i’ve talked about the invites, programs, thank yous and our website. now let’s move on to the wedding decorations. i’ll start with the flowers.

i wish i was one of those girls that knew a lot about flowers and had a great vision for what they would look like. but i’m very much not. in fact, jason can identify 90% more flowers than i can. i can, however, look at a photo and tell you if i think something looks good, which was our method for choosing our florist. we went with garden laurels, and we couldn’t have been happier with the result.

my bouquet had orange ranunculus, white peony, juliet garden roses, yellow billy buttons, blue eryngium, with succulent and greenery accents. the bridesmaids’ bouquets had peonies, ranunculus, dendrobiums, freesia, and accents of greenery. and the boys tied it all together with billy button boutonnieres.

next, the centerpieces. as i’ve mentioned in the last couple of posts, maps were a central part of our decor. it’s not surprising then that we really wanted globes to be part of our centerpieces. we came up with this idea months ago, probably in december, and i started hunting for globes. i learned quickly that globes are very, very expensive (even small ones can cost $50 each) and since we thought we’d have about 18 tables, we knew that was unrealistic.

i looked and looked and kept finding ones that were either too expensive or so small that they wouldn’t even be noticeable on a table. then during the holidays i was at world market picking up presents for the family when i spotted these 6 inch globes that were $10 and on sale for $8. i bought out the store, then ordered the rest online. we had globes! but where to store them until june? here is where they sat for 7 months:

since the tables were relatively large, we knew we wanted to boost the globes up so that they would look bigger. we decided to use old books to do so. we contemplated renting books from various decoration vendors but then i decided to try out the UW Swap Shop to see if they had any for cheap. and boy was i right, they had bins and bins of free old textbooks. i loaded up the mini cooper to full capacity.

next for the centerpieces was the table numbers. we scraped the labels off old wine bottles and then stenciled the numbers onto them. unfortunately i couldn’t find any stencils that weren’t made for little kid’s decorations, so i ended up making my own, which took forever, but was worth it in the end.

our florist added some greenery and peonies to finish off the centerpieces. on the head table, she also placed vases for all the bouquets as an added element.

to stick with the wine theme we decided to make our placecards out of cork. this meant we had a lot of wine to drink, but we were up for the challenge. we also enlisted the help of friends and family, and with everyone’s contribution, we ended up with about 200 corks (some of which we couldn’t use because they were synthetic). then we got to work cutting off about 1/4 of each cork so they would lay flat.

we cut a small slit in the top, and asked jason’s mother to help us make the name cards since she has much prettier handwriting than either of us. she wrote everyone’s name on the front and stamped the table number on the back of small round tags. the tags fit into the slits in the corks, and we finished them off with some color string to signify the meal that each person had ordered. to snazz up the placecard table we also bought some large cardboard letters and painted them copper, just in case you weren’t sure whose wedding you were at. unfortunately, our initials are J and V. we felt like we were pretty varsity, so we went with V and J.

last but not least were the anniversary cards. instead of having a guest book, we decided to have our guests write us cards that we would open each year on our anniversary. each envelope had an anniversary and the year we would reach that anniversary on it. we went from our first anniversary in 2014 to our 75 anniversary in 2088. 2088…does that even sound real? even our 20th anniversary sounds made up…2033? will we live that long?

unsurprisingly, people gravitated towards the lower years. i cannot wait to open them, but i promise i’ll be patient. unfortunately, i didn’t snap any photos of the basket with the cards in them, but this is what they looked like (we kept it simple):

everything came together nicely with the decorations. if i could make one recommendation for future couples out there: keep your decorations personal and simple. come up with a concept early and work on it throughout the months leading up to your wedding. don’t do it all in the end, you will freak out. shocking, i know.

3 Comments

• 12 / 30 / 13 / 1:47 am

  My daughter is getting married in March and wants to use her globes in her centerpieces. We’ve been collecting them for months now. Do you have pics of the centerpieces with your globes?

  writes ShellyReply
  • 12 / 30 / 13 / 7:21 am

    That’s great! Here are some more photos:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingsimadetoday/10187795646/
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingsimadetoday/10187644564/
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/thingsimadetoday/10187742845/

    writes VickyReply
• 01 / 12 / 22 / 4:27 pm

  1obituary

  writes 3worthinessReply