After a morning full of hair appointments, picking up our bouquets and applying make-up, it was finally time to put on my wedding gown!

As you all know, I haven’t yet revealed the gown that I chose to wear – so, without further delay, here it is! I chose an ivory Alfred Angelo tiered lace gown with an ivory satin bodice and sash :)

The gown has since been discontinued (actually, this gown was discontinued a mere two weeks after we ordered it!) – I love knowing that I am one of the last women to wear this beautiful, vintage-inspired gown.

My Mom helped me get into my gown…

Then it was time for jewelry…

I wore beautiful pearl earrings that Jordan gave me as a gift; a Norwegian brooch that has been in my family for generations; a Norwegian necklace that my grandmother gave to me when I was young; a fun yellow-gold ring that I purchased from Galla15 on Etsy; and a lovely pearl bracelet that my friend and bridesmaid Serena gave me.

And then, it was time for my veil! I purchased my veil at a local bridal shop; it’s by Signature Bridal.

Next up were my (hand-crafted and homemade!) garters and my shoes, featuring shoe clips from BPoetic on Etsy!

And with a few tears from my bridesmaids and my Mom…

…I put the finishing touches on my bouquet (isn’t it beautiful!!)…

…took a few bridal portraits…

…and headed over to the chapel to meet Jordan for our “First Look!”

Coming up next: my favorite part of our day – our “First Look!”

What do you think of my gown? Was it worth the wait?

[All photos by the outstanding Creative Kindling]

Remember those inspiration boards that I created for my bouquet and my girls’ bouquets on Style Me Pretty’s Style Circle? I brought these to Twyla, our florist at The Flower Shop, to use as inspiration for our florals.

Well, I can’t wait to show you how our lovely flowers turned out!

In the top picture, notice the sunflower bouquet on the left; that was my throw-away bouquet! It was wrapped in burlap and was simple but beautiful. The other bouquets in that photo are my girls’ bouquets; they turned out perfectly! Very organic – they look like they were just picked right from a field before the wedding! The bouquet with the succulent is Kristen’s, to make hers a little special, as the maid of honor.

As you can see in the bottom picture, the girls’ bouquets were wrapped in ribbon, and I had Twyla attach a brooch to each of their bouquets (I spent the months before the wedding searching flea markets and antique stores for brooches!)

And now, a peek at my bouquet (more of the full bouquet after I reveal my wedding gown!):

I had Twyla wrap the stem of the bouquet in burlap, to echo the organic, nature-inspired feel of our wedding (as well as the burlap on the reception tables!). I then wrapped a piece of lace around the stem – my great-Grandma Sophie made the lace! As you can see from the bottom picture, I also had Paloma’s Nest on Etsy make me a bouquet charm (my something blue! notice the blue string?). I just LOVED the bouquet charm; it says “i carry your heart with me,” after the e.e. cummings poem we had read during our wedding ceremony. I also attached to the stem of my bouquet a little brooch that Kristen gave me – it was perfect!

In my bouquet, Twyla used sunflowers, succulents, dusty miller, billy balls, lisianthus, spray roses and much, much more. It was literally the bouquet of my dreams – I couldn’t have been more pleased!

A big plus – I had Twyla ensure to utilize as many locally grown blooms for our flowers as possible!

Stay tuned for what’s up next: me and my girls (and Jordan and his guys!) getting ready, plus a full list of make-up products that my sister-in-law used to achieve my bridal look!

[Inspiration boards made by me on Style Me Pretty's Style Circle; all photos by the amazingly talented Creative Kindling]

And let the wedding recaps begin…

Waking up on the morning of our wedding day was extremely surreal. My lovely bestest friend in the whole world, my cousin and maid of honor Kristen, spent the night at my house the night before, and honestly, that was one of the best decisions I made – having her there right away in the morning definitely helped to calm my nerves!

