DIY, Real Weddings

29.11.2010

I’m back, and as promised with part 2 of this mornings amazing wedding. The wedding moves onto some beautiful portraits and a gorgeous reception, full of DIY personal details in a stunning green and black colour scheme.

Jill and Gareth put so much effort into their big day and it truly pays off.

Thanks again to the wonderful Marianne Taylor Photography for letting me share her work today.

Enjoy.

Our wedding car was our friend’s old red VW Beetle. He loves that car, and we were so happy that he let us use it and was our driver!

We actually changed our wedding date so that we could have our wedding breakfast and reception at Kilworth House Hotel. It was very important that we picked a venue that didn’t require a lot of decorating since we were planning the wedding abroad, and Kilworth’s Orangery was absolutely stunning in the sunlight!

The Details + Décor….

We spent a lot of time coming up with our table decorations. We wanted to incorporate Washington, DC into the reception since it’s where we met and still live, so we came up with a list of popular sites in DC for our table names. Gareth went around DC and took all of the pictures for our tables. I designed the menus and escort cards, and Gareth and I both made the green topiary balls (made from green felt circles), the paper flower bouquets (made from black and white pictures), and drawing pins (cut from an old version of The Princess Bride book).

To make each table a bit more personal, we added favours that were specific to each table, so Chinatown had chopsticks and fortune cookies, The Library of Congress had burning bookmarks, and Union Station had luggage tags, etc. It was a lot of fun coming up with the favours, even though we only had three weeks to figure it out and have everything shipped!

For our guestbook we had all of our guests have a mini instant photo taken of them, which they then pasted in a book and wrote next to. It was so fun to look at the messages and seeing people having such fun at our wedding.

For the place cards, I used to love Jones Soda when I was growing up, and I thought it would add a great pop of colour to the tables. We spent quite a long time soaking off the original labels so that we could add our own, which were designed by etsy.com vendor TheButterShop. They had Union Jack and American flags at the top, and I loved that small detail since that is essentially us!

The Cake…

It wasn’t what we wanted at all. Our cake toppers were pictures of Gareth and myself as small children.

Ups and Down’s on the day…

The entire day was an up! It was honestly the best day of our lives, and we have absolutely no regrets about how everything went. The only thing that I was concerned about was that nobody would dance in the evening, and I think that everyone was on the dance floor by the time the night ended!

The one time that I had a bit of a moment was when the glow sticks were passed out much earlier than they were supposed to be, so all of our first dance pictures have people looking crazy in the background. I guess that just adds to the memories of the day, though! And those pictures are pretty hilarious.

Advice for other couples…

Remember why you’re planning the wedding. It might seem like a lot to handle, but it will so be worth it to have all of our friends and family there for you. Add those personal details!

The Honeymoon….

We actually planned our honeymoon quite early since we decided to set up a honeymoon registry. We went to Venice and Rome, and it was absolutely perfect. We took mini instant pictures of us whenever we did something that was purchased for us on our registry, and we included those photos in our thank you notes to whichever guest gave us that memory. I think it was a great personal touch that hopefully our guests enjoy receiving.

Thanks so much to Jill and Gareth for sharing their day with {www} today.

Credit where credit’s due…

Dress — Alfred Angelo

Suit - DKNY

Charm shoes — Kate Spade

Earrings — J Crew

Photographer — Marianne Taylor Photography

Etsy -  – kottonkandy52 (button bouquet), TheButterShop (soda labels), xoxoDesigns (hair flower), joyousillusions (veil), ZoeAndDoyle (groom’ s ring), LaPetiteBoheme (oui charm on bouquet), lilafrances (heart hanger)

Reception Venue — Kilworth House

Church — Rothwell Holy Trinity

Super 8 videographer — Mark W Brown

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Tags: Black, Green, Real Weddings

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