Crystal Gardens Wedding
This wedding sent from Heather Roth Fine Art Photography has a couple made in DIY heaven: one supremely crafty bride and one carpenter-by-trade husband who made together one truly beautiful wedding day. The guestbook postcards were given to one of the bridesmaids, who has been mailing them to the newlyweds in small handfuls ever since their nuptials. What a sweet way to reminisce their wedding day!
From the bride, Kate: Joel and I met 4 years ago on a four-wheeling, fun-loving country weekend trip away with mutual friends. We’ve been together ever since. He supports my crazy creative side that leaves our kitchen table covered in bits of paint, moss and beads. I support his dream to live on a farm. Together, we wanted a wedding that was completely us. We wanted our guests to leave knowing that everything from the ceremony to the cake was special to us. And I think we did exactly that!
Joel and I can easily be described as a hands-on, do-it-yourself couple. He’s a carpenter by trade and I dabble in a bit of everything art & crafty and have since I was little. I’ve always been really in love with hearing stories from the past, learning about where our families come from and shopping vintage. We both love to garden, he loves to grow vegetables & I love flowers. So from the minute he popped the question I knew our wedding would be filled with DIY, special touches with a vintage flair. We decided to combine our favorite things and to have a vintage garden wedding.
We decided to have an outdoor ceremony on site to keep it simple and we decided to personalize our ceremony by asking a good friend of mine, James Love to officiate. We were able to completely customize our ceremony to include things that we thought were special and meaningful including a wine and letter ceremony, music by really close friends, a ring warming ceremony by our parents and personalized vows. Our ceremony was perfect for us. And as much fun as I had at the rest of the wedding, the ceremony was easily my most favorite part!
We created a unique guest book by using vintage postcards I found from a antique store that was closing. We invited all the guests to write us a note and drop it in the mailbox which we had placed on the table. All the postcards were addressed to us and stamped. One of my bridesmaids took them home and has been mailing them to us a few at a time. We love getting the mail and finding sweet messages from our family and friends.
I wanted to make sure to include special touches that reminded me of my family. At the reception we used my parents toasting glasses from their wedding 36 years ago. My Mom and I use pieces of her wedding dress to create flowers for my DIY dress sash (my “something old”). We also used pieces of her dress to create a ring bearer’s pillow. Keeping family memories close by was so important to me. One of my grandmothers passed away almost 10 years ago and the other only a week before the wedding. I wore my late Grandmother’s pearls for the ceremony (my something borrowed) & I included pictures of both of my grandparents in a vintage locket on my bouquet to keep them close by. For my something blue, my mom stitched our wedding date into the lining of my wedding dress with blue embroidery floss.
Advice for future brides? Don’t forget about the ceremony. Make it as special and meaningful as possible. After all, that’s the reason you’re having a big party later on, it should mean something to the two of you! Oh, and ask for help. There are always lots of people offering to help you and sometimes it’s hard to give up control but ask for help so you can enjoy the process!
View all images from this wedding in the gallery
Location: Edwardsville, IL / Wedding Photographer: Heather Roth Fine Art Photography / Wedding Venue and Caterer: Crystal Gardens / Wedding Flowers: Les Bouquets / Wedding Dress: Galina Signature via David’s Bridal / Wedding Veil: David’s Bridal / Wedding Shoes: Etienne Aigner / Bridesmaids’ Dresses: ModCloth / Bride’s Hair: Dana of Treo Salon / Wedding Cake: Patty Cakes / Musicians: Lauren Connolly and Phil Hoffman / DJ: Party Time / Officiant: James Love
What a beautiful wedding. I love that the ceremony was the most important part! And I love the postcards too.
Please pop over to my website to see my wedding stationery designs.
Love
Amy
x
i love everything about this wedding! if the lovely bride kate sees this, would she mind sharing a few tips as to how she made her lovely sash (or emailing)? i’m struggling with mine and hers looks perfect.
xo
julia
Simple and beautiful, very nice!
I would have loved to see more of the ceremony – actually ANY photos of the ceremony seeing that the bride in the text put so much emphasis on it.
Hi Tia,
You can view all photos from the ceremony (and reception) in the photo gallery. Just click on any photo or on the link below the last image.
