Themes and our (multiple personality) concept

It is trendy right now for weddings to have a theme.  Sometimes it's inspired by the location of the wedding (beach, winery, library), the couple's heritage (Mexican, Indian), the bride's sense of style (vintage, bohemian), the couple's interests (camping, traveling), or simply the season (fall, winter).  Mainstream wedsites Brides, Bridal Guide, and the Knot all have quizzes or filters that are designed to help people choose a style or a theme for their wedding (classic, modern, garden, rustic).  Even the nonconformists chose niche themes to express who they are as a couple (Victorian steampunk octopus).

Some of these themes lend themselves to gorgeous pictures, but it important to note that these themes, while meant to be a celebration of the couple's individuality, can actually distract from the couple and the sanctity of the day.  This became obvious to me when Lance and I went to a friend's wedding last year.  My friend was a no-muss, no-fuss Chinese bride, and her wedding was a traditional Chinese feast (as in, they eat 10 courses over 5 hours) in a Chinese hotel in Flushing.  She didn't choose centerpieces or decorations; the hotel provided different color balloons, traditional red linens, and a double happiness character backdrop.  Despite the fact that the wedding looked exactly like the other 4 weddings happening in the hotel at the same time, the focus of the wedding was always on the couple, rather than judging how well the decorations fit the theme.  Thus, I think it's important not to spend all of your energy cultivating your theme.

I am learning, though, that having a theme or a concept can help provided some direction in the endless sea of wedding choices.  For instance, you wouldn't want a heavy dress with a cathedral train at a beach wedding, it would just look odd.  It's nice to have things generally go together and produce a cohesive look.

Lance and I decided to try to describe our wedding style, and while we are on the same page, we found putting it into words incredibly difficult.  We know who we are, as individuals and as a couple, but it is difficult to summarize.  I think that's a symptom of our "living between worlds" (briefly, part city, part country, but it goes deeper than that).  We tried once, when we first moved in together, to describe a joint home decorating style (one thing that magazines tell you to think about when deciding "your" wedding style).  We decided that our couple decorating style was rustic-elegant-Shaker-Gothic-Western.  Figure that out.

We had an equally rough time putting our wedding style into words.  We like nature-inspired elegance (Pottery Barn calls it rustic-luxe) (think fur cover-ups and snow-like crystals on dresses rather than cowboy boots and burlap).  We will have wintry touches, but don't want our wedding to look like a glorified Christmas party (think baby's breath, which is reminiscent of snow, rather than actual snowflake patterns).  Lance calls the concept "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," after the Robert Frost poem.  I think that's fair, but we are also going to let the architecture of our church inspire our colors and the formality of the event (while not rustic, I wouldn't call Gothic* cathedrals urban, either).  Romantic, a little bit storybook, a reflection of nature, without edging over into princess.  (I really don't want people to get "princess" from our wedding.  I'm a little worried about that given the castle-like look of the church and a few other details.  :/ )  So, cathedral winter woods?

So far I think the choices we've made have worked well within our concept.  In the end, I'm hoping that if we just choose things we like, it will all come together.  That said, David Tutera managed to base the entire second draft of his show on brides with completely disjunct and confusing themes.  So, wish us luck!

*(Churches with spires, ribbed arches, quatrefoils, and stained glass, not angry teenagers in black eyeliner.)

Lights hung to resemble stars

Ring pillow leaf charm

Wedding Day Timeline

Every time we meet with a new wedding vendor, they ask us if we are working with a wedding planner.  You can almost see the tension leave their bodies when we say that we aren't.  Truthfully, I don't know why we would hire a planner.  I started looking at wedding websites in 2008, when the first of Lance's friends got married and I realized that I knew nothing about weddings, including etiquette (I was not one of those girls who grew up dreaming of my wedding).  Wedsites turned out to be a huge time sink, as weddings combine my love of pretty things and my love of organizing things, so at this point I've read more articles and seen more inspiration than most of our friends combined.  I think we'd be hard pressed to find a wedding planner who could tell me something that I couldn't find online.  St. Francis Xavier and the Cedars both provide on-site day-of coordinators, and our photographers offered to help us structure the in-between times.  Thus, we already have a rough outline of the day!

