This past month I had the honor of helping with the decorations for the wedding of some dear friends that got married here in France. I worked closely with the brides parents for 2 weeks just before the wedding and enjoyed every minute of it.
Aren't they cute!!
First we worked on the chapel. we used a lot of orchids (the brides favorite flowers), which we put in glass vases (roots and all!). I wish I'd taken more pictures. we had little bouquets of orchids pinned to the back of some of the chairs which you can see if you look closely.
Then at the reception we had a couple things outside for the guests to see before entering the reception hall. We made this nice big canvas print using one of their engagement pictures. I used gel medium to transfer the image to the canvas, there are tons of tutorials out there on how to do that, such as
here.
We bought an ugly blueish frame that was on sale and painted it orange (their colors were orange and red), then we added chicken wire and made little place cards to help the guests find their table.
Inside we set up a table with the framed menu and a cute vintage suitcase to hold the cards.
I got to display my vintage camera which I'd just found in a flea market near by a couple weeks earlier.
For the menu we found this gorgeous frame, no need to paint it, that's just the way it was originally:) I cut a stencil out with my silhouette and used it to paint on the heart shaped bush and the bride and grooms initials onto a piece of cream colored fabric. I put the fabric in the frame and added the menu to the front of the glass using vinyl.
We desperately tried to find a real vintage suitcase but had no luck. Instead we went to the craft store and found this lovely cardboard suitcase with nice hardware. It was bare thick cardboard and needed a lot of work to get this finished look. I'm not great at sewing and dont own a proper sewing machine so I was very glad the brides mom took care of decorating the case. We even created a leather imitation effect using
this tutorial. We used
this image as inspiration for the suitcase.
The bride and groom's table. We weren't in charge of the flowers for the other tables and had ordered a small flower arrangement just for their table, sadly we decided to just trust the florist on this one but she forgot and ended up putting together a rather unflattering flower arrangement which we ended up not using.
We created a photo corner using a pergola and a very pretty garden bench. We covered the pergola with ivy and I made a banner to hang on the front (made the banner 20 minutes before the reception hall was to be decorated).
We found these test tubes at the craft store. I hot glued lace ribbon around the top making sure to leave two little openings to put nylon thread through them and hang the tubes to the top of the pergola.
There were a few other cool things that I dont have pictures of, the mother of the bride drew a big leafless tree on a big canvas and we had orange and red ink pads for people to use and put their finger prints on the empty branches. It was something like
this. We also brought in some tall branches in a pot and made adorable little cards that had beads hanging from them that people could write on and then hang on the tree branches for the bride and groom.
We were going for a romantic decor with light vintage touches, I'm very happy with the way things turned out but most importantly the bride and groom loved everything as well and that makes me very happy. After spending so much time with their families before the wedding I was very emotional the day of the wedding, I was very honored to be a part of their special day. Thanks again Camille and Simon!!