Kristen and I headed to Salon Ne-Zhoni in Sioux Falls, where my bridesmaids and I proceeded to take over the salon for the morning. My sister-in-law Larissa arrived, too, and all 3 of us were whisked off to the beauty chairs for our updos.

As you can recall, I had a hair trial a few weeks prior, so my hairstylist and I were on the same page from the get-go. For my bridesmaids, we decided to have all of the girls wear their hair up and off to the right side…it looked super cute to have their hair all going the same direction!

My hairstylist Lisa began curling my hair…

Kristen took pictures…

I started to feel bride-y…

My hairstylist braided the back of my hair across my head (my favorite part!)…

And inserted my hair fascinator (courtesy of Y&E Bridal on Etsy…one of the first purchases I made, and one of the best)…

And I was done!

Larissa and Kristen were seriously gorgeous…

And then it was time for my other 2 bridesmaids, my friends Jessica and Serena, to have their hair done!

First, Serena got in touch with her inner Curly Sue…

And Jessica tried a new look…

But eventually, they were ready for the day!

You’ll notice the hair pieces in all of the girls’ hair…my Mom and I made those! We purchased very inexpensive fabric flowers from New York & Company, dyed them grey (they were ivory), sewed and pinned on some ivory lace, added a hair comb on the back and a bauble in the middle of the flower, and voila! I was so pleased with how they turned out.

We all grabbed a quick lunch at the salon, thanks to my lovely Aunt Becky…

And while Kristen and I picked up the flowers (which were HEAVENLY – I can’t wait to share them with you!), all of the other girls headed off to the church to get ready!

[All photos by the amazingly talented Creative Kindling]

Dear readers, I don’t even know where to begin with this post, except to say that Jordan and I are SO excited to share our DIY wedding invitations with you today! This post is rather lengthy, but for you budget-brides out there, I wanted to give you an extensive look into what it takes to DIY your own wedding invitation suite.

A note on our inspiration

It was quite a challenge to try and explain to Jordan (or anyone, really) what “vintage” means to me, and how exactly I envision us capturing that feel in our wedding invitations. So, I frequented many a web site, from Etsy to super awesome stationery sites to simple Google searches of random objects (mason jars, for instance).

Jordan and I began the design process with the idea that we would utilize Adobe Photo Shop brushes. Since little touches of birds, nature and aviary motifs will appear throughout our wedding, we felt it was important to include a bird in our wedding invitations. We found a Photo Shop brush of a tree, and we started working with that.

However, with each draft of the invitation, we began to hate the look and the feel of it more and more. It didn’t look elegant, it didn’t look lovely, and it didn’t look vintage. So, much to my chagrin (seriously, I was stressed!), we scrapped that idea and started over, a mere month-and-a-half before we wanted to start the printing process.

However, in re-conceptualizing our DIY wedding invitations, I remembered an art class that I took in middle school, where we carved images into a wood block, and then used that wood block to stamp with ink. (I’m sure this was a Mother’s or Father’s Day project from way back when.)

So, I started to try and tell Jordan about what I envisioned based on this look. Then I saw a few invitations around the web utilizing different fonts and a woodblock/boxed layout, and after brainstorming with Jordan, we downloaded a variety of fonts (which is over-simplifying the process – I was very picky about what fonts I wanted to use, and Jordan just would not let me go with Feel Script, no matter how badly I wanted to shell out the money for it – and he was right in the end…) and we  got to work bringing together all of our inspiration into one invitation suite.

A note on the design process

Jordan and I used Adobe Fireworks to design our invitations. Jordan is very familiar with this program, and I found it to be a rather intuitive program myself after playing with it for 20 minutes or so.

