishing line and hung over a space (or I've seen them as pew decorations). You can actually order them pre-folded off Etsy, but that's actually the easy part. Gently opening all the folds without ripping the paper is the difficult part. We had help in the final week leading up to the wedding to finish enough of these to cover the dance floor (and we are forever grateful to those helpers!). Every time I see them in the background of a reception picture, I smile. These pictures below couldn't be from anyone's wedding at that venue - just ours.

Close ups.

Love their presence in our first dance pictures.

And these, taken from above, in the lofted space, looking down.

Hanging over our packed dance floor.

* All photos by Leah LaRiccia Photography unless otherwise noted.

Reception Details: Entryway

Right when the guests filed into the reception space from the cocktail hour, they saw our escort card display.  We followed this tutorial on Martha Stewart Weddings. I thought the flag idea fit perfectly in with the rest of our decorations for the day. It's essentially stacked pieces of foam board with toothpicks stuck in. Matt really took the lead on this and had the spacing for the toothpicks specified down to a measurement. He even used graph paper to plan it out before starting (it was so cute). 

picture from Martha Stewart Weddings

 We had two tiered foam board displays next to each other to fit all the guests.

I cut decorative gray/yellow paper from Paper Source with a scalloped border to hide the edging of the foam board. The gray and yellow paper that became the flags was also from Paper Source and luckily had no issues printing directly on it with our home printer. We had some initial issues gluing the paper flag to the toothpick (the paper kept wanting to unroll) but they held up enough for those few days.
Also in the entryway before reaching the dinner tables was our guest book. We paid for Thrilled For You software and transported our pwn iMac to the venue. The software allows guests to walk up to the computer and type in their name and record a message using the built-in camera. This is one of those decisions that I found on-line one day and was sort of on the fence about but Matt had no hesitations and I'm so happy we went with it. We have a ton of video clips from friends and family that day recording messages of congratulations and well wishes. Recordings from friends became slightly less and less relevant (and increasingly hilarious) as the night went on. Some day I have a grand plan to edit a bunch of them together. My regrets about it and advice for anyone considering it would be two things: make sure everyone knows about it (a lot of people didn't notice it and didn't leave messages) and provide a light. Some of the late-night ones are harder to see because the room is darkened for dancing.

 We provided a small list of instructions for someone to get started recording, though it is fairly straightforward.

One of the most noticeable things about the reception space (besides the high ceilings and lofted space) is a large stone fireplace in one corner of the room. It is by the entryway, right after guests picked up their escort card-flag and I knew we would personalize it for the wedding. 

Generic picture from one of our visits showing the fireplace in the back.

Here is a collage showing some different angles of the fireplace for our wedding. We had two of our engagement pictures framed and displayed, and wedding pictures of all of our grandparents and both sets of parents. We also had some candles and small vases of flowers, and a large Y and S that we had displayed in our house (kind of like these).
What I am most proud of in this display, though, are our memorial candles. We had ordered tall cylinder vases for the table centerpieces and had several left over. They are so easy to make but look much more complicated and expensive than they are. We got a ton of feedback on them after the fact. It's just sheets of vellum (frosted-looking paper) fed through any old printer (I found lots of examples on-line to use for the layout). I designed them to have the pictures of our deceased loved ones and their names and dates. Then we just taped them around the glass cylinder and popped in a candle.

Inside the fireplace, the venue recommended using some large candles and a sheet so we picked up those items at IKEA one day. Easy peasy.

* All photos by Leah LaRiccia Photography unless otherwise noted.