Happy Monday everyone! We’re starting this week off with a beautiful yellow DIY wedding from Emily Takes Photos! Complete with handmade bunting, a gorgeous yellow, gray, and white color palette, and tables named after meaningful places, this wedding is absolutely full of DIY love! The bride, Jen, shares her insight with us:
What (or who) helped you most in your planning process and/or on your wedding day?
My fiance (now husband!). Planning a wedding (in the midst of a cross-country move and new jobs for both of us) was really stressful, but the key was that we learned how to work as a team in the process. That will serve us as a couple for the rest of our lives together.
What was the most important thing to you when deciding who to work with for your wedding?
I work as a production manager for a regional theatre — and it turns out that planning a wedding is not really any different than producing a play. So even though I’d never planned my own wedding before, I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting into, and I wanted vendors who would not only respect but also understand the perspective and experience that I was bringing to the process. Consequently we selected vendors whom I know from my field — our wedding coordinator is also an actress, I knew our band from having produced a show with them a few years ago, my hair stylist was a costume designer friend, etc. I wanted folks who WEREN’T specialists in the wedding industry, but instead came from the same creative, out-of-the-box, roll-with-the-punches event-producing environment that I come from. I’m not the sort of bride who needs to be ‘managed’ and so I wanted vendors who would communicate openly with me instead of managing me (and my wallet!).
What was your inspiration for your wedding details and/or design?
My husband and I had moved to northern California 2 years earlier and most of our guests were coming from out of town, from all over the country. We really wanted to share a bit of our northern california life with them, so we selected a venue that really featured the natural beauty of northern california and served great local food. We love to craft and design and make things, so we filled out the details of the wedding with handmade crafts that matched the natural outdoors aesthetic. Our venue was in the middle of Sonoma county, where our guests could fill out the rest of their weekend going hiking, to the ocean, wine tasting, and exploring the countryside and nearby small towns. We love hearing stories about the adventures that our friends and family had before/after the actually wedding day.
What was your favorite thing about your wedding?
Having nearly all of our favorite friends and family all in the same place at the same time.
What is your best piece of advice for other brides?
Remember to always, continuously check in with yourself and our partner and see if it matters to YOU. If a tradition doesn’t make sense to you, throw it out the window! You won’t be able to make every element of your wedding be important and personal and special. When you have inspiration, run with it, but for everything else, either make a quick, cost-effective decision and or skip it entirely. (Eg, neither of us likes cake, and the cake-cutting ceremony moment seemed unimportant to us. So we served pie for dessert and skipped any sort of posed-dessert-cutting moment entirely — and our guests were too busy enjoying delicious pie to care that we’d skipped the tradition). Also – the DIY wedding aesthetic is really in these days. Make sure that you are making things because you LIKE to make things, not because you think you’re supposed to. Consider making things that you need in the 10’s (centerpiece) rather than the 100’s (invitations, favors). I loved every handmade thing at my wedding, but it was overwhelming at times (like, when we handmade all 200 invitations including envelopes made from upcycled national geographic maps.)
I love Jen’s advice about DIYing things- focusing on things that can be made in smaller quantities is a great piece of advice!
So are any of you planning on DIYing things for your own wedding? What will you being making?
Vendors who made it all happen…
Lauren
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What a cute wedding! I love the alter and all the gray and yellow…so pretty!