Soiree: A Wedding in the Capital

My friend Brittany and her husband Tim were married this fall in The Land of Lincoln. She had a gorgeous Illinois wedding that she's sharing today. Like most of us, she planned her own wedding- no wedding planner in site. I had her write the post to share inspiration and details of her big day.

 

Inspiration:

Being a 27 year old female, I had been involved in more weddings in the past 5 years than I can count.  When most people who knew me asked about my wedding, they'd say something like, “Oh, you probably have it all planned out.”  My response: “I don’t know everything I want to do, but I know lots of things I don’t want to do!”   Being behind the scenes at dozens of weddings showed me a lot about what works and what doesn’t, what goes over well and what's overdone. So with that, I have to thank all my friends who were married before me and inspired me to do… or not do something at my own wedding!

More than anything, I wanted our wedding to be unique.  I sewed each invitation indiviually from fabric that I had custom made in our colors. We made our cake "table" out of vintage windows and spindles that we took down in our first house that we are remodeling. Tim’s dad made all the chocolate for our favors. 

Of course I snatched ideas from other weddings I saw online.  Some of my favorite wedding sites include Style Me Pretty, Green Wedding Shoes, and Ruffled.  (It's really too bad that Pinterest debuted towards the end of my wedding planning.)

My last "inspiration"-and probably the most important--our budget! Isn't that the case for everyone?

Church/Venue:

First Presbyterian, downtown Springfield, Illinois (also known as Lincoln’s Church, as in Abe!)

We knew we wanted a traditional church with pews, hardwood floors and tall ceilings (none of which the church we belonged to had).  After a couple of months of visiting almost every church in town, we made the decision to have it here.  It worked out great since the church was across the street from the reception, held at The Hoogland Center for the Arts.

 
Look/Feel we wanted:

We wanted a traditional but simple wedding, nothing too flashy or overdone. We tried to focus on making sure our guests would be comfortable and enjoy the day.  Having a church that was over 100 years old wouldn’t have really set the stage for anything too modern.  Luckily, that wasn’t the look we were going for.

The Route 66 Car Festival is a huge annual festival in the downtown area that happened to be the same weekend as the wedding.  There were vintage cars everywhere, which made for some great photo opportunities!

{Guest found their table numbers via these window panes.}

The Bouquets

While looking through wedding sites and blogs, I kept coming back to pictures of succulents. I loved their look, and they weren't something that's seen much in my part of the country. Because succulents are really plants with small flowers, I also wanted to incorporate some larger flowers. I chose hydrangeas because I thought they would help brighten up the bouquets when mixed with the darker succulents.

{This is Heather popping my head into the post...One of my favorite things at the reception were these cards they had placed at guests' seats. They had fun questions about the bride and groom and a place for us to draw a picture of them. It was almost like a scrapbook page. We had fun filling them out, and I thought it was a great personal touch that I hadn't seen before.}

~SOURCE GUIDE~

Photography: Lark Photography

Fabric: fabric.com, fabricworm.com, Hawthornethreads.com (Fabricondemand.com- I used this site to print custom fabric I designed that listed all the guests' names to use as their place name card.)

Bride's Dresses: Mia Solano

Bridesmaid Dresses: Dessy.com 

Flowers: The Succulent Garden  (Etsy shop)
Because I live in the Midwest, finding succulents in the area is almost impossible since they need a warm, dry climate….so I turned to Etsy! I was able to order over 300 succulents plants and have them shipped in from California.

Advice for Brides:
I highly recommend, if possible, to do all your set up the day before the ceremony. I only had to make one quick trip to drop something off at the reception site on the wedding day. This left almost the entire day for me to relax, get ready, and enjoy the time with my girls. It made things so much less stressful by not having to worry about the details on the "day of". I couldn’t have been more pleased with how the day went. There were just a couple minor hiccups, but nothing that most guests would have ever noticed. I was very thankful things went so smoothly!

...And they lived happily ever after. Congrats Tim and Brit!

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