Bright + Modern NYC Wedding

Buckle in, because we’re about to share the wedding of event and floral designer extraordinaire Juli Vaughn of Juli Vaughn Designs. With some planning expertise from Leah of Color Pop Events and the help of some of New York’s finest vendors, the wedding turned into a “color-filled, festive, whimsical event” in the bride’s own words. Thank you to Haley Sheffield for taking these wonderful images!

From the bride, Juli: When Josh and I started planning our wedding, the first thing we realized was that we wanted all of our dearest friends present and involved and made to feel like our wedding was the most fun they’d ever had. It was the driving force in all of our details and all of our festivities. Because it was the second wedding for both of us, we chose to solely invite friends instead of family. We planned a weekend of events – Friday night tacos and karaoke instead of a rehearsal, morning yoga the day of the wedding to calm nerves and start the day off right, a double decker bus tour of NYC for the cocktail hour, and a pajama brunch at the hotel the day after the wedding.

Flower recipe: I designed the bouquet and other flower arrangements in copper and rose gold containers with lots of colorful garden roses, ranunculus, Dutch carnations, zinnias, kumquats, pomegranates, and peonies – all my favorite flowers and fruits!

We wanted to make sure that everyone also had lots of usable keepsakes from the weekend, so I hand dyed the welcome bags and filled them with things like “Take 2 Regret Nothing” Tylenol for after-drinking, peaches to represent our Georgia roots, and little custom gifts for each guest throughout the weekend. For something different, we provided our Instagram hashtag as a “tag” on the welcome bags so that the guests would have it for the entire weekend. We chose not to have seats at our ceremony so that our friends were surrounding our chuppah – symbolic of each of them being members of our wedding party. We made our chuppah together – figuring out and assembling each piece of copper pipe and tassel. I encourage creative couples to do a wedding project like this together – it’s a bit like assembling IKEA furniture – it proves you love each other and can work through “disagreements!” (Ha)

See Also

Intimate La Valencia Hotel Wedding Editorial with a Garden Luxe Feel

Our wedding “theme” was based on my favorite painting by Darren Waterston. It has watercolor-type agate shapes and tassels suspended in this super dreamy yet playful way. Much of his work also features shades of pink and coral which is how the color palette began. If you’ve seen any of my work, you know I just love color, so we spanned the hues out to be happy and bright. Being in the wedding industry has given me friends who are amazingly talented, so with the help of Leah from Color Pop Events the design exploded into a color-filled, festive, whimsical event. Our invitation suite (complete with an agate slice and New York Subway map!) was designed by Gubba Gumma. The agate slice had embossed gold lyrics from our processional song, “I Choose You” by Sara Barielles. The invitations were mailed inside personalized calligraphy boxes made by Ashley Buzzy McHugh – who also made our agate place cards and menus. My absolute favorite design element was the ceiling full of suspended ranunculus installed by Gina Paola Design. Josh absolutely loves cake and I absolutely love ice cream so we decided to have both! Our ice cream bar was from Luca and Bosco and our cakes were made by Nine Cakes. Josh is a video game designer so his was inspired by all of his favorite retro games and mine was covered in incredible sugar flowers and topped with a pink agate slice!

Wedding Music:
Groom’s Processional: “I Choose You,” Sara Barielles
Bride’s Processional: “How Long Will I Love You,” Ellie Goulding
Recessional: The theme song for Step by Step by Jesse Frederick
First Dance: “Thinking Out Loud,” Ed Sheeran