Berkeley Church Wedding

Any time Christine Lim and Sweet Woodruff collaborate, you can consider us happy wedding bloggers. From the Jenga guest book to the glittered Jimmy Choo heels, we soaked up all the details and fell in love with every single one. Just wait until you see the brilliant ivory and orange wedding cake from DT Bistro!

From the bride, Rebecca: Between our family and closest friends, we knew we would have a guest list of around 140 people. At the same time, we wanted to keep the wedding as intimate as possible. We tried to achieve that by keeping the colours warm and more importantly, incorporating little touches of ourselves wherever we could. We love board games so we placed a Jenga set by the guestbook and asked everyone to jot down marriage advice on each of the blocks. For our bonbonnieres, we sourced little tins of tea sachets from our favourite tea company, and we wrapped each tin with ribbon from my favourite store (Mokuba). (When Darin proposed, he had tied the ring to a long strand of Mokuba ribbon!)

Bouquet recipe: Lots of garden roses, ranunculus, dahlias, sweet peas, and veronica.

I’m not sure if we had an overall theme or style that we were trying to achieve, but we knew that there were certain things we just needed to have. String lights were a must – Christmas lights are a year-round decoration in our home! An added bonus, the warmth of the string lights looked so beautiful against the rustic backdrop of the old converted church where we celebrated. We also wanted to have long harvest tables, which felt more communal to us… like everyone is a part of one big family! The one other thing we knew we had to incorporate was our love for music. The reception part came easy – a good friend of ours had volunteered his DJ services as soon as we were engaged, and since he knows us so well we were comfortable giving him full reign of the evening. For the ceremony, we knew we had to find a specific someone but weren’t really sure how. One of our favourite places to go to while we were dating was a small creperie in Toronto, and on some weekends there would be an accordion player playing French-style cafe music. With a little google research we were able to connect with him, and we were so glad we did because having the accordion and clarinet play during the ceremony and cocktail hour was a definite highlight. They walked around amongst the guests during the cocktail hour, which really lent to a more intimate feel, and the sound of the music was so charming and old-worldly – a perfect match to our venue.

An exact colour scheme was hard to pin down, but in the end it became a mix of corals, peach, blush pink, and orange with touches of gold and silver. I was most excited about finding the dresses for each of the ladies in my bridal party – I knew I wanted them in different dresses all in neutral colours, and with a mix of texture (lace, brocade, etc). One of the DIY projects was putting together the seating chart. We had found a beautiful old wooden frame, not really knowing if it would be large enough to fit all of the place cards. With help from my bridesmaid, we stayed up one night measuring out twine to hang from the frame and properly spacing out all the cards to fit within it perfectly! Another project was the menu cards. Aside from ribbon, beautiful stationery/greeting cards is my weakness. Instead of printing out menu cards, I thought it would be a great idea to place cute Rifle Paper & Co. cards on the tables with the menu handwritten inside.

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Any advice for couples planning their weddings now? Don’t procrastinate! We had planned to take a few days off work leading up to the wedding day, so we ended up leaving quite a few things till the last minute. However, it just caused unnecessary stress and less hours of sleep! Try not to leave things like the seating arrangement and your thank-you speech till the week of the wedding – they ended up taking more time than we had expected.

Wedding Music:
Bridal Party Processional: “La Vie en Rose”
Bride’s Processional: Pachelbel’s Canon in D
Signing of the Registry: Gymnopedie
Recessional: The Wedding March
First Dance: “Our House,” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Parents’ Dance: “Stand By Me,” Ben E. King
The ceremony music was played by an accordionist and clarinetist. During the cocktail hour, they walked around playing a mix of French cafe style music and rock songs including ones from Beirut, The Strokes, The Kinks, Postal Service, Belle & Sebastian. Our wonderful DJ played an amazing mix of songs from the 60s and 80s (The Kinks, The Zombies, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, The Velvet Underground, The Smiths, The Cure), and more recent indie music (Sufjan Stevens, The Magnetic Fields, Pavement, Broken Social Scene, Beach House, St. Vincent). He even threw in Forever… by Jesse and the Rippers!

Wedding Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada / Photographer: Christine Lim / Flowers: Sweet Woodruff / Venue: Berkeley Church / Portraits Location: Spadina Museum / Groom’s Getting-Ready Location: Shangri-La / Wedding Dress: Reem Acra via White Toronto / Veil: White Toronto / Wedding Shoes: Jimmy Choo / Hair Pin: Jennifer Behr / Bridesmaids’ Dresses: BCBG, Laundry by Shelli Segal / Groom’s Suit: Freeman Formals / Caterer: Berkeley Catering / Wedding Cake: DT Bistro / Accordionist: Ronen Segall / DJ: This Broken Mixtape
Wedding Invitations: 7eightynine / Transportation: M&M Limousine