Wedding anniversary

Since we are coming up on the four year anniversary of the wedding of me and my love, I thought I'd write a post about it.  The wedding.  As far as the decorations and stuff goes, it was mainly a DIY wedding and I am really happy with how everything turned out.  We didn't make our own food or clothing or anything like that, but we did create a lot of things ourselves and with the help of some family and friends, from the floral to the table numbers and the ceremony decorations.  We were trying to stay within a budget but also, I am kind of a control freak and I really had a vision of how I wanted everything to look.  Once I finally decided on color scheme and style, that is.  The decor planning stage went through a few iterations: first I really wanted lime green mums and pink roses, them I thought about nice blues and purples like hydrangeas and hyacinth, then changed it to bright colors again with pops of colorful pink, orange and yellow roses.  But ultimately, I decided on the beautiful reds, yellows and oranges of fall colors since it was November and we didn't want to spend a fortune on out of season flowers.  Had it been summer, I totally would have loaded up on the beautiful dahlia bouquets from Pike Place Market, but since it was late fall, they were not available.  The flower situation was the biggest deal.  I wanted to save money but have lots of roses.  I wasn't able to purchase them wholesale, so I went about researching the next most economical option.  I found that I could buy flowers at Costco in bulk for a pretty reasonable price per stem.  However, after talking with the company that supplies their roses, I found out that around holidays (our wedding was just days before thanksgiving), we wouldn't be able to order red roses in bulk.  Seriously?  Grrrr, so I had to look elsewhere.  On a whim I talked to the floral person at a Safeway near me, and they would be able to order what I needed and it would be less per stem than Costco!  Wooohoooo!  I knew exactly what I wanted, square vases with a big banana leaf folded up around the inside with lots of red and orange roses and some bear grass criss crossing over the top of the flowers.  I had gotten inspiration from several different ideas that I liked and pieced together.  The floral lady helped me order all the flowers, leaves and bear grass and even showed me the best way to arrange it all in the vase with some samples at the store.  She was amazingly helpful.  Two days before the wedding, my soon to be father in law and hubby picked up the hundreds of roses, put them in buckets of water, de-thorned them and dropped them off at my apartment for assembly.  The day before the wedding, with the help of some friends and family, we had an assembly line of centerpiece, boutonnière, and ceremony decor making including my bridal bouquet.  It was actually a lot of fun, and with the ten of us involved it didn't take as long as I feared that it would.  The hardest part was transferring them to the hotel for the ceremony and reception and miraculously we only broke one vase.  I also wanted tall vases down the sides of the aisle that held a a cluster of submerged roses with floating candles on top.  It took us a minute to figure out how to keep it altogether and keep the roses submerged but I had read that you can keep the flowers from floating using sinkers (the kind for fishing).  My aunt added flowers to the cake and my super talented cousin and a few friends decorated the ceremony archway thingy perfectly.  I had printed out a few different designs for inspiration but since I was getting ready to be a bride, they put it together and did such an amazing job, better than the inspiration pictures.   I was thrilled with the result.  Looking back now, I would have added more to the table centerpieces, perhaps small containers filled with roses clustered around the square centerpieces and more candles, but we kept it simple.  My friend helped with the card box, table numbers and escort cards, which turned out perfect.  I had a candy table with little scoops and bags so people could take candy home as their favor.  We were able to get our DJ to provide us with up lights, along with the set up of them for ceremony and reception.  He didn't have enough so had to end up picking up a few more for us.  My sister in law put together the ceremony programs and hubs and I printed and cut them.  Hubby and I picked out prayers and writings for the ceremony and consulted with one of our friends who agreed to compile everything together and be the "MC" for the ceremony (the Bahai faith doesn't have clergy so we didn't have a pastor or minister officiating the ceremony).  Lucky for us, we had many amazing friends and family that helped us pull off the wedding, and it was so wonderful!  Well, enough of the words, here are some pictures....ah memories.  

Here are some pics of my bouquet.  My amazingly talented cousin put it together.  I had wanted bear grass strung with crystal beads and then criss crossing over the flowers, but the bear grass was too thick to string the beads so my friend just ended up putting them on wire and then sticking them in the flowers which worked great.  We were able to thread about two beads onto the end of the bear grass, so we just let those ones hang down which was a cool effect.  And I wanted those big leafs to fold over around the outside of the bouquet.  Then we wrapped the stems with orange and pink ribbon.  Oh, and I also hung a bell from the bottom of the bouquet in honor of my grampa who is no longer with us, he loved and collected bells.

Here you can see some shots of the ceremony decorations.  I had a vision for what I wanted the archy thing to look like and my cousin and friends put it all together, using their imagination.  And I was stunned.  It was beautiful and more amazing than my inspiration photos.  They did such a wonderful job.

Here are some details of the rose submerged vases that lined the aisle, and some of the other ceremony decor detail:

              

We had a table outside of the ceremony room that had a framed engagement pic of us with a mat that people could sign, as the "guest book", and also had each of our parents' wedding pictures.

                                                                    

Our escort cards that my friend created:

              

She also made the table number cards, the candy table sign and these cute bride and groom signs:

              

We put together a sweets table so that people could grab a little organza bag and fill it with candy as their favor:

              

Our centerpieces that we asked people to take home with them so that we didn't get stuck with 20 square vases:

                                                                    

We reused the tall vases with submerged roses in the reception space, behind the cake.  And my aunt decorated the cake with roses:

            

And the lighting, the uplights that our photographer provided us with made a great ambiance.  Any celebration space looks awesome with fun lighting:

                                                       

Oh, and not that this is a DIY project, but just a fun thing, our friends arranged for some of the guests to line the entrance to the reception room and throw rose petals over us when we were announced.  It was a fun surprise:

 

So, that's a brief run through of the DIY stuff we did.  I really enjoyed our wedding, and am so happy to be married to my amazing hubby!