I am so excited to share with you today’s real wedding. I have some many great pics I am going to break it up into two days worth of inspiration. One of our readers, Sara, emailed me and shared some of her great wedding pics and then filled me in on all the details. Sara included great ideas and info on some of her DIY projects which you could use at your own wedding. Below you can read all about this wedding from the bride herself. Come back tomorrow to see part II.
We got married at a lakeside community called Lake of the Forest in Bonner Springs, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City. Lake of the Forest started as a summer retreat for Kansas Citians who came there by train 100 years ago. Now the community is a year-round “retreat” for residents. I actually grew up there and knew that fall weddings were the best for the Lake.
We were married underneath beautiful sugar maples lakeside that had just turned a beautiful bright orange, and the reception venue (the Lake’s Clubhouse) was built in 1917 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Most of our wedding decorations were dictated by this location, so we chose a vintage but rustic approach to our wedding theme. Our invitations featured bare limbs with just a few leaves and two love birds, and we stuck with this theme through a lot of our decorations. For example, our wedding cake topper had love birds in a nest and our guest book (my favorite detail!) was a bare tree decorated by leaf cut-outs that our guests signed. (I have to give props to my friend Jessica Langley who is an art student at the University of Kansas. She painted our tree for our guest book as a gift.) We will now frame our guest book and hang it in our home.
A big piece of the “rustic” feel was the wheat we used in decorating. We used wheat in the bouonnieers and centerpieces. We actually made all of the guy’s boutonnieers ourselves. They had twigs, berries, acorns, leaves and wheat. All of the wheat used in our wedding came from James’ grandfather’s farm in western Kansas. We also used lanterns and pumpkins for centerpieces. And all of the pumpkins used in our wedding were grown by James’ parents. We used pumpkins for centerpieces – we hollowed them out and used them as vases. And then we used mini pumpkins EVERYWHERE!
Our best DYI projects:
- The guest book!
- The boutineers
- The table numbers
- The wheat
- The pumpkins!
1 Comment
Mariette
January 17, 2012 at 6:00 pmI love your “guest book”, my daughter is looking for ideas for her rustic wedding coming up in July. Did you use a punch to cut out the leaves, if so what brand was the punch? Thanks, Mariette