Lovely wedding! So personal and unique for this couple! We love her designer wedding dress, too. Beautiful bridal gown for such a perfect day!
love the moss numbered centerpieces!
Loving all the details! Especially the date that was hand sewn in! Everything looks amazing<3 Congrats to the lovely couple!
I am in love with the idea of having the guests write on postcards then the bridesmaids post them occasionally! So original & so romantic x One of the sweetest things ever! x
Ooooohhh … love seeing it all in print! It helps me relive our wedding day again!!
Julia – I’d love to help you out by giving you some more details about the sash my mom and I made!
To make the actual sash my mom used duponi silk (found at a local fabric store). It hooked in the front with hook and eye closures (we weren’t worried about how that part looked since it was covered by fabric flowers!
For the flowers we tried about 100 different things using every online tutorial I could find plus trying to figure out flowers we liked by looking at photos & other flowers in bridal shops. I ended up using 2. One was bought from this Etsy store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/OliniFloral
The other was made using netting from my mom’s dress and pieces of other bits of white fabric. Also I wanted to add a bit more drama so I bought a few feather and bead picks from the floral section of the craft store, I cut them to size & wrapped the bottom with floral tape. I attached all the feathers & flowers to alligator clips and just clipped those on to the sash that day.
Don’t be afraid to try things and keep changing them. We tried lots of different combinations before we found the winner!
Hope that helps 🙂
Kate, this brought tears to my eyes and helped get to know you and Joel better. He is my nephew who I visited regularly and even “babysat” on weekends away for his parents. But I don’t really know the adult Joel. I used to tease and tickle or hit him on the arm as a little one and while growing up at home. He and I had a special relationship as nephew/aunt. So, saw the adult Joel at his wedding and saw what he gave to this event. Thanks for sharing your dreams and your love for one another. You two will do well and I will continue to love him and you! Aunt Patty
Ruffled! Thank you so much for sharing this wedding on your beautiful blog, we really appreciate it. My couple is beyond excited and so happy you love all the special details + love they poured into this special day!
xox
Heather
Love the pictures! Everything looks absolutely beautiful! I love the rings by the way. My fiancee and I were going to use Tungsten Rings as our jeweler, but we found out they are bad news. (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Broken-Promises/250169371749153) I am definitely going to search around for other options now that I see the elegance you and your husband found in your rings.
LOVE this wedding! The crafty paper details are just gorgeous.
Chloe x
Love it! Perfect recap of a beautiful wedding! Happy 1 month to Joel and Kate!
Love the postcard idea! Really sweet 🙂
I would love to know how you made your invitations. They are amazing…. Beautiful wedding….
The invitations were actually pretty easy. I ordered all the paper and the kraft paper envelope enclosure from https://www.paperandmore.com
I mostly just used Microsoft Word and a few fonts I had downloaded to design the actual paper insert portion. I did use Photoshop for a bit of it, but honestly it’d be just as easy in Word.
I used manilla tags from the offie supply store for the RSVP cards & I printed both the manilla tags (with string removed) and the invitation through my home printer…nothing fancy at all!
I put all the pieces together by gluing the invitation in the enclosure, sticking the RSVP & envelope inside the pocket, then I used wide lace (that I bought for CHEAP on to wrap around the outside. Over the wide lace I wrapped thin green ribbon around a few times and used kraft paper self sticking circle labels (which I printed…again using Word with our initial on it) to stick all the lace/ribbon down.
Lots of pieces but really not so hard to put together and the results were exactly what I wanted!! Also found the vintage stamps by going to a stamp collecting store and asking for vintage, mint-condition, face value stamps. Had a huge bin to dig through and only paid face value but got the pretty vintage stamps I had wanted 🙂
I have always really liked the look of the handwriting on a chalkboard for weddings and putting “happily ever after starts here” is so adorable! I have a thing for vintage stuff as well. I love the cards and notes that are in that vintage, old brown wooden box. That’s such a cute idea for a guest book. I always suggest using photo strips from our photo booth to use a guest books. But a great way to tie those two together is attaching the photo strips to a vintage post card and putting it in the box.
-Kristin
wanna a wedding like this.