For the rest of the week, until our anniversary on Saturday, I'll be blogging about all things wedding. Maybe these posts will provide some inspiration for another bride-to-be, or maybe they'll just be interesting to those who like wedding details. I originally started this blog to chronicle the wedding planning process, but it just didn't pan out that way. I'm over a year late with these posts, so I better get to blogging!
If I had to have one big takeaway from all of my wedding posts, it would be this:
Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to follow the rules.
(1) The ceremony had to feel intimate; and
(2) We had to create a festive environment so our guests would mingle.
Also, because I hadn't planned on a full-blown wedding we added a third requirement:
(3) It had to be affordable.
I think we accomplished all three of these. Shawn and let the phrase “modern, yet vintage,” guide us in our planning. We kept many classic wedding traditions and details, but added a few fun and unique elements of our own. This was a true DIY wedding. By doing a lot of the crafting and legwork, I was able to save money and splurge in the areas that gave the day such an elegant feel. My mother, family members and I made most of the décor including the place cards, out-of-town bags, wedding favors, and headpieces for the flower girl and for me. I'll highlight a few of the DIY and budget-friendly ideas we used in this post.
Because we live in the DC Metro area, we wanted to have a wedding that
celebrated the place where we met and fell in love. I also knew that many of my family and
friends would enjoy visiting Washington, DC and having a true city
experience. Since our wedding ended up being on a
Friday evening, many of them took the opportunity to enjoy our Nation’s Capital
over the weekend.
We tied the knot at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC.
We did not have a theme for the wedding, per se. Instead, we tried to think of things that
would be meaningful and symbolic to us. The Carnegie is really special because of its rotunda.
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This pic is great, but still does it no justice. |
Most people who get married there opt to get married in this space, and some of them choose to use circular seating. The idea of being
married in a circle, surrounded with the love and support from our family and
friends, served as inspiration. As for wedding colors, I chose a metallic color palette, representing special years in marriage – copper for 7 years, silver for 25, and gold for 50 and used black accents.
Keeping all of this in mind, We set up our wedding website and we ordered our save the dates:
Like I said, staying within our budget was super important, so we used postcards that I made on Vistaprint.com. The postcard design gave me the chance to show off our pics from my surprise engagement. And then on one of the rainiest days of 2011, we mailed our save the dates:
Life went back to normal for a little while. Hubs and I moved in together to save money for the wedding - yes, saints, we shacked up ;). Then the wedding planning got super duper real toward late 2011. I will admit I put school on the back burner for a bit because I turned into a one-woman planning machine.
It was finally time to find some invitations. I searched high and low, had my feelings hurt at a high-end stationary store, and scoured the internet for what seemed like months. And then I found The One. Well, it was The One once I got done redesigning it.
Given the fact that I'm a former high school math teacher who taught Geometry for years and that the rotunda was the focal point of the Carnegie, I ran with the circle idea. After
some searching on Google, I ran across the poem “Marriage Surrounds Two People
in the Circle of Its Love.” We decided to use this line on our invitations. My cousin ended up reading it at the wedding, too. I also incorporated circles into our invites, which were designed by an amazing vendor (and fellow Ph.D. student) on Etsy.com, which is like, the BEST website ever for buying cool wedding stuff. After about 40 iterations, Sophia at All That Jazz created these lovelies just for us. Here's a closer look:
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The same company also made our lovely wedding programs that are in the background. |
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She uses this pic on her website!!! |
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Isn't this cool?!? |
So that's the story of our wedding theme, location, and invites, but there's so much more to tell. In my next post, I'll talk about our wedding favors and welcome bags - touches that helped to make our wedding all our own.
Until next time . . . hang on! There are more wedding posts on the way!
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