Throwback Indie Wedding Guide 2011: A Wedding Tale: Vintage & DIY Style – Alexandra & Ryan (Part One)
Hello loves, it has been one crazy week here at the VI house. I'm finally getting over a very painful sinus infection and trying to play catch-up! Welcome spring! I'm officially done with winter, how about you? Until things are back to somewhat normal here please enjoy some throwback Indie Wedding Guide this weekend from some of my favorite past features.
How did you meet? Ryan and I met at university. He was in a fraternity, I was a new member of a sorority and we were informally paired together as a "big brother" and "little sister." We had a lot of study dates together, and I was the "manager" of his basketball team – a job that mostly consisted of showing up to each game wearing a suit jacket and bearing baked goods! One moonlit night, while hanging out in my dorm room, Ryan decided to serenade me on the guitar. Then, in a wild wild stroke of fate and mad destiny, he kissed me. Two minutes later, he was outside on the pavement, and I was inside, fuming. And thinking. And wondering. But wondering turned into liking, and liking turned into plotting, and plotting turned into baking, and baking turned into ill-advised jogging dates together and mad shopping sprees and moments of insanity, and those moments of insanity? They turned into love! We've been together ever since!
What did you do to make your wedding "green" or "eco-friendly"? Ryan and I are very environmentally-conscious. Although we were planning a rather elaborate wedding, we wanted to make sure that we were being as responsible as possible. Having a vintage-inspired wedding allowed us to reuse a lot of materials – I bought and dissected an old wedding gown; turning its lace and satin into pieces of our hand-made paper-maché cake topper, and reusing millinery bits from the veil to decorate my DIY wedding slippers.
My grandmother's lace was hand-tacked onto my hoopskirt for a "peekaboo" effect, and I reused vintage 1950s brooches to adorn both my bridal bouquet and my hair. All of the felt projects in the wedding (my rehearsal bouquet, the thirty-odd hand-sewn felt birds for the floral "tree" centerpieces, the hand-made ipod holders for the wedding party) were made with ecofelt – a 100% post-consumer product.
I re-used the patterned scraps from our hand-made invitation suites to line thank-you card envelopes, as well as to decorate the insides of our table numbers. Extra blank invitation pieces were scored and calligraphed into place cards for each place setting. To cut down on emissions, we provided shuttles for our guests on the wedding day, and to reduce waste, we gave away the centerpieces at the end of the night.
What was your favorite wedding detail? It would be hard to pick just one! I worked very, very hard on personalizing our wedding. In total, I had about twenty five DIY projects for our wedding, and I loved every one! Our completely hand-made invitations were drawn by me with India ink and old-school pen nibs. I calligraphed all of the envelopes for our invitations, all of the place cards at the wedding, and all of the thank-you notes as well.