{the wedding} inspiration

Today I'm going to share with you some of went into planning our wedding! I'm really excited. As I mentioned yesterday, I LOVED planning our wedding. Besides the obvious (marrying this amazing man!), it also introduced me to the world of blogs! I was scouring the internet looking for great wedding ideas when I came across Design Sponge and Brooklyn Bride, which opened up a whole new online world. And, of course, I was completely hooked.

SITE.

I have always, always, always wanted a fall wedding. Fall is by far my favorite season and is generally great weather in Oregon. The leaves are changing color, the air is crisp, and it's just beautiful. To take full advantage of the fall gorgeousness, we chose to have our wedding in an outdoor garden. 

source: Wedding site. 

evrim gallery: Reception site.

I was incredibly torn when choosing a site. I didn't want to go with standard wedding site, but I also didn't want to go in a completely DIY route. There are so many amazing things you can do on a DIY site, but in the end a little more standard won out because I realized I didn't want to be setting up tables and chairs on my wedding day :). The garden is GORGEOUS and it won me over and soon as we went for a look. As you can also see in the photos above, it's a mostly evergreen garden. There weren't a lot of fall colors happening, which left me a lot of room to play.

COLORS.

My colors/theme were the hardest for me to decide on. I seriously agonized over this friends. But one day I was flipping through an old Martha Stewart magazine and came across a full page photo of the most amazing dahlias I've ever seen. Brilliant oranges, pinks, yellows .... it just screamed fall. I wish I'd kept that page I tore out of the magazine ... but it was completely trashed by the time our wedding came around and I didn't expect to be blogging about it three years later :).

So my colors, as you see above, were coral, brown, golden yellow and orange. The theme I went with can be described as *Elegently-Rustic Fall*. It would features these colors, dahlias and lots of wood and natural elements.

INVITES.

Our invites were super special to me because they were custom designed by a lovely friend of mine. I am WAY to chicken/OCD to design my own invites, but I wanted them to be special. I was beyond excited when my talented friend offered to design them for us.

So after that, I needed to pull together programs, menus and other day-of paper products. And I was lucky enough to find the PERFECT paper to pull everything together. Enter, Paper Source's Flora and Fauna paper.

PROGRAM.

I am not a fan of programs at weddings. I know they're helpful and can be really sweet, but I can't get over what a waste of paper they are! So, instead of handing everyone a program, we simply made a huge program poster and had it next to the gifts table for people to look at if they were interested. I found a huge cheap frame at Goodwill and spray painted it cream. I used the paper source paper, and the same fonts from our invite to tie everything together. 

MENUS.
We opted to have one menu per table. It was a nice way to carry out font/color theme through each table.

Also on our tables were coral napkins and, on family tables, place holders.

CUPCAKE DISPLAY.

The last element of the wedding that we did ourselves beforehand was the cupcakes holder. I couldn't find anything that wasn't white. cardboard. Blurgh. So we bought one and transformed it into something that would be lovely at our wedding.

We spray painted it dark brown and added cream ribbon with brown dots. It was a perfect compliment to the coral flowers the florist added.

Want to see how it turned out? I'll be back friday with a few day-of pictures to show you how all the planning came together. I'll also share the one thing I would've changed about the day and a couple other tips I picked up along the way :).