INSPIRATION

For about a year, I planned my own wedding which involved a substantial amount of logistics, visual design & crafting (I LOVE to craft). It was the largest visual design project I’ve ever led from start to finish & it was all worth it because it was perfect.

My wedding was on June 18th, 2022 in my in-laws’ backyard on Long Island. It was inspired by the International Rose Test Garden in Portland, OR, the nation’s oldest rose garden & one of my favorite spots ever with over 10,000 rose bushes. Since it wasn’t fair to ask our guests to fly there, I decided to recreate it. Here’s how I did it.

COLOR PALETTE

One of the first elements of design I like to explore is color. I browsed a plethora of different colored roses on Pinterest & came across a brand called Ling’s Moment that carried high quality, faux floral arrangements & wedding decor. They offered many different color collections, but the color collection I gravitated towards the most was the blush & cream collection: a beautiful pastel pink & cream that exemplified a romantic spring wedding.

An attractive product that Ling’s Moment also carried was a flower box: loose foam & silk flowers in every color you could possibly imagine that could be utilized in any craft or added to any existing Ling’s Moment product. As I was browsing through all the colors, I landed on adding peach as the third primary color. Blush, cream & peach: a gorgeous, warm & welcoming combination of pastels. Rose gold, a shiny eccentric tone of copper, was later added as an accent color. It even has the word “rose” in it. We love rose gold so much, our rings were made of rose gold.

WHIMSICAL, VINTAGE FURNITURE

A new trend emerging in the wedding industry is vintage furniture: Victorian-style sofas & chairs, old rustic trunks used as tables, antique vanities & dressers used to display a wedding cake, paisley rugs placed outdoors, sophisticated colored glass goblets used for a water glass & more. I saw several wedding portraits of couples sitting on vintage sofas & wanted to follow suit & rent a lounge set or two. Plus, the lounge set could be used for additional seating (who doesn’t want to enjoy their cocktail on an outdoor sofa?).

After contacting 6 different vintage rental companies on Long Island, I ended up hiring Early Bird Vintage, a small business that carried a very wide range & fanciful collection of all sorts of items. My final list of rental items from them included two lounge sets in the blush, peach & cream color scheme, two white vanities & mismatched peach & pink goblets. All of these items added a nice antique element that further allowed my romantic wedding vision to come to life.

A CUSTOM BAR

Another common wedding trend I came across was mobile bars. Mobile bars involve a bartender serving glamorous cocktails out of a clean, polished & lavish truck. I researched many different mobile bars and almost booked one called Tailored Fox Events.

Tailored Fox Events was a mobile bar repurposed from a horse trailer. What differentiated Tailored Fox Events from other mobile bars was that they offered a lounge set as well as a hydration station, a cart full of non-alcoholic beverages that guests can freely serve themselves. This became part of my influence in renting a lounge set & creating my own hydration station.

Since this mobile bar was out of my budget, I took a different approach for a custom bar. As I looked around my in-laws’ backyard, I thought, “Why not turn their shed into a bar? It’s unconventional & we can save some backyard space for other things.” My husband then thought of the idea to paint, stack & then nail in a bunch of wooden crates together. It took us 3 days to build the wooden bar.

HANDMADE SIGNS

My mother-in-law studied art & calligraphy in the 80’s and volunteered to create most of our signs. I handed her a bunch of secondhand, vintage-style frames & she used several different techniques to create the signs: subtly sponge painting the background, pairing the signs with fun printed paper, using elegant & curvy calligraphy. Since she made most of the signs & I wanted to give her a break, I made the largest sign myself: the itinerary. It was definitely a unique itinerary sign & all of these signs were much more personalized than a typical printed sign.

A SPECIAL MEMORIAL

My father passed away in November 2020 & before that, my husband’s uncle/godfather passed away a few years prior. So I wanted to do something special to honor them.

For inspiration, I browsed Pinterest & Instagram and decided to execute an idea others have used to display seating charts or old photographs of the couple. They nailed a bunch of picture frames to a wooden pallet. I mixed & matched both secondhand & new picture frames in my color scheme, gathered & printed pictures of close family members who passed away, and then nailed them into a free wooden pallet my in-laws’ found for me. And of course I added a Ling’s Moment floral garland to the top to further match the rest of the decor.

The memorial received tons of compliments. It conveniently took up minimal space since the wood pallet rested along the fence. Long Island is also very windy, so the nailed frames survived the 60+mph wind on my wedding day.

