I have more photos for you! This is from a wedding at Firehouse Chicago, one of my very favorite wedding venues. Once again, these are just my snaps, and I’ll hope to have professional photos later in the year. Flowers were by May Floral. Cage and Aquarium sent the DJ. And you’ll see who the caterer was if you scroll down.
Did I promise you more photos from recent weddings? These are just the ones I took myself from one of my recent weddings. Professional photos will follow when I can get them.
I must confess that I loved this wedding. It felt so authentic. Everything the couple did reflected their personalities and their relationship. It was all beautiful. It was also completely unique.
The single most unusual thing about the wedding was the amount of hand-crafting that went into it. Both bride and groom are crafty people. The bride knits, so she made the gorgeous shawl you will see below. The groom crochets, so not only did he make the bride’s bouquet out of crocheted flowers; he also crocheted all the flowers for the table decorations. Take a look for yourself!
The people who carry stuff from place to place rarely get the credit they deserve.
I’m always happy to celebrate Labor Day, and all the working people who make possible much of our good lives. Here are the people I really appreciate when I’m on site at a wedding: the kitchen staff; the florist’s set-up and tear-down crew; the building engineers who take care of heating and cooling and make sure the lights are working; the security guards; the people who set up and clean portable restrooms; the delivery drivers; anyone who carries heavy stuff from a truck to a room or back out again; the sound engineers; the good people who come in at the end of the night to clean the floors and take out the trash.
Most of the time all of these excellent people are invisible to an event. They aren’t glamorous. But they are all indispensable. Today is a day to celebrate their contributions to your party, wedding, or other event. Happy Labor Day to all of you!!
Sorry for the total radio silence these last few weeks. I’ve been working on some very wonderful weddings, each of them very different from the others. Here are some teaser photos for your viewing pleasure. I’ll have the full set of the photos I took for each event very soon. Enjoy!
DIY allows you to express yourself. Photo by Allison Williams Photography.
If you’re on a budget (and there are a lot of budget weddings), you might try to save some money by having most of your decor be DIY. Or maybe you are just crafty and want to have your own artistic vision featured at your wedding. These are both good reasons to have DIY decor.
But let’s talk about the practical side of the matter: How do you get from concept to installed finished product–and how do you do it without sending your day-of coordinator into screaming fits?
There are some coordinators who hate dealing with DIY decor. There are others who charge extra because they know that it requires extra work on their part. When you hire a coordinator, be sure to ask them how they deal with DIY decor. It is good to know before you hire.
I don’t hate DIY. In fact, I think it is a lot of fun and makes for visually unique events. I also don’t charge extra–unless the decor requires that I put in extra hours or hire extra hands. But in my standard contract, you will find this one little sentence: “Decor design and implementation are to be decided and communicated to me in advance.”
The reason that sentence is there is because one too many times, I have walked into a wedding venue and been confronted by unlabeled boxes of decor items. In a limited amount of time, I have had to figure out where to put all the many objects and how to make it all look beautiful and intentional. Naturally, I can do this and make it all look fabulous, but it’s much more work and much more stress than is necessary.
So, what does this mean for how you handle your decor if I’m coordinating your wedding? It means you have to decide in advance what you want your tables (and walls, and bar, and….) to look like. It means you have to draw diagrams or take pictures and send them to me. It means you organize things in ways that make it easy to set things up. It means you label everything. And it also means that we have some detailed discussions in advance so I know what you want.
One exceptionally organized bride who had enormous amounts of DIY decor put all the objects for each table in their own boxes, so all I had to do was pull it out and set it up according to the pictures she had sent. Another included a list in each box with the name of the object and its location. Sometimes a bridesmaid or sibling has been designated to be the liaison and helper.
It doesn’t matter how you organize the objects and communicate your vision. All I ask is that you make it as easy as possible to set up decor, so I can also do everything else that needs to be done to make your wedding as wonderful as possible.
I did full planning on a wedding that was featured on the blog A Bicycle Built for Two. It’s a blog that says it is “real wedding inspiration for lesbians, queers, and everyone else.” I love what they do! They show real people and their real choices for celebrating.
So, please check out the post about the wedding I planned. And take a look at their archives. There’s a lot of good stuff there.
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