OK, finally got some pics up! There are a bunch of proofs on page 2, but I'll leave up the link to the sneak peek our photographer (Angelica Glass) made for us while we were waiting...
This is it. So…hi! I don’t post very often because we went with a nontraditional venue and did a lot of things ourselves, so I didn’t have much useful info to add to the threads about catering halls, florists, etc. But I often found other brides' reviews helpful for vendor advice (and love looking at all the beautiful photos) so I thought I’d post ours. Maybe some of the do-it-yourself info will be useful to other couples who are thinking of going that route, and I highly recommend most of the vendors we did use.
Invitations: DIY (paper ordered from paper-source.com) I designed my invitations in Photoshop and printed them at home using paper from
Paper-Source.com, who get an
A for gorgeous paper kits at excellent prices—I made 100 invitations, including response cards and envelopes, for a grand total of $174.80. We used the
Kinwashi Sheer Booklet Kit, a little booklet with a sheer handmade-paper overlay, tied with a twig at the top. People loved them (even DH’s poker buddies noticed and complimented them). As with pretty much every other DIY project we did, it took extra time and effort, but was not especially difficult (just time-consuming) and we finished with something unique and special to us.
Tips if you decide to do something like this: They don’t come in an assembled booklet—you need to print and cut each layer separately, and assemble them. It’s a little tricky to get them perfect but the paper kit comes with excellent directions. We used one of those sliding paper cutters rather than the ones with the arm that goes up and down, which helped a lot.
Venue: Smithtown Historical Society, A (smithtownhistorical.org)We wanted something a little out of the ordinary so we decided to hold both our ceremony and reception at the Smithtown Historical Society. The ceremony was in a field on their 20-acre property and the reception was in their historic restored barn, the Frank Brush Barn.
Having the wedding here required a lot of work, but was worth it to us because we got exactly what we wanted, and had fun making all the decorations, etc.
Tips if you decide to do something like this: They do not provide catering or rentals, so you have to get these separately. We had to clean the barn ourselves before and after the wedding, make a lot of phone calls in the year before the wedding to get info and confirm details, and the Historical Society did not always get back to us right away (which is understandable, considering weddings are not exactly their main business). FM me if you want more details on what this entailed. But the atmosphere at the wedding made it all worth it, and many people commented on the beauty of the space.
My mom and I made all the decorations, and she, DH and the bridal party set them up the morning of the wedding.
