As gorgeous as your flowers are or as delicious as your wedding food is, I firmly believe that it’s the little personal details that will make you smile most at your wedding and that you’ll remember for years to come.
In a lot of ways, as I’m hoping to showcase throughout this wedding blog series, Grace and I felt like ambassadors in hosting the first gay wedding many of our friends and family (including ourselves!) had attended. Partly because of this, I knew I wanted to infuse our whole day with meaning and take special care for the little details that would make our day uniquely “us.”
In this post I’m sharing a few of my favorite “little details” from our wedding day. I hope they will give you a better sense of the meaning behind our wedding and perhaps give you inspiration for own your little wedding day details!
By far my favorite detail was the individual letters we wrote to each guest. As you can see in the photo above, we wrