Our Wedding: The Details

I knew all along green would be the main color of the wedding – it’s both Mr. B and my favorite color, universally flattering, and works well with flowers. And to pop against the green, bright pink flowers. So green and pink – it had the potential to look like Lily Pulitzer threw up on our wedding, but I think the more subdued green helped us avoid that disaster.

Photography
I found our photographers when looking at the wedding photos of a friend who got married just days after B proposed. They were gorgeous photos, so we called up Dave and Lynn and met with them. They were a cute couple with fabulous energy, a great eye for photos and enthusiasm galore. They basically make the Denver Catholic wedding circuit, so we knew everyone in the photos they showed us – it was like homecoming week in Dave and Lynn’s living room. We said we would meet with three vendors for each need before making a decision, but we walked out of our meeting with them and said “They’re exactly what we want!”. Every picture in this series is by Dave and Lynn.

Cake

On a road trip to IKEA with my mom and aunt, I was flipping through a bridal magazine when I saw a green “pleated” cake. I loved it. I loved the simple lines, I loved that the details were so subtle, I loved everything about it and wanted THAT cake. I found the picture of the cake before I found my dress, and when I picked the dress I did, I knew the cake would work perfectly. So we called a local baker, she said she could recreate the cake in the picture without a problem – and in buttercream so people didn’t have to eat sticky, icky fondant – and she did.

We used the cake knife and cake server that B’s Grandparents used at their wedding. They were unable to travel for our wedding, and we thought this would be a fun way to have a piece of their history with us. This photo of the servers -reflecting the cake – is one of my favorite photos of the day for that reason.

Bouquets
Again, easy does it in the Emily and Caroline wedding planning saga. We went to a bridal show – I hated the bridal shows – but we were six months from the wedding and I’d put off flowers and the DJ, so we went to find those two things. We walked in and met Chris – he had the most beautiful bouquet on display, was a riot, and very opinionated about flowers, what makes a hideous bouquet, and the scale of bouquets to the girl that is carrying them. It was love at first snark. We met with him a few weeks later, he had great ideas for a “grandmother’s flower garden” theme for the bouquets, and we told him to go for it. He also had opinions about my hair (up), shoes (pointy and high), nail color (neutral pink), and the amount of alcohol needed for the open bar (“Both of you are Irish, you can’t have too much alcohol.”). LOVED him.

Each hand tied bouquet had the same flowers – I was adamant about not having a white bridal bouquet so I opted for a slightly larger version of the bridesmaids’ bouquets.

And we did Pommander balls for the little girls. They were a hit with the three-year-old.

Place Cards

We decided we’d use color to distinguish between the meal choices – so everyone got their own place card. In keeping with the pleated theme, we layered three rectangles to make the cards. My mom, sister and I cut hundreds of ivory rectangles and hundreds of rectangles in green, pink and brown. Green was for beef, pink was for chicken, and brown was for fish.

Flip Flops

We had a galvanized bucket of Old Navy flip flops – in Pink, Green and White – sitting in front of the DJ. It was a hit – no one likes dancing in wedding shoes.