All Pretty Things: Our Wedding

Our wedding day: ceremony

wordless post

{photography by E&M}

le inspiration part two

{please read part one here}

5. Grey Likes Weddings

A lot of eye-candy on this website, but some interesting diy projects too! It's all very styled but I liked going through the real weddings and other more inspirational posts. Author and stylist Summer Watkins claims to like LOVE most of all, but well styled. What else could we ask for? 

6. Brooklyn Bride

This is where I found my ideal bouquet and many other ideas. It is also just really nice to look at, but it has an edge. And I like it.

7. BHLDN

This is a shop actually, but the gowns, the web page itself and especially the accessories are to die for. And now they also have an exquisite selection of decor!

8. Mr. Boddintong

Great source of inspiration for invitations. And not only inspiration, you can actually have your invites made by them and I am sure they would be delightful! Very classy and elegant with a touch of decadence, perfect! 

 Of course, there are many other sources I found and you will find too. These are just the ones that I kept looking at over and over and I wanted to mention them, because they really helped me. And because I had a lot of fun looking at them. Oh I wish I had another wedding to organize!

Our wedding day: getting ready

wordless post

 

{photography by E&M}

the week before THE day

{Beach in Donostia-San Sebastian, days before our wedding}

I'm the kind of person who enjoys the preparation process more than the happening itself. When we reached the two weeks before the wedding Saturday, I was thrilled. All those little finishing touches, a spa day...it was all planned. And then we were flying to my parents and we would have four days of gatherings and excitement. It did turn out to be more or less like that, but I didn't count on being tired and having to deal with the people around me. I know, silly me. Those four days before our wedding were still full of little tasks to be finished: the confetti bags, the almonds wrapped in tulle, the seating cards...all the things we couldn't do before flying because they would get destroyed in our luggage. And I felt very, very tired. I wanted to sleep for hours and hours.

Looking back, we could've done most of the things at home, in Amsterdam. For some reason we thought we would have time while at my parents' and that it would be easier to do it there. But it wasn't. We weren't home and we weren't alone, all of which makes it a bit harder to concentrate. And to be honest, some things could and should have been simplified, which we ended up doing anyway. For example, our confetti bags. We had punched confetti for days and we wanted to have them in little glassline envelopes. The idea was to leave them open and put them in a box, all bags standing upright in it, so guests could take a bag when leaving the ceremony. That meant not closing the bags and so not putting the confetti in bags before arriving to my parents'. At the end, we couldn't find a nice box and ended up closing the bags with tape. Much easier and still nice looking. Why did we not think of that before?

{MT Washi Masking Tape we ended up using to close the confetti bags and our thank you cards (more on those later)}

All in all, it was a real pleasure to have our guests arrive days before our wedding to Donostia-San Sebastian. We always say we had a wedding week, not a wedding day. I guess that's the nice thing about getting married abroad. And although I had my stress moments and the unavoidable 'f*** it' moment with some people, I can say I went through it with no major stress and I slept like a rose every night. 

 

you've been cordially invited

Invitations. How many did I check on the internet...We knew from the beginning that I would be making the invitations. That doesn't mean it was fast and easy tough. I started out with a very classic look, then went through stages when I would want color and drawings, and ended up with this below.  I was happy with the result, I still am. The look is 'Paris meets New York', urban yet classic. I used this freely downloadable invitation suite at e.m. papers (great source btw) and then played with it. Classic fonts, black and white, and voila! 

Then we added a golden sticker that we punched ourselves for a bit of festive feeling. I looove stickers, plus I think I got hooked to punching too, ehem. But let me get to the details:

• Paper: for invitation and rsvp cards we used Original Crown Mill, laid paper 160 gr that we got at Cortina Papier. The envelopes are Oud Hollands, and we got them at De Vlieger.
• Printing: as much as I would have loved to do it letterpress, our budget was small and so we printed everything at home with our Canon MP Pixma 980. Funny detail, in the middle of the printing process our printer swallowed a piece of thick paper and it had to get repaired. Other than that, no problemo, it went all fine.
• Oh yeah, and stamps! 

I think this is the choice we made that I am most happy with (aside of the getting married, you know;). If you have time in your hands, you like graphic design, paper is your friend and you have a bit of creativity, I would totally encourage you to do it yourself! But you also need to be prepared to be satisfied with the result, knowing it won't look absolutely professional. That, I guess, is the down-side of all diy projects.

Good luck!

 

le inspiration part one

Hello! I can't believe we're married for almost 2 months! It goes fast, let me tell you. 

I wanted to talk about wedding inspiration today. I hinted in the post about finding a location that I looked at many many blogs while we were engaged. The truth is I might have looked at many, but I was loyal to only some of them. And I think it's only fair I thank them here too. So, here it is, the first part of a list of links you might want to check whether you are a bride-to-be or not.