8:30                 Hair appointment 

10:30-11:45     Getting ready photos in the hotel suite

11:45-12:15     First look, couple photos

12:15-12:45     Some bridal party photos

1-2pm             Allowed to set up and access “getting ready” areas at St. Francis Xavier

1-1:30             Lunch with bridal party at St. Francis Xavier

2-3pm             Ceremony

3-3:30             Formal photos in the church, family photos

3:30                Photos nearby

4:40                Travel to reception

4:43                Sunset

5:00-10:00       Reception

Now all we need to do is fill in the holes for the bridal party and immediate family, so people don't feel like they are waiting around all day.  :)

Our Reception Site: The Cedars

I've mentioned before how we chose our church, but I haven't talked about the process we used to choose a reception venue.  And I do mean process.  Having decent food is one of our top priorities, so we scoured the internet for reception venues and caterers and checked all their reviews.  Thirty percent of Saint Louis wedding receptions are held in traditional reception halls, but we were open to different spaces, as long as they were in keeping with the formality we envisioned for the event.  We considered our church's hall, restaurants, hotels, lodges, dedicated banquet halls, historic mansions, museums, art galleries, and golf clubs.  We found over 110 locations in the area!

We knew we would need to seat around 200 guests at the reception, so we weeded out any place smaller than that--including all of the historic properties, which usually only accommodate around 100.  From there, we crossed off any that were outside of our budget.  That eliminated most of the hotels--particularly those with a view of the arch, which start around $75/plate (yikes!).  It also knocked out a local train station that I loved, which has an insanely beautiful and winter-perfect banquet hall with Gothic lanterns and stained glass windows in an old train barn, but honestly I wouldn't feel good about paying that much for a dinner even if we were made of money.  It just doesn't seem right given all the needy people in the world.

Gorgeous, though!

Finally, we could get to whether the space was actually pretty, whether other couples have given them positive reviews, and whether or not the food was actually good.  We had a handful of places left, so we decided to be a little creepy and drive by them to see if it was worth scheduling a site visit.  I'm actually really glad we decided to do that, because it ruled out two more places immediately.  One was a historic restaurant with ties to the local beer industry.  It was very poorly maintained, with paint falling off the building in long strips, and we didn't feel safe in that area even in the daylight.  The other was an "old world themed banquet hall."  That place looked fine, but as we drove down an alley to the parking lot, we noticed that the building next door was an abandoned glass industrial nightmare with machinery everywhere and meat hooks hanging from the ceiling.  Meat hooks.  It looked like a scene out of Lance's zombie game The Last of Us.  I was waiting for a serial killer with a chainsaw to jump out at any minute.  I can only imagine what our families would have said when they saw that! 

We decided to schedule site visits with two places that we really liked... and only one of them returned our phone calls and emails.  So, we went to look at the Cedars and hoped for the best.  We could not be more pleased!  The reception space, actually the hall of another Catholic church, seats up to 400 for dinner.  The first thing you see when you walk in the door is a (working!) fireplace, and chandeliers dot the ceiling inside.  It's the perfect space for winter--it even has a coat check!  We lucked out because the Cedars has been flying under the radar somehow; it has fantastic reviews on WeddingWire but hasn't shown up on bigger sites like The Knot yet.  We also liked that it didn't have any weird package deals (some places have "preferred vendors" that they require you to use for cakes, flowers, etc.), and that it has its own parking lot (not a given in the city).  The thing we like best of all, though, is the site coordinator, Sabrina.  She has been fantastic about answering questions and very flexible and enthusiastic with any specific ideas or requests we have.  We are so excited and lucky to have her on our team!

We scheduled another site visit over break to see what the space would look like set up for a wedding in December.  Pictures below!


The fireplace:

One of the 8-person tables.  We hate chair covers, so we were excited about these chairs, which will go with our black tablecloths:

 We get to choose linen colors.  Our napkins will probably be this silver color:

The dance floor and one of the chandeliers:

The stage with the blue uplighting we will probably use:

The hall has four doors leading to the foyer and hallway.  I was thinking of decorating them in some way, but now I think I might just leave them alone:

I think I'm going to throw some lights on those bushes outside:

Our website is live!

As you probably already know, our website is live!  I tried to finish the majority of it before we sent the save-the-dates.  Let me know if there is anything you think is missing.

