Wedding Week: The Reception (Part Two)/ The Details

Well, friends...we've come to the last post for Wedding Week! Today I'm excited to show you my favorite details from the day. We wanted our wedding to be personal, beautiful and as inexpensive as possible. So, everything was DIY-- even our food! Read on...

My favorite project for the wedding was our hand made invitations. I designed them and got the supplies from Michael's and Paper Source. My wonderful man and I spent hours cutting, stamping and gluing them and we went through each DVD in the Planet Earth series.

I forget the exact numbers but we ended up saving lots of money and they turned out more beautiful than anything else I had found.

This is the only picture I have of our programs but they were also hand made. We used the same orange stamp as the invitations and the same raspberry lettering. Inside, we wrote special blurbs about each member of the bridal party and a timeline of the ceremony. The back of the program had random fun facts about Chris and me.

Our response cards were postcards with a request asking guests to draw what they thought the bride and groom would look like on our wedding day. It was a blast checking the mail each day to see what our friends and family came up with and our favorites were framed and displayed at the reception. They are now hanging in our hallway and I love seeing them each day.

(Hint: The postcard option also saved us money on stamps!)

On to the reception!

For our guest book, I bought a scrapbook at Michael's and made pages with pictures of me and Chris in the middle. The guests wrote messages around the pictures and the guest book is now in a basket in our living room where we can flip through and remember the day. My one regret was that we didn't make an announcement about the guest book and it was not in an obvious place so not many people signed it.

I also hand painted our initial letters for the table. I recently repainted and repurposed them in the house and I plan to show them to you in a future post!

I keep wanting to say that each part was my favorite of the day! I loooved the linens that we rented from a local party rental company. Here's our sweetheart table.

Below you can see the cocktail tables and dj table with iridescent orange/gold and raspberry/gold iridescent tablecloths and sashes. We also ordered paper lanterns online and even though half of them ended up on the ground by the end of the evening, they were the perfect way to add even more color to the reception.

To keep costs down, we used plain white tablecloths on the tables, and added just a splash of color with the centerpieces.

We kept the centerpieces super simple. We borrowed glass bowls from some church members, floated some orange slices and pink peonies in there and placed the whole thing on gorgeous iridescent silk napkins.

Ok, are you ready to start drooling? Our food was phenomenal.

Chris and I love to travel so we decided to do a buffet inspired by foods from some of the countries we have visited. And it was also a "do-it-yourself project". I've told you how amazing my mom is so it shouldn't surprise you that the buffet line was her labor of love (well, so was pretty much everything at the reception). She brainstormed with me for hours on which foods we should have and then she used her knowledge and connections from years of catering to make it happen. What she didn't cook herself, she enlisted help with and like I said yesterday, we feasted like royalty.

Delicious appetizers:

First came an antipasto and penne pasta representing Italy.

Taquitos for Mexico.

Chick-fil-a strips for the US of A.

(I think Chris was more excited about these than he was about marrying me. Ok, maybe not... but close.)

Paella for Spain.

(Also, this is probably the best picture of the menu cards and holders that I made. I hand painted each block and designed the cards describing each menu item.)