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Photography: Love Me Do Photography
From the bride:
I knew from Day 1 of engagement extravaganza that I wanted to have a hand in the design of our wedding so I started collected ideas and vintage finds right away. I wanted it to feel eclectic and fun and colorful while still keeping the focus on the sentiment of the day. I wanted our wedding to feel “sweet bohemian with a touch of glamour” and I couldn’t have had more fun designing it!
One of the first things we did was design our save-the-dates and website. We turned our engagement photos, shot by my sister, into polaroids and then sent them out with the wedding and website information a few months before the big day. I wanted a really unique website so I designed and published the site (www.kenrickheartsmolly.com) and let it work as an introduction to our wedding day. We got to describe the venue, the people involved and also created a honeymoon-based registry for people to peruse.
We started by collecting milk glass bit by bit and accumulated a huge amount of gorgeous vintage glasses that we handed over the week of the wedding to our florist, Wade, at Blue Moon Florists. We had an overlying red heart and mix-matched patterns so I ordered the dessert napkins online and focused our paper products in that direction. I made the heart straws and flag stirrers to interject a little jazziness into the drink menu. I designed all the signage for the wedding, from the Blackberry Vodka Fizz signs to the Thank You signs to the Shawls sign and put all the little circle signs on stands I spray painted gold. I also designed the church programs, which included the patterns from the wedding invites. It was so much fun trying to put together something eclectic and fun but still cohesive and pretty.
The chalkboards were collected and used as menu boards, taxi information and also tacked onto a vintage planter to point guests towards the lawn games. I painted the large gold Cocktail Hour sign and hung it from a vintage bird cage stand to direct guests to the garden for cocktail hour. We came up with a guest book that touched on both our literary loves and our new address in Brooklyn (we moved to New York this summer) by having guests sign postcards made from Penguin Book covers that my parents will send us throughout our first year of wedded bliss.
One of the most fun elements to create were the escort cards and their display. I took two old bulletin boards and spray-painted them gold then pinned our heart escort cards backed in colorful patterns to them. A lot of guests tucked the colorful cards into their suit pockets like pocket squares. We also created the M & K moss letters on the welcome table and the table numbers with simple craft ingredients and a little creativity. The pretzel bags were made by me and kept with our little red heart theme, sending guests off with some Philly Love. I was lucky to have available to me a variety of my mom’s vintage luggage to store little props we’d collected, as well as the shawls and the pretzels.
I chose two of my favorite vintage sheets from my collection to create the two photobooths and left by them a big, red heart I made out of tissue paper for our engagement photos six months ago and a big vintage frame I found discarded by the roadside as props. Guests were greeted by another gold sign at the entrance that I made and hung from another vintage bird cage holder.
To send us off in sparkling style, I designed and assembled (with the help of my saint of a mother) little sparkler sendoff cards that were placed at each of the guests seats. They had attached to them three sparklers and a book of matches and we loved exiting under the tunnel of light our friends and family made for us in front of the Manor House.
Friends and Family help:
“It all started with my amazing sister Sarah, a graphic designer (www.eviandesign.com), who created our invitations by combining a mix-match batch of patterns with super fun and playful fonts. It 100% set the tone for the wedding. She made the RSVPs extra-interactive by creating a “Love Is ______” heart that people filled out and sent back with their RSVP response. We clothes-pinned them onto purple ribbn and displayed the whole lot of them in the garden gazebo during cocktail hour. The guests got such a kick out of the cute/sweet/funny/crazy responses we got!
Our good family friend, Sharon Kyne, a baker extraordinnaire, created all of the cakes. She makes the world’s most heavenly cakes. We thought she was just bringing a collection of her smaller goodies so when we showed up to the reception and saw a gorgeous three-tiered wedding beauty along with all the other delicious cakes, my heart was so filled with love for her, I could have burst.
I have to give a huge thank you to our friend Katelin Flecken, for being our day-of stylist extraordinaire. She took my visions and made sure they came to fruition on the big day! Having her there and knowing she’d handle all of the “fluff” of the day that I cared so much about allowed me to sit back and just enjoy the show.
My mama, Dawn, was the best mother of the bride a girl could ever ask for. She scoured flea markets and thrift stores for gorgeous little finds, she created design schemes and kept me focused, she stayed up late putting together all the little paper elements, she hand-finished all the invitations, she gushed and awed at just the right moments: she was everything and more that I could have ever hoped for and the wedding would have been nothing without her.
Our bridesmaids and groomsmen really came together the week of the wedding to set up and light the tent, engineer the photobooths and just make me smile. They were the funniest and most creative bunch Kenrick and I could’ve hoped for to share in our wedding day.”
I knew I’d enjoy designing the wedding, but I didn’t know that I’d enjoy it SO MUCH. I work in film and television and my time in this profession has made me really appreciate both creativity and organization. I think my skill sets on set probably allowed for me to anticipate some of the scheduling and creative roadblocks that in putting together a huge fun love fest wedding like this always entails. So I went into the planning process trying to be highly organized and to communicate frequently with all of my vendors. I wanted to have good relationships with all of them and was blessed to find in all of our vendors a great set of fun and highly talented people. And with that knowledge came a huge ease of mind that they were amazing people who would do an amazing job. I wanted to be organized and confident so that I could just sit back and enjoy the wedding day.
I am so blessed to look back on our wedding day and know that it was 100% reflective of us. It was on the smiles of our guests, in our dancing feet, at the tables, roaming the gardens. It was a very happy, happy day and that’s all a girl (and her lovely husband) could ever ask for.”