Since Jordan and I are living 45 miles apart right now, we designed our entire invitation suite on the weekends we were able to be together. For us, the process worked like this:

1. Sara tells Jordan in advance, “We need to work on this part of our invitation suite this weekend.”
2. Sara sends Jordan links of what she’s found that she likes (”I like this overall look, but with this wording and this graphic and this font.”)
3. Jordan comes home, sits on the couch and designs away, making sure Sara doesn’t look over his shoulder until the project is near completion (it drove him nuts!).
4. Sara edits, says what she’d like changed, and Jordan makes the changes.
5. When Sara and Jordan are both satisfied with the design, they PDF the file and send it to their right-hand person to print a proof.
6. After final proof approval, the document goes to the printer, and a few days later, the final product arrives at Sara’s house.

Multiply this by 5 pieces (there are 5 items in our invitation suite), and you have approximately 24 weekends (6 months!) of design work that we spent working to complete this invitation suite. It was definitely a labor of love; there’s no other way to describe it.

A note on invitation wording

It was important to Jordan and I that we acknowledge the contributions that our parents have made to our lives and to making our wedding happen, so we included them in our invitation wording. In determining the other parts of the wording for our invitation, we spent quite a bit of time (probably two weeks) changing words and tweaking the look of the invitation.

Here’s what we ended up with:

Sara’s parents and
Jordan’s parents
Invite you to celebrate the wedding of their children
Sara Jo and
Jordan Wayne
(Ceremony Details)
(When/Where)
Dinner, Dancing & Merriment to immediately follow
at the Washington Pavilion

A note on the details

First, I spent about 8 – 10 hours of time gluing little doilies (see above picture) inside both the mailing envelopes and the RSVP envelopes (a la Holly) – what a project (!!), but I’m SO happy with how well they turned out. (Everyone thought I was nuts, but I was having a great time!)

I then stamped our return address on each of these envelopes, proceeded to freak out when the ink I used wouldn’t dry, and then our envelopes were miraculously saved by a can of hairspray. Moving on…(I just can’t talk about those darn envelopes anymore!)

Next, once everything was printed, we glued the invitation matte directly to the pocketfold, and then glued the wedding invitation on top of the matte, to create a layered look (again, see above picture).

I knew that I wanted our invitation suite to have a few components to it. While the majority of our guests are from South Dakota (and are rather localized to Sioux Falls, where the wedding will be held), I still wanted to provide guests with a map to help them navigate their way to each location. Thanks to a wonderful classmate of mine, we had a lovely hand-drawn map to showcase to our guests. We placed the map on its end in the right-side pocket of the pocketfold.

For our RSVP card, we wanted to make sure that our guests knew to expect an offbeat, relaxed wedding from the moment they received their invitation. So, we utilized the following check box system, as seen on A $2000 Wedding:

- Gladly Attend
- Regretfully Decline
- Regretfully Attend
- Enthusiastically Decline
- I’m in the wedding, so I have to come
- Other ____________________________

Since Jordan and I are coordinating the music for the wedding dance ourselves, we also wanted feedback from our guests to see what would get them out on the dance floor. Our “Request a Song” card was so much fun to design, and Jordan even made the record player graphic himself!

These two cards were tied together with the RSVP envelope using baker’s twine, which is a special type of yarn that blends two colors (our’s was yellow and white) together. This little package was then placed in the pocketfold in front of the wedding map.

A note on the construction and presentation of the invite

I owe a lot to the lovely Holly at Nothing But Bonfires for introducing us to a company without which our invitations would have lacked cohesion: Cards & Pockets. We ordered nearly everything for our DIY invites from Cards & Pockets … from the pocketfolds in which each piece of our invitation suite was placed to the envelopes that carried our invitations to their destination, we found Cards & Pockets to be the best value for our money. And the quality of the materials? Couldn’t have asked for a better product or better customer service along the way. [No, this is not a sponsored/paid post; I just love the company!]

A note on printing

Jordan and I feel extremely blessed to have had the help and support of one of my father’s business colleagues throughout the DIY invitation design and printing process. From our first initial idea to our final proof, having a person to walk us through the process, telling us what worked and what didn’t, was absolutely invaluable.

