photos by white rabbit studios

if you had told me at any point in my life that i would have enough close friends to have 6 bridesmaids, i would have never believed you. but i do, and they are a group of amazing people. i’ve been in half of their weddings, am related to 2 of them, and each is from a different defining time period in my life. and they’re all beautiful.

photos by white rabbit studios

some of the hangers i made for my bridesmaids. they each had a different dress that they picked out. i think they look so good all together. and each girl actually really liked their dress.

photo by one of my adriennes

 i also made them flowers for their hair. i wanted a pop of color with the grey dresses. i knew their yellow flowers would be something, but i wanted something else. we talked about yellow shoes, but could never find any that we all liked.

photos by white rabbit studios

photos by white rabbit studios

i got my flowers on wednesday, and despite receiving some purple spider mums (instead of the pretty yellow football mums you see here) at first, we put together all of our flowers on thursday. i really love the way they turned out.

i also made each one of my girls thank you cards. originally i was just going to make a card for marty (with a tux and a dress on it), but i grabbed some extra grey fabric before we left austin and came up with these one night the week before the wedding. i think they turned out great and i totally made some of my best friends cry.

if you thought those were cool, our wedding invitations were even cooler:

i spent quite a bit of time looking at invitations online, but none of them were quite what i was looking for. i wanted something that carried over the save the date tree and was unique to us. luckily, we have a graphic designer in the family. marty’s little brother joey is an amazing artist. he took our guidelines, came up with some ideas, showed them to us, made some changes, and landed with this.

we ordered the pocketfolds, and envelopes from cards  & pockets, marty had the invites and inserts printed at a local shop, and we tackled the task of cutting and assembling together one night. i addressed all of the envelopes by myself. if you’ve ever seen marty’s handwriting, you’d thank me.

i love the end result, and we got so many compliments from people. and it’s always awesome to get envelopes in the mail that you addressed to yourself

(see those mustaches? they’re tattoos. i meant to make our bridal party wear them for some photos, but i completely forgot.)

i also made our rehearsal dinner invites! i tried to research my idea online (i like to see the way other people do things before i dive in. i’ve found it usually makes the process go smoother with less trial and error), but didn’t find anything. so let me introduce you to my totally original rehearsal dinner invites

this was as i was making them, so i trimmed the excess string once they’d dried. i thought they were cute and tied in with our other pennants nicely. i got a lot of use out of that fabric.

i also made my bridal lunch invites but i didn’t take any pictures of those because i didn’t really think they were anything special. edit: i took a picture:

hooray for paper!

going into our meeting with our awesome caterer, i really wasn’t sure what i wanted my cake to look like. i knew what i wanted it to taste like, which i guess is most important anyway. i don’t believe in fondant. yes, you can do cool things with it, but it tastes so terrible. and what’s the point of cake if you don’t want to eat it? luckily, our caterer agreed. my cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting. and it was amazing. i’ve eaten a piece every day since we got married (we had a lot of leftovers).

marty decided he wanted to embrace the fall season and serve pies instead of a groom’s cake. which totally surprised me, because marty loves chocolate. we had pumpkin and pecan pie. i only had a slice of the pecan and marty didn’t get to try any before it was all gone (the horror!) you snooze, you lose, i suppose. they were delicious.

but back to my beautiful cake. we had a meeting with our venue the day before. after that meeting was when i decided i wanted pennants. and after our caterer meeting i decided i wanted to carry the theme over to our cake. i told my sister my idea, she did some googling and came up with a couple of websites that had examples. i decided to forgo the scrapbook paper suggestion and make them out of leftover fabric. so they were tiny versions of my larger pennants.

i am beyond in love with the result. not only was my cake totally delicious. it was also absolutely beautiful. simple, clean, happy, and cohesive. and perfect.

(photos by white rabbit studios)

(marty’s pies!)

honestly, i don’t really believe in superstition. and so i didn’t really try very hard to make this happen. but i’m kinda glad it did.

something old

the green ring. it was a present from my mom on my 21st birthday. she can tell you the story behind it.

something new

everything. ha. i went with the dress.

something borrowed

my sister wore the same headband at her wedding earlier this year. in fact, my hair looks quite a bit like her’s did and her hair at my wedding looks quite a bit like mine did at hers. also borrowed (and blue) is the anklet i wore. it belongs to another one of my bridesmaids who wore it to her wedding.

something blue

i’m not sure what happened to the M. it appears one of the stones got moved. oh well, imperfectly perfect.

during family photos my grandmother gave me a 2011 penny that i also taped to the bottom of my shoe.

(once again, all photos by white rabbit studios.)

(check out my cute groom :])

yay!