Lance and I decided to do a website as an alternative to pocket invitations.  I love pretty paper--nowadays you can hire a professional stationer to design beautiful custom wedding suites--and one popular option is pocket invitations.  I think they're awesome, because they hold inserts for all sorts of information (maps, things to do, hotels, etc.) to help people plan their trips.  However, they run $3-5 and up, even if you make them yourself!  Lance wasn't a big fan ("That's a lot of money for something most people are going to throw away.").  I couldn't argue with that, and I also didn't like the idea of killing so many trees for just one day.

I figured I could communicate most of this information with a website instead.  I don't like most of the website templates that I've seen on sites like the Knot, so I decided to use this opportunity to learn to build a website on my own.  Google Sites has been awesome for this project--it's not exactly intuitive all the time, but there is a lot of help available online.  It also lets you click through most options or play with the html code, so you can really learn as much as you feel is necessary for your project.  Kinda neat.  I'm planning on adding an interactive Google map or a pretty line drawing one (which you can do at weddingmapper.com), filling in the rest of the details, and I'm done! 

Save the Date Update

**I ordered these today after changing a few things based on the feedback I got, so the "comment window" is officially closed.  :)  Original post below:

I know it's been a while since I posted, but I've been pretty busy with work, Christmas shopping, etc.  In any case, I just finished our save the date design, and I was wondering what you all think (the quality is shoddy here as a .jpg because I don't have the skills to upload as a .pdf).  Worthy of sending to everyone we know?  Need work?  Need scrapped?  Let me know.  :)  It's a postcard, and the other side will have a link to our wedding website.  Also, if anyone would like to volunteer to look over/edit our wedding website before it goes live, I'd appreciate it!

Save The Dates

Now that we have a bridal party, we can finish that page on our website... just in time to send out save the dates!  Normally I don't have much use for save the dates; there are very few people whose pictures I want magnetized to my fridge for months, and they are an added and usually unnecessary expense.  There are a few exceptions, one of which is weddings that fall close to holidays (that's us).  Guests need advanced warning to make holiday and travel plans, I get that.  I've seen a few cute save the dates online, but I'd rather make my own.  You can print custom postcards on Vistaprint for very reasonable prices, so we thought we could come up with our own design, have them printed, and send them in our Christmas cards this year (Postage is one of the hidden wedding costs; if we're using a stamp, we might as well make it pull double duty!).  As I mentioned in my very first post, we already have a save the date idea.  I saw a wedding website a long time ago that has this very modern, simple, but funny and cute text format:

Lance wanted to edit out the "effing," but other than that we really liked this (and have plenty of history to fill it with!).  Plus, it shouldn't be that hard to make; it's just text, right?  WRONG.  I've been messing with it for days, and it's sneaky hard to choose workable fonts, double justify the text, and make it attractive.  So if you have any basic graphics design skills, please help!!

Table Numbers

We ordered our centerpiece candles this weekend!  It's really early, I know, but I found a sale at a candle wholesaler online, AND Lance found a coupon for them, so we jumped on it!  Which brings us to the next question... what to do for table numbers?

After my centerpieces post, both my dad and Lance's mom enthusiastically joined Team Silver Trays, so we're going to see if we can make that work.  That plan does have the advantage of keeping the setup easy, since we might have to have people set up the reception without us the morning of the wedding if the venue books a Christmas party the night before (reeeeally hoping that doesn't happen).  Going with the trays changes two things, though.  First, I think that the glass vases on silver trays might look too busy, so we held off buying candle vases until we decide what we're doing for sure.  (I also have to check with the venue to make sure that the trays qualify as "holders" for fire regulations.)

Second, it changes our thoughts about table numbers.  Part of the reason the candles on trays look so pretty is that that it's very clean looking.  Our original thought for table numbers was to use small silver photo frames with pictures of us either around the city or at other places we've traveled.  (We also entertained the idea of naming the tables after said places, but ultimately thought the numbers made more sense.)

With trays, however, picture frames are too busy, too much silver, and possibly tall enough to block the candlelight, which defeats the purpose.

So what are our other options?  Without vases, etching numbers into the vases isn't a possibility.  I've seen some lucite table numbers online, which I thought were cool:

I could always make table numbers using my die cut machine.  I just got a Sizzix Big Kick, and it can cut paper, fabric, cork, sheet plastic, and even metal.  I've seen a few nice number dies:

I could press out numbers and make little number cards, or pin them directly on a candle, or even glue them to stands and make them 3D:

Decisions, decisions... it's all in the details, right?  ;)