While I understand that what’s right for us might not be right for everyone, I would encourage readers who are looking to DIY their own invitations to get them printed by a professional (but local!) printing company. All we supplied was the paper (we chose a partially recycled natural ivory linen cardstock), and the printers and our right-hand person handled the printing and the cutting gratis (yes, we were extremely lucky).

A note on the materials used

Materials:

From Cards & Pockets:

- Perfetto pocketfolds in “Smoke” (We ordered a sample of one, loved it, and then ordered 90 for our invitations)
- 5.75 inch square invitation mattes in “Lemonade” (Again, we ordered a color swatch, then ordered 90 mattes for our invitations)
- 90 6.5 inch square envelopes in “Lemonade” (to hold the invitation; we scrapped the inner envelope, because I think it’s wasteful and frivolous (no offense))
- 90 RSVP envelopes in “Lemonade” (while we initally thought about designing postcards, I loved these little envelopes, so we went with them)

From Etsy:

- Customized stickers from Maxim Creative Invites on Etsy (we ordered two different designs of stickers, one which we used to close the pocketfold and the other which we used to close the envelope)
- Yellow baker’s twine from Whisker Graphics on Etsy (we used this adorable twine to tie a bow around our RSVP package)
- Return address stamp from Love to Create Stamps on Etsy (we used this stamp as a return address and as the “deliver to” address on our RSVP envelopes)

From around town:

- Partially recycled natural ivory linen cardstock (we printed everything on this stock; we probably utilized 250-300 sheets for invitations for our entire guest list)
- Doilies + glue sticks + glue lines + ink pads from Michael’s craft store
- $0.61 cent wedding cake stamp, plus 2 $0.10 cent clock/nautical stamps, per invite, purchased at our local post office (I really wanted stamps with one of our engagement photos on it, but I couldn’t justify the cost)
- $0.44 cent “Love” stamp for our RSVP cards; we chose the stamp with the King and Queen on it!

A note on final cost

After calculating cost for everything ordered, including postage, it seems that the cost for each invitation suite was $3.74.

Here’s the breakdown:

Pocketfolds: $0.98 per invitation
Invitation Mattes: $0.18 per invitation
Natural Ivory Linen Cardstock: $8.00 per ream, $0.09 per invitation
Mailing Envelopes: $0.17 per invitation
RSVP Envelopes: $0.12 per invitation
Stickers: $0.47 per invitation
Address stamp: $0.08 per invitation (includes RSVP envelope)
Doilies: $0.14 per invitation (includes RSVP envelope)
Glue/Glue Lines/Double-stick Tape: $0.22 per invitation (includes all construction)
Baker’s Twine: $0.04 per invitation
Postage: $0.81 per invitation
Postage: $0.44 per RSVP card

TOTAL: $3.74 per invitation

What do you think of our DIY wedding invitations?

[All photos taken by my soon-to-be father-in-law, Steve!]

Last week, my Mom and I worked hard on making a garter for me to wear on my wedding day. It turned out perfectly!

Materials:
-Sewing machine
-Lace trim (the wider the better)
-Ribbon (at least 1/2 inch wide)
-Elastic (1/4 inch wide)
-Adornments/Embellishments as desired

Steps:
1. After estimating how much lace and ribbon is needed by measuring the circumference of your thigh, sew the ribbon to the top or the middle of the lace trim, depending on how wide the lace is and your own personal preference. Sew along the top edge and the bottom edge, so as to create a tunnel of sorts to feed the elastic through.

2. After estimating how much elastic you will need by wrapping the elastic around your thigh, attach a safety pin to one end of the elastic and feed it through the tunnel created by the ribbon.

3. Make sure it fits and feels comfortable, then sew the two ends together.

4. Add embellishments to the garter (we used a lovely vintage brooch), and you’re done!

I’m so pleased with how it turned out! I estimate that the project took about two hours and cost about $20.00.

What DIY projects are you working on now?

