Mint

Today I’m sharing a DIY tutorial on Design Sponge for the gifts I gave my bridesmaids!! This project was so easy and turned out really well, so if you’d like the step-by-step, head over to D*S for the details.

If you’re new to Mint, welcome and thanks for stopping by! You can also visit me on Flickr (lots more photos of this project) and twitter. And, I have a stationery shop in the works… with new updates coming soon.

Thanks Grace!

Today my “Wedding Graduate” post went up on A Practical Wedding. I think it’s pretty good, except if I could do it all over again I’d maybe include a few sentences about how much I love APW and how it brought me back to earth when I was up to my ears in out of season flowers and chandeliers in oak trees. And, maybe, I’d say how honored I am that Meg found my wedding “creative, thrifty, and sane” even though it occasionally felt like none of the above : )

If you want to know my two cents on wedding planning, you can check it out here. And really, Meg, thank you for the gobs of practicality over the last year.

After making so many inspiration boards for our wedding (many of which I couldn’t share here because I did such a bad job remembering where I found the photos!), I thought I might as well make a couple out of our own wedding photos. I’m not quite sure why I wanted to do this, other than it was really kind of fun. And since inspiration boards were where the wedding planning all started, it seemed fitting that that’s how I should end it, too.

It is a little bittersweet to be done with our wedding planning. Despite all the tears (oh yes, there were tears) it was a lot of fun and was the biggest project we’ve pulled off yet!

As soon as I finish writing it, I’m going to have a “wedding graduate” post for A Practical Wedding. If there were two things that were most important about our wedding planning, it was that we only spent time and money on things we enjoyed, and practicality was a major priority. I’ll leave it at that for now, and I’ll let you know when my “two cents” are up on APW.

Have a great weekend!

[photos all taken by either harry taylor, amy jones, or myself]

Wedding quick links:

• Save the dates

• Invitations

• Rehearsal dinner invitations

• Bridal shower invitations

• Programs & direction cards

• Guest book

• Pew Cards (and here)

• Birdseed bags (with template)

• Flowers

• Dress, jewelry & veil

• Getting organized (with download)

• Paper & printing

• Tearing paper & gocco tips

• Our photographer

• All wedding posts

We’ve come to the end of the evening!

We ate cake…

We danced to motown and funk…

we took a few more photos outside…

and then it was time to go…

And we slept for about a week!

Thanks for reading Mint, and for all your nice comments and emails about our wedding! Harry Taylor took all these photos, and he would be great for your wedding, too : )

Tomorrow I’ll have one final wedding recap post (I’m excited about that one!), and then normal, mostly non-wedding posting will resume on Monday. Assuming I remember how… haha.

To see all of our wedding posts on one page, please visit here.

We were so lucky with our reception location! It was absolutely gorgeous, and like I mentioned before, required very little in the way of decoration. With the flowers, luminaries, lanterns, and ferns it was just right.

Our guests arrived at the reception around 6pm, so there was a couple hours of daylight to enjoy the beach view.

Our caterer was really attentive to Brendan and me. In other words, we actually got to eat! For the appetizers and dinner, they prepared plates for us so that we could sample a little bit of everything.

I am a big flower person, but we just couldn’t afford to have flowers all over the place! My mother-in-law bought ferns, blue hydrangeas, and white roses for the rehearsal dinner from Costco, and the next day we brought them to the reception. Our florist added colorful roses and tulips to make them fit in with her arrangements. It was a wonderful way to have more flowers without spending much more money!

You probably noticed that there were lots of rocking chairs… They were another big plus of our reception location. Having rocking chairs and benches meant that we didn’t need to have tables (which meant fewer rentals and centerpieces). Instead, people ate on their laps, sat with whomever they pleased, and mingled while they ate. Everyone loved it! I was worried that some of our guests (especially the older ones) might not be comfortable eating on their laps, so we set up and reserved a few tables (above).

We rented burlap runners for the reserved tables (which ended up being even cheaper than buying burlap fabric), and all of the flower arrangements from the florist were in mason jars that I bought at the grocery store. Our florist kept the gold rim around the edge and tied twine and ribbon around the top of the jars, which I thought was so cute.

We also had a few cocktail tables for people to eat and drink around. They had burlap sashes, tied in a bow at the middle.

A few more photos coming this afternoon!

(Photos are by Harry Taylor, unless otherwise noted. To see all the posts on our wedding, please visit this page.)

When we arrived at the reception, Brendan and I went straight down to the beach with our photographer. We did a quick photo session, and the pictures we got were some of my favorites from the whole day.

All photos by Harry Taylor.

(To see all the posts on our wedding, visit this page.)

Wedding dress shopping was lots of fun, but also hard! I felt like I was playing dress-up in many of the gorgeous bridal gowns I tried on. I didn’t want something over-the-top sexy, but I didn’t want to feel girlish either and it couldn’t be too fancy. I went for a Nicole Miller gown, and I absolutely loved it. The fact that it was a little untraditional suit me perfectly, and the off-white, greyish color looked better with my super-fair skin than most other wedding dresses. It was on the casual side, which went well with the feel of our reception. Above all, it was the most comfortable dress I tried on! You can find used versions of my dress for sale here.

I also loved my bouquet. I asked our florist to make something casual and slightly imperfect, that looked like it was picked from someone’s backyard. She chose lots of greenery, hydrangeas, white roses, and cottage flower.

The bracelet I wore was a birthday & wedding present from Brendan. Even though he hadn’t seen my dress, he managed to pick the perfect accessory. Once I had the bracelet, I shopped around for a necklace to match and found the perfect thing at Nordstrom. I wore my great-grandmother’s earrings.

I bought grey ballet flats from J.Crew but they ended up being really uncomfortable and I took them off immediately after the ceremony. This is strange, but I don’t remember what shoes I wore at the reception! (I guess some details just don’t matter in the end…)

I’ve already talked a little about my veil. It was a beautiful, long, lace-edged veil that has been in my family for generations. More photos coming this afternoon!

(Photos copyright Harry Taylor unless noted. To see all posts on our wedding, please visit this page.)