]]> http://itendtowhisper.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/wedding-pennants-a-finished-product/feed/ 0 Holly pennants pennants (1) pennants (2) pennants (3) pennants (4) pennants (5) pennants (6) pennants (8) pennants (7) pennants (9) http://itendtowhisper.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/little-bits-and-pieces-pennants/ http://itendtowhisper.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/little-bits-and-pieces-pennants/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 18:50:39 +0000 Holly http://itendtowhisper.wordpress.com/?p=1137 ]]> the location we picked to have our wedding is beautiful. it’s a big old annabellum house with gorgeous gardens and trees. one of the major appeals to us (besides having a beautiful location that we could get married at, as well as have a reception) was the fact that it was beautiful all on it’s own.

that being said, i didn’t want my wedding to look exactly like every other wedding that has taken place there. it’s a popular wedding location in huntsville and i know a handful of people that have gotten married there. we weren’t encouraged to do a whole lot of extra decorating, but i wanted somethings to set our wedding apart from the rest.

that’s where the pennants came in. they were something just a little bit extra that tied an already beautiful location to our wedding.

i spent sometime picking out the perfect yellows and greys and then ordered them (and ended up with too much. anyone want a yellow and grey owl?)

the good thing about having a soon to be husband in grad school is that i had a lot of free time in the evenings while he studied and graded papers.

i cut triangles, sewed plain grey or yellow to the backs of the patterned fabric, pinking sheared the edges so they wouldn’t fray, folded floral ribbon in half and ironed it, and then sewed each pennant on individually because i wasn’t sure how long each needed to be for the particular location. each ribbon was 30 feet long and i think i sewed a total of 5 of them.

i considered getting married in this.

i also carried the pennant theme over into our cake and our rehearsal dinner invites.

i’ll show you some finished products later.

happiness in our house.

wedding countdown.

paper flowers that i didn’t end up using.

felt flowers that i didn’t end up using.

registering at macys.

countdown getting smaller and smaller.

(all pictures by white rabbit studios)

aren’t they gorgeous!?

it’s probably picture overload, but they turned out so wonderful and i love them so much! simple, clean, and happy. exactly what i was going for

let me introduce you to our centerpieces. i mostly referred to them as whine bottles.

i knew i didn’t want something traditional for our centerpieces. and by traditional i imagine in my head some elaborate flowery thing, or mirror plates or something like that. i like simple and i like clean and that was the look i wanted. i decided i wanted to paint some wine bottles. it’s a simple look that doesn’t hold a ton of flowers so we wouldn’t have to worry about a huge flower order and it’s something i could do myself.

our sweet friend johanna works at a fancy restaurant here in austin and hooked me up with all the wine bottles i needed. then i spent a little time googling about what would be the best way to go about de-labeling and painting them. i didn’t find a whole lot of information about painted wine bottles at the time (although since pinterest is now a thing, i could be proven wrong), but i did come across this website which had pretty good instructions.

i filled our second bathtub up with soap, added our wine bottles and let them soak for a good 24 hours. despite that, they were still a complete pain to de-label (hence the term “whine bottles”)

i bought some spray paints in various greys, silver, and white, took the bottles out to our courtyard and spent a day spray painting. i put a primer on all of our bottles and then a couple of coats of the spray paint. i had a little trouble getting them even (i think the secret is to hold the can at a distance from the bottle. and keep your dog inside so she doesn’t breathe fumes) and then i had some trouble with the paint peeling off a few of them (which was weird and i still don’t know why it happened).

by the time i got done with them (there were about 50), they truly earned the name whine bottles. i put a top coat on them and then let them dry a few days.

luckily, we didn’t have to figure out how to get them from texas to alabama. marty’s little brother stayed with us for south by southwest and we had him take them back to starkville. from starkville, one of my bridesmaids picked them up and drove them to huntsville. where they stayed for 9 months and i didn’t have to think about them again.

except these. i kept them because they were messed up.

i wish i had a picture of the finished product. i ended up adding a little ribbon around each of the bottles (mostly to hide where they’d gotten a little banged up on their travels) and putting them in groups of 3 on each table. i also got small mason jars with votives in them to go around the bottles (thanks for hunting those down mom!) to give the table a little something more to it.

i loved the end product. i walked into the reception room once all the flowers were added in and it just added to the insane amount of happiness that i was already feeling.

we did it!

and now i feel like i can tell you all about it, haha! i hesitated about writing about my wedding process before actually getting married for a variety of reaons. the biggest one being that the whole thing was extremely personal to me. i didn’t read a ton of wedding blogs just for fun. i didn’t seek out other people’s wedding ideas without something very specific in mind (turns out, i’m not as orginal as i originally though, but such is life), or to find advice on things i found confusing (wording of invites? confusing. wording of programs? confusing. wording of addresses? confusing).

this whole process made me realize that i am a lot more traditional than i originally thought. so i wanted something that bordered on traditional but with very big influences of both marty and i. our wedding day was absolutely perfect and i wouldn’t have changed a thing, so i feel like we definitely achieved that.

here are some bits and pieces of that:

save the dates! i knew i didn’t want normal everyday save the dates, but i wasn’t 100% sure what i wanted. i found something similar to these and thought the idea was adorable. plus, i love to sew so these were done in no time.

my only regret is that i heard the magnets weren’t quite strong enough to hold up the actual save the dates. oh well, you live you learn. the actual save the date was not at all original, but i wanted something we could print ourselves that was different than anything else i had seen. the giving tree design was perfect and i absolutely loved them.