The Mister and I celebrated our 4th anniversary last week.  In honor of that event, I thought I’d do a blog post on our wedding!  We dated and lived together for a LONG time before getting engaged.  A LOOONG time.  Because we were together for many years we felt kinda of silly about making a big deal about getting married.  We chose to keep our wedding small, simple, and budget friendly (mostly.)  I was my own wedding planner, and I planned our wedding in just two and a half short months!

Stand By Me, Ben E. King

We decided to get married in a small village in the Catskills of western New York state.  My parents live in this town, my mother grew up there,and I spent many a summer visiting my grandparents there.  I chose to have our ceremony at a sweet little white, country, church, just outside of town.

For our reception location we settled on The Chestnut Inn,  a lovely, quaint, lakeside Inn with a great restaurant, a fantastic view of the lake, and beautiful vintage rooms.

We had a very short guest list, (around 45 people,) family and a handful of friends.  We opted to skip the attendants, the wedding showers, the bachelor/bachelorette parties and focused on creating a ceremony and reception that fit us.

Our personal style is Vintage Modern.  I wanted our wedding to reflect this so I included several vintage details but also tried to keep things minimal and modern.  Our wedding colors were ivory, peridot, and plum.  I wore a simple tea length ivory dress.  And since it was mid September and chilly in the evenings, I paired the dress with a pretty, green, vintage-inspired cardigan.  I found a vintage beaded clutch at a thrift store and for jewelry I wore pearl posts and a simple Peridot drop.  The Mister wore a casual light khaki colored suit with a white shirt and a dark plum tie.

I did a fair amount of shopping on Etsy for our wedding.  I had been eying the fabric flower bobby pins over at Cultivar for some time. I loved the vintage look of them and contacted Katie to see if she could not only make me a set of custom bobbies but if she might also be able to make a matching bouquet. She was so sweet and accommodating!  Even though she hadn’t made a wedding bouquet before she was willing to take on the task. She ended up making my bobbies, my bouquet, the Mister’s boutonniere, bouts for our fathers and flower pins for our mothers.  (She has since made hundreds of wedding bouquets and I am honored to own her very first one!)

She’s Mine, Brett Dennen

My other Etsy wedding purchases were, our Invitation Design suite, from Studio Paquet, (this included invitations, rsvps, placecards, and table numbers.)  Our Soap favors, from Anderson Soap Company.  And, homemade sweets for our candy bar from Vintage Confections .  We got 3 different flavors of chocolate truffles, sea salt caramels, and some lime green suckers! It’s a shame they are no longer doing chocolates, those truffles were YUMMY!

Being the crafty gal that I am, I did some hand making of my own and made The Mister’s wedding band.  It’s Copper & Argentium Silver Mokume Gane.

I also made these simple paper cones to hold birdseed for the Wedding Ceremony.  I used pages from a weathered, illustrated copy of Charles Dickens stories.  The Mister put some chicken wire like netting inside of an old wooden crate so the cones could stand up.  We set the crate next to the door so that our guests could grab a cone as they exited.

For our final craft, The Mister and I created a CD with some of our favorite songs.  This was our second wedding favor.  Yes, we had two, I couldn’t quite seem to decide on one so went with both.  The Mister burned these discs using a Lightscribe burner which allows you to burn a “label” onto the surface of the disc.  I made envelopes for the discs with some ivory colored card stock, my printer, a glue stick, a hole puncher, and some ribbon.

After our ceremony, our guests drove up the hill to our reception location, where they enjoyed hor d’oeuvres and drinks on the Inn’s waterfront patio.

Because our reception location was an actual Inn restaurant, (that was open and serving dinner to regular patrons at the same time as our dinner,) I was somewhat limited on what I could do in terms of decor.  Also being my own wedding planner made things a bit tricky as I couldn’t be both at the church getting married and at the Inn setting up for the reception.  So I kept it super simple and just put mason jars with candles and vintage doilies on the patio tables.  Luckily the lake and the landscaping provided plenty of ambiance.  The Mister and I created an Ipod playlist and set up a couple of speakers on the patio and that served as our cocktail hour music.

After cocktails we had a delicious buffet dinner inside, in one of the Inn’s dining rooms.  Again decor was pretty simple.  Each table had three vintage glass jars of flowers and two tealights in scalloped jelly jars.  I embellished the napkin rolls with a plum colored ribbon and a single stem of bright green pom.  On one wall we set up a table to house the candy bar and our wedding cakes.  I used vintage white hobnail and green depression glass containers to serve the candy.  I purchased a few of these at a thrift store and borrowed the rest.  All the flowers I bought in bulk both online and at a local flower shop and I put the arrangements together myself.

We were very lucky to find a local band to play live acoustic music during our dinner hour.  They also acted as our MC after dinner, which was a huge relief to us as neither The Mister or myself wanted that task!  Of course I was a typical dazed bride and totally forgot to thank them at the end of the night.  So if you are out there, Lori and Chris Brown, THANK YOU!!  We are soo grateful to you!  Everyone really enjoyed your performance!

As I mentioned at the beginning of my post, this was a budget friendly wedding.  Our biggest expense was our reception venue and dinner.  It ended up being about seventy-five percent of our total cost.  I was able to keep the other elements of the wedding affordable by doing the following;  I shopped on Etsy, and I shopped at thrift stores.  I bought our flowers in bulk online.  I hired a local private baker to make our wedding cakes.  I hired someone to design our invitations but did all my own printing.  I purchased a “bridesmaid” dress instead of a wedding gown.  I borrowed my father’s vintage car to use as our “getaway” car instead of renting a limo.  I borrowed vintage jars and doilies from a kind neighbor.  A family friend was gracious enough to volunteer to play piano during our wedding ceremony.  Thank you Elaine!  My sister-in-law was kind enough to agree to be our wedding photographer, (while juggling a baby and a toddler!)  As you can see her photos are just beautiful!  Thank you so much Nicole!

And last but not least, a Great Big Thank You to our parents for giving us this lovely wedding!

Nobody Does it Better, Carly Simon