[Photo by me]

I jumped on the bunting bandwagon and crafted up my own bunting to dress up our wedding cake table.

I probably should have taken pictures along the way to dress up this post, but alas, I have only a picture of the finished product (above).

Steps:

1. Gather/purchase fabric. I purchased 2 yards of yellow gingham fabric and 2 yards of charcoal grey polka-dot fabric from Hancock Fabrics in Sioux Falls.

2. Find/draw a triangle shape and print on cardstock. This will be your pattern for the triangles. (I’m a fan of larger triangles, but I’ve seen many a cute bunting with little triangles or squares.)

3. Take a pen/pencil and trace along the outside of the triangle on the BACK side of the fabric.

4. Take (sharpened!) pinking shears and cut alongside the outside of your tracing marks. (I made about 30 triangles.)

5. After all of your triangles are cut, fold over the top of the triangle approximately 1 inch, and use a hot iron (with steam!) to make a crease in the triangle, similar to when you’re hemming pants. The purpose is to create a fold where the string can fit in.

6. When all of your triangles are ironed, grab your string, a pair of scissors and a ruler. (I used twine, but you could use ribbon, ric rac, or any other type of string, depending upon your project!) Determine the spacing between each flag (I had approximately 2 inches between triangles).

7. Plug in your hot glue gun, and once it’s warm, insert the string into the fold of the triangle (created with the iron) and place a line of hot glue in the fold as well. Press lightly to secure. Continue on until you’ve used all of your triangles.

8. Take a look at all of your triangles, and trim as necessary.

And you’re done!

While there are various tutorials online that offer ways to make your own bunting, I definitely prefer the no-sew type.

Enjoy!

[Photo by me]

I officially made hair appointments for my bridesmaids and I this week, so I’ve started to think about my hairstyle a little more. I know that I want something low and off to the side, yet the top two photos leave me feeling weak in the knees…what a perfectly beautiful vintage style!

How are YOU wearing your hair on your wedding day?

Remember my lamentations about wedding shoes? Well, I think I’ve found a swoon-worthy alternative for trendy sky-high shoes:  Etsy seller OxfordHeaven!

OxfordHeaven crafts fun refashioned & vintage shoes & accessories for your closet. From Rachael, the brains behind OxfordHeaven:  I always think it is unfair that little girls have amazingly fun little shoes, so grown-up girls need something pretty in their lives, too.

I’ve already requested my custom pair of shoes – low heels/wedges in a sunshine yellow color! I can’t wait to work with Rachael on customizing my wedding shoes.

Check out more delightful beauties on OxfordHeaven’s Flickr page!

[All photos courtesy of OxfordHeaven on Etsy]

A few weeks ago on Twitter, I stumbled upon a post from Intimate Weddings that literally made me stop in my tracks. Besides boasting a comprehensive venue search for intimate weddings on her site, Christina of Intimate Weddings has also collected tutorials and inspiration for some of the best DIY projects out there, making Intimate Weddings a literal hub of DIY goodness.

Because J and I plan to incorporate mason jars into our wedding decor, Christina’s post on these multi-purpose lovelies caught my eye recently. Before seeing this post, J and I figured that we would utilize mason jars as vases to hold flowers on on our reception tables. But after seeing this picture (at left), I now am on the hunt for more mason jars to achieve this affect!

I’ve always wanted to be married by candlelight, and this picture literally is just oozing with romance. Can you imagine collections of these mason jars lining the aisle?! How amazing.

The best part about mason jars is that they can be reused post-wedding for canning, storing foods like salsa, or utilized for gifts, such as hot chocolate mix, hard ingredients for cookie dough and more. Plus,mason jars are an easy, always available vase for your favorite garden flowers! Therefore, making an investment in mason jars is an eco-friendly, budget-friendly decor idea.

[Photo credit: Intimate Weddings]

Credits: Karen Wise, Zoom Photography (4), Jose Villa, Olivia Leigh, Dollface Studio, Suthi Picotte