A DREAMY ARCH FOR AN INTIMATE ceremony

The arch took quite a lot of experimenting to construct. I purchased drapes & arch flowers from Ling’s Moment & researched different ways to hang drapes & arrange arch flowers. After 3 hours of playing with the arrangements, I chose to braid the blush & cream drapes & then drew the remaining fabric back like curtains. I hung the flowers southwest & northeast of the arch for asymmetry.

My husband then added sandbags to hold the arch down the day of the wedding since it was incredibly windy. My wedding coordinator then decorated the sandbags with Ling’s Moment flower garlands.

We chose to have a time capsule ceremony where we added memorabilia we’ve collected while dating: brochures from different tours we went on, cards we’ve made for each other on special occasions, trinkets & more. We plan to open the time capsule on our 1 year wedding anniversary.

AN EASY, UNIQUE SEATING CHART

I browsed through tons of creative seating chart ideas: champagne walls labeled with each guest’s name, a single flower in a vase with each guest’s name, a citrus fruit with each guest’s name, a planter with each table number & guests’ names. However, I wanted a very inexpensive seating chart with minimal work since I was already putting a lot of work into other decorations.

I also wanted to repurpose something that would otherwise end up in the trash: wine bottles. Instead of spending money on planters displaying each table number with all the guest names, how about we use wine bottles instead? My in-laws’ drink a lot of wine when they have guests over, so I asked them to collect all their empty wine bottles. While browsing Etsy, I finally found a shop that created & printed wine bottle labels used as seating charts.

All I had to do was soak the empty wine bottles in warm water & baking soda for about half an hour. This process allowed the existing wine labels to be removed. Then, I carefully stuck the Etsy wine bottle labels where the old label was located and…voila! Hello, easy seating chart execution.

LAST-MINUTE FLORAL CHANDELIER

I purchased 3 floral hoops from Ling’s Moment: one small, one medium & one large. I wasn’t sure what to do with them or where to hang them. Two days before the wedding, I came up with the idea to turn them into a chandelier. We placed them above each other in ascending size & I tied them with twine. It took about an hour to line the hoops up as evenly as possible. We then added more flowers from the Ling’s Moment flower boxes & added 2 eucalyptus string lights to the bottom hoop. We refrained from adding more string lights because they each had a battery pack which would add too much weight to the chandelier.

My husband got on the tallest step of the ladder & hung the floral chandelier in the center of the tent above the dance floor. The chandelier looked so professionally crafted that most of our guests’ thought we purchased it! They were impressed to learn we crafted it.

BLUSH & PEACH DESSERTS & Local pies

As much as I love sweets, I am not a fan of too much frosting. Naked frosting was another ubiquitous trend in the event world, a lesser spread of frosting that exposed some of the cake, so that’s what we went with. My husband, though not too into sweets, liked vanilla cake & I loved chocolate. I mustered up the compromise to select a marble cake. Finally, we decided to decorate the cake with simple blush & peach roses.

Another dessert I’ve always loved but did not eat frequently because it was overpriced was macarons. I saw a lot of pretty macaron towers on Pinterest, so I ordered a macaron tower in blush & peach.

My in-laws’ insisted on picking up a few pies at a local pie shop nearby. They mentioned the pies were out of this world: the best pies you’ll ever taste in your life. I was skeptical at first. But after one bite of blueberry pie, I immediately withdrew my skepticism & agreed these were the best pies I’ve ever had.

chic FAVORS

To support small businesses, I ordered all 3 of my favors from Etsy. Reinforcing the garden theme, I ordered wildflower seeds packaged in small craft envelopes with customized print: Let Love Grow. I also wanted to continue the rose theme so I thought, “Which item comes in a rose shape?” Soap! I selected cream & pink rose-shaped soaps as the second favor. Finally, I wanted to offer something edible & rose-flavored. I found these lollipops consisting of many sophisticated flavors including white peach, rose & honey with tiny rose petals infused into the candy.

My mother-in-law wanted other candy options, so she filled some personalized craft paper bags with candy including heart-shaped chocolates wrapped in rose gold foil. And there you have it: 4 total favors for guests to enjoy.

CONCLUSION

I received a multitude of compliments on my wedding & all my decor & crafts. My family & friends were all very impressed & grateful to have experienced such a personalized , visually pleasing & fun wedding (& of course to witness the marriage ceremony). All the hours, days, weeks & months of work I put into my wedding resonated within the quality of every aspect it consisted of. Though my wedding is over, I continue to browse modern wedding trends with the hopes that one day, I may be hired to be a visual designer for events in a future endeavor.