Wedding Edition

Happy Saturday babes! Sorry for the delay on this post, but as promised, here is the first part of our wedding. I need to do a couple of posts because there are so many photos and details that I want to share with you all. I hope that you enjoy them. This day was the BEST DAY EVER!

My husband’s name is Christian; we’ve been married since March 6, 2017. On that date, we had our legal marriage ceremony at City Hall with our closest family members. This past June, we had our Catholic wedding with family and friends. We are going to start with this wedding edition with the main details of the wedding. I wanted our wedding to be a bit different from the usual. Growing up, I imagined a glam wedding with lots of guests, but when it was time to think about the theme and the budget, everything changed!

What was your budget?

When we started planning, our budget was $10,000- that slowly grew. My first and main advice for planning a wedding with a strict budget: just stick with it! If you see that you’ve spent more money on a vendor (or on anything else for the wedding), try to compromise with lower prices on other needs. Balance is key!

How did you guys pick the theme, the venue?

I am a Spring and Summer fan, I try not to step out of my house during Winter. For this reason, I wanted the wedding either late Spring or early Summer. We did a few visits to indoor venues without having a theme in mind, then my husband suggested doing the wedding outdoors! That was when I started looking all over Pinterest for outdoor wedding inspirations and searching for rental vendors on google. I found a few rental companies but narrowed them down to two. Since they both rent out tents for huge parties, I asked them for a few outdoor locations to host a wedding. Both companies suggested the same venue! We then booked a tour around the venue and that became the one! We also visited both rental vendors to talk prices. I am a huge fan of Farmhouse décor. With the pins that I saved on Pinterest, I came to love the idea of a rustic wedding! It was perfect since our wedding reception was taking place at a lawn in the middle of a farm.

Vendors:

Queens County Farm Museum

Ace Party & Tent Rental

Photography & Video

www.gfiallos.com/

www.jerezdesigns.com/photography

To be honest, I didn’t want a tent. I just wanted the space filled with string lights but the rental company didn’t rent the dance floor without a tent so we had to get a tent- something I wasn’t happy about in the beginning.. I started pinning again on Pinterest for tent weddings and I found so many ideas including tents with side curtains. They really dressed up the tent and made it more stylish for the event. To see my wedding inspirations, you can check my wedding board here in Pinterest.

Now let’s talk about the decor!

What was the budget for your decorations, flowers? Where they expensive?

For a wedding, everything is expensive just because of the title “WEDDING”. My budget for all the decorations was very low. Something that saved me a lot of money was floral arrangements. Many floral companies would charge the triple of what we paid for wedding flowers. But we were lucky to have a family friend who helped me through the whole process of creating the floral arrangements. My theme for the flowers were mostly greens rather than actual flowers.

For our sweetheart table, I rented a half moon table. For the MR & MRS signs that I purchased on Amazon and spray painted them gold. The floating candles and the votive candles are all from Michael’s. I got the vases for the floating candles at Dollar Tree for a dollar each. I used four for the sweetheart table and got 13 more for our centerpieces. We rented the tablecloths from our party coordinator rather than our rental vendor.

Shop The Sweetheart Table Decor

[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3324470″]

Omg! The cake was amazing! While planning the wedding I wanted fondant cake because to me it’s just the prettiest for a wedding. But I had a few concerns regarding fondant cake.

#1 Fondant cake for a wedding is super expensive!

#2 Many people don’t like the taste of fondant!

Did you have a fake cake since it was outdoors?

I have heard of having a fake cake and having pre-cut pieces to give to guests but no, I didn’t. We had the cake outside the entire time until it was time to cut it.

The cake was a gift from our wedding god-mother (my aunt) and we ordered the cake from a friend’s bakery. I decided on this naked cake a month before the wedding! My pinning on Pinterest for an outdoor wedding didn’t finish until the week before the wedding!

For the cake topper, I didn’t want anything traditional so I googled cake toppers and found this one in Etsy. It was refresh painted and super shiny! I really do not know what happened to the cake topper after the caterers cut the cake, but I really wanted to save it.

Shop The Cake Topper

[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3324492″]

Did you give any favors?

Yes! I’ve always wanted to give Wine bottles with our photo as favors. The chosen photo was taken a month before the wedding, while shooting our pre-wedding video.

I went wine shopping with my husband to choose the perfect wine for our favors. He knows more about wines since he’s a bartender, but I loved this one because of the gold top.

We made the labels ourselves with the help of our bridesmaids. I purchased two label packets because I had 60 families attending the wedding and needed to give a bottle to each. One of my maids of honor created the template on a Word document.

Since we had lanterns for the centerpieces, I chose a lantern for gift card holders. I purchased this exact lantern at HomeGoods and I also found this small picture frame which I thought would be nice placed with the lantern.

While searching around for the flowers a few months prior to the event, the person who was helping me with the floral arrangement thought it would be a cute idea to add a grass runner to a table. So we added the runner to this table. The grass runner was made from dried moss; you can find it at your local floral marker or even on Amazon. What do you think? I loved it!

Shop The Favor Table Decor

[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3324516″]

The lanterns were so perfect for an outdoor wedding. For a total of 13 tables, these lanterns were a bit expensive, but am glad that everyone loved them and took them home! A group of ladies and my bridesmaids gathered on the day before the wedding to put together the floral arrangements (centerpieces, bouquets, garlands). Thank you, ladies! Btw – I added moss inside the lanterns to make them fuller with greens!

This is the only photo that I have of the centerpieces, but here is one a better one.

There were a few things that I do not have photos of: the entrance of the reception tent. I had a stand for the seating chart and next to it, I had a small table with a basket full of fans for the females.

We also made the seating chart! One of my maids of honor spent two days painting and writing on this chart and I love it! I still have it in my closet. haha

Shop The Wedding Decor

[show_shopthepost_widget id=”3324534″]