We recently had the fun and exciting adventure of designing and planning a wedding featured on TLC's Four Weddings show. If your not familiar with this show, the concept is both interesting and terrifying! Basically, the four Brides agree to attend and judge each others weddings on four categories: food, dress, venue, and overall experience. The Bride with the highest score wins a 5 star honeymoon.
While this might sound like a great way to get a free honeymoon, being faced with the opinions of three Brides who desperately want that honeymoon for themselves can turn out to be a scary proposition!! Another important thing to note about this show is that the Brides don't necessarily have the same budget (or anywhere close to the same budget). This is where we picked up with our sweet Bride, Anna. When we first met with her about the wedding, she had already interviewed with the show and agreed to have her wedding featured. It quickly became apparent that the budget for our Four Weddings wedding was very small. Of course, this would be a problem in hands of lesser Wedding Planners... We, however, were up to the challenge!! Here is a shot of our fabulous couple on the big day....
LET THE PLANNING BEGIN
We were beyond thrilled to team with the wonderful Jenna Lee of Splurge Events. We have a wonderful history of working together on events... awesome events. Ha! Take that tiny budget, you are no match for our awesomeness! Since the lovely Anna and Garritt are a bit young, we decided to play up their youthfulness with the theme A+G = LOVE. Anna chose the color scheme of red, black, and white.....
Anna's friends and family came together to help us create a fabulous cookie station with homemade cookies. The Milk and Cookie station was a huge hit and played right into our youthful theme! Score!
Below is the milk station... this picture doesn't do it justice! Guests were encouraged to add their favorite flavored syrup to their glass of milk. And the straws... the straws were oh so cute!!!
Made with love for Anna and Garritt...
BUT WAIT!! Our sweets don't end there!! The invitation promised a dessert reception, and we aim to make good on our promises... Check out the fabulous candy bar (warning: all dieters should discontinue reading this section.... if the cookie pictures didn't already drive you to your local girl scout, these will surely get you to the confection aisle of your local Tom Thumb.)
We used one of Jenna's fabulous vintage doors as the table for this station... so cute!!
No dessert reception is complete without the main dessert... the cake! Anna and Garritt chose to have two; both a Brides and Grooms cake. Garritt worked on the Groom's cake with the Baker on his own. His love of music was the theme and the Baker created a cake shaped like his guitar and amp. Check out the pictures below... it's so realistic!! Cutting that amp cake was a bit challenging, but once the task was done everyone agreed it was delicious!
TIME TO GET CREATIVE
Each stage of planning this reception left us faced with the same challenge... how do you make something beautiful, fun (like Anna and Garritt), and unique with little to no money. Here is what we came up with....
The first thing we did is a no brainer, but it's something that might be under estimated by a lot of brides... it's using the resources available to you! Here are some examples of how we used what we had:
We needed to address the fact that the reception space had a dimly lit overhang area. Lighting is one of the most often overlooked elements by brides planning their own weddings. It not only gives a dramatic look to the decor you've worked hard on, it also effects the overall mood and feeling of the reception. In short, has a direct reflection on how your guests feel about your event. Obviously, in this instance, hiring an event lighting vendor was out of the question. Our solution: Lamps. Anna and her friends and family collected as many lamps as they could get their hands on (in our color scheme of course). Check out the results....
With our lighting issue taken care of, we moved on to the tables.... time to find some beautiful, creative, but cost effective centerpieces. Sticking to our mantra of "use what you already have" we decided to use Gracie's tall vases on a portion of the tables. Now all we needed was something to fill them with... let's see here, what could be colorful, unique, low in cost, and smell wonderful?? You guessed it, APPLES! Yes we have done it before, but if it works, it works! The most common wedding centerpieces use flowers to make them beautiful. Since fresh flowers were out of the question (read: budget) for this one, we decided to get really creative and make our own. Jenna led the charge with this project. She gathered the troops (once again, community in action) and led them through the process of assembling these awesome creations. Check out the fabulous results of our apple/ flower creation...
Some of our flowers were constructed using parts of old unreadable Bibles. This was significant to Anna and Garritt because their desire was to have the Word of God in every part of their wedding. We also used other old and interesting books. These are a great DIY and you can use almost any book you can find to create interesting and beautiful flowers. If you would like to find out how to make these flowers yourself, CLICK HERE
It's important to use more than one type of centerpiece to make the layout of the room interesting. For our second centerpiece option used a collection of different sized eclectic candles covered in beautiful papers with ribbon. Candle light is such an easy way to give an event ambiance. To keep with the fresh apple look, we elevated each candle collection on a circle of apples.
The rest of the reception decorating definitely relied on our idea of using what you have. If you are planning a reception or event, be sure to look around your house and see what will work for the event. Here are some fun elements we rounded up....
Here's an overall shot of the main reception room...
STILL USING OUR RESOURCES....
So this is when it's helpful to have a Wedding Planner~ or two. Any time you are doing a "dessert reception" it's important to include at least few options for the guests that are "snacky" and salty~ something needs to balance out all of that sugar! We wanted to research all of our options for this element of the reception. We looked into the cost of providing appetizers ourselves but ultimately found that one of our wonderful vendors was willing to make us a great deal. Thank you Fort Worth Catering.com!! We were able to offer our guests a wonderful Tex-Mex spread of Chimichangas, Chips, Queso and toppings for a wonderful price!! What a blessing!! Here are some pics of the food.....
A FUN ELEMENT
The last thing that deserves a mention is the cute photo booth we put together. Our goal was to create an extra element of entertainment for our guest. Since an actual "booth" wasn't in the budget, we put together an area and had a friend take the pictures. Jenna brought props for everyone to use in the photos. Volunteers printed the photos during the reception.
Here is our photo prop display:
Priceless keepsakes for the Bride and Groom!!
After the pics were taken, our community of volunteers printed them and we displayed them here...
The printed photos went into this forever album for Anna and Garritt
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