1. Snippet & Ink

I used to study Snippet & Ink way before I was engaged, but while engaged I just checked it every day, several times a day sometimes, ehem. Even my husband knows the link ;) Obviously, it's visually exquisite and the mood boards are adorable and very well executed, but there is something else about Snippet & Ink that made me calm down and enjoy being engaged. I can't quite put my finger on it, maybe it's the word/image balance that I like, or the words used...I don't know, but I love it! And yes, I still check it every day.

2. A Practical Wedding

I still read A Practical Wedding too. This blog is about reading and thinking. And then doing some rethinking. If I am totally honest, I have to say that like it and I read it, but it also has some funny effect on me. Sometimes it made me think in a good way, other times I thought it was too much good for one place: too understanding, too humble, too funny, too caring. I know this sounds crazy, even more when I read this blog practically every day and I list it as my number two source of inspiration, but it's just how I feel. In any case, go read it, it's worth it!

 

3. Handmade Weddings

 This is not a blog, this is actually a book. A book full of ideas by Eunice and Sabrina Moyle, the founders of Hello!Lucky. It's very nice visually and I loved loved having it, although we didn't really use it at the end. But the ideas on this book can be used for any party really, and even for everyday life. Just to make things pretty.

 

 4. A Cup Of Jo

This blog is not only about weddings, but it has great ideas, plus you get to see the wonderful wedding of author Joanna Goddard! I realize this is peeking on someone else's life at its best, but I love it and I feel identified many times. This blog is also very cheerful and happy, even when addressing tougher issues, and frankly, I need that sometimes (when I go into drama mood for instance ;).

{Part two here}

spreading the word

Today I want to show you our Save The Date, which was the funniest project! We made a little video and sent the link to our guests for them to know the official date and place. We did it all ourselves with our photo camera and iMovie. If we did, you can do it too!

 

{Music by The Beach Boys}

country, city, venue

Right after we told everybody we were getting married, we started searching for a venue and a church. Well, we started looking for a country first. We live in Amsterdam, my husband comes from Maastricht, I come from Eibar, a small industrial town in the Basque Country, northern Spain. We looked for venues all over the Basque Country and Amsterdam. Nothing was really what we were looking for. We had the idea of a natural and not too formal wedding, I even considered a bbq party. But we soon discovered that what we were looking for only existed in the American blogs I was looking at, not in Amsterdam, and certainly not in the Basque Country.

 I fought. With myself, most of the time. Compromising was hard and the idea that what we wanted was impossible simply for what I considered the narrow mindedness of caterers, venues and people around us infuriated me. Still does, a little. But we wanted to marry, and we wanted to do it in the Basque Country, so we needed to compromise somewhere. 

{our wedding location, Hotel Maria Cristina}

Some months later, we visited Hotel Maria Cristina in Donostia-San Sebastian. I fell a little bit in love when I saw it. But my husband didn't so much and I also had my doubts. It was a very different concept to the farm bbq wedding. But the more we thought about it, the more sense it all started making. It was a great place and it was pretty, maybe not what we had hoped for, but it was nice. It was very practical for us and our guests, and it was in Donostia, a city we loved, where my sister lives and where most of our Dutch guests had been and claimed it as their favourite city. It all started falling into place. And this is how, after months of deliberation, we chose our venue. We would get married in Hotel Maria Cristina. And so we did.

 

{Our guest enjoying the cocktail at the terrace. Photo by e&m}

at the beginning there was a ring

{my engagement ring}

I've been thinking of how to write about the process of getting married and I've come to the conclusion that the easiest is to follow the chronological order. From the beginning. And the beginning was our engagement.

After eight and a half years of relationship, I was asked on a hot day at the end of June of 2010. It was the day after my graduation from the styling academy, I had slept a total of 10 hours during that week and I was still fighting the feeling that I should have done better at school. 

The engagement itself was very sweet and also slightly comical.When he finally asked me (he had been looking for a spot to sit down for hours!!), I laughed. As in they tell you a good joke and you laugh hard. He stood there, half smiling and said: 'for real, give me an answer'. I said yes and laughed some more. It was surreal! I had been waiting for that moment but I thought, well, I don't know what I thought. In any case, I was very happy. And I had a wedding to plan. A world of endless possibilities, the super lovely white sheet in front of me. Ah, how I love that feeling.

 I think the start can be difficult for some people; I personally loved it. There was no decision making yet, so it was all dreams but then knowing they will come true. I knew some things that I wanted but we hadn't really made up our minds about anything. It was me and my boyfriend, making plans for our day, dreaming together, worrying together, budgeting together...constructing a day that would be example of the marriage we wanted to build.

the making of

While we wait for the official pictures from our photographers, I wanted to show you our confetti. Because we made it, punch punch punch. I love paper so it was a pleasant job for me, but it also took some time, quite a lot of time actually. Was it worth it? Yes. Granted, white standard confetti might have done the job, but I loved the colors in ours; I'm hoping the pictures will show that too! Plus, making it while watching TV built up our excitement too! I think that's the biggest thing about diy, you sort of feel it more than just ordering by phone. 

I will post more substantial stuff once we get the pictures, but for now, I leave you with our confetti in the making!