Editor’s note: Happy Monday everyone! I know this is Kristine’s post and all, but I just had to pop in to say hello! ;) I’ll see you all back here tomorrow with a gorgeous feature filled with inspiration! Oh and this is an AWESOME wedding, so enjoy! :)

The thing I love the most about DIY weddings is that they require the help of family and friends which ends up making the day a true labor of love. This wedding by Sarah Kathleen Photography is no exception. The flowers were gifted by a friend who owns his own flower nursery {I need to start making friends at the local nursery}, the bride and groom wrapped hundreds of bottles in twine for the centerpieces, and two friends performed “day of coordinator” duties. Their hard work certainly paid off–everything came together perfectly! Go ahead, see for yourself…

What (or who) helped you most in your planning process and/or on your  wedding day?

Within the year before my wedding my sister, one of my best friends, and my cousin had gotten married so I had a wealth of information at my finger tips because of them! Whenever I had a question I would call any one of them and they passed on their wedding books. I had started to use some of the books but I found the internet to be a better source of info. I constantly found myself checking out www.weddinggawker.com because I loved seeing what other brides were doing and it gave me some great ideas. I also ended up making my own wedding binder of which I filled with idea pages with magazine cutouts and ideas I had seen online. It also housed all of our vendor contracts, invite lists, stamps and pretty much everything else you can think of. Along the whole planning process my friends and family helped a ton with all of the little hand made projects I decided to do.  My fiance(now husband :) ) also helped more than I ever expected he would. I had decided to wrap wine bottles and beer bottles with colored twine and Garrett (husband) ended up doing about a third of the wrapping, and since we did about 200 bottles and each would take about 15 minutes to wrap, he was a huge help! Two really good friends of ours took the roles of “day of coordinators”.  We only had a short time beforehand to set up for the wedding so I depended heavily on them to delegate tasks to my other family and friends that helped set up. So basically my wedding wouldn’t have been possible without my friends and family!

What was the most important thing to you when deciding who to work  with for your wedding?

We would first look at price and quality and then when we found vendors within our price range I would meet up with about 3 from each category to see who I got along with. Sarah was an easy choice because she was an amazing artist and her price was reasonable. We actually spent more on our DJ than we wanted to but they did an amazing job at my friend’s wedding so we wanted to have them (Kramer Entertainment). We actually only checked out one caterer, his food was amazing and the price was fair (Phil’s Catering).  My cake baker was an easy choice ( Two Little Birds Bakery) because I had worked part-time for Lauren Galena for about a year! She ended up giving us our cake for free so you can’t beat that price! A good friend of ours donated all of the flowers because he has a flower nursery in Nipomo, CA and he is also a flower broker (Theo Vandescende). One of my best friends arranged the bouquets as a favor because she worked at a florist shop. Another good friend was our officiant. So we had some vendors that were an easy choice because they were good friends and they were willing to help out in more ways than we thought!

Did any of your vendors do anything special for you before, on, or  after your wedding day that you would like to share?

I would just be reiterating what our friends had done for us. So see the above section!

What was your favorite thing about your wedding?

My favorite thing about my wedding was when my husband and I did our grand entrance into the reception area and I got to see for the first time how all of our hard work and planning had come together. Everything looked as I had hoped it would and we had 165 of our family and good friends in front of us! At that point I truly relaxed and soaked everything in!

What is your best piece of advice for other brides?

Make your wedding personable. It will mean so much more to you and others in the long run. All of our guests told us how much they appreciated all of the personal details and how much the wedding as a whole represented our personalities!

Thanks to the stunning bride, Allison, for sharing her day with us {seriously, isn’t Allison stunning?!} and to Sarah Kathleen Photography for these incredible photos.

Gosh, I don’t even know what to comment on–there are so many great details. Don’t you love those bottles wrapped in colorful twine? And the combination of yellow and red? And that ceremony arch with all those paper flowers? Well done, Allison and Garrett. Well done.

xo-Kristine

Vendors Who Made It All Happen…