A Wedding Tale: Vintage & DIY Style – Alexandra & Ryan (Part One)

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.

 Stay tuned, you won't want to miss part two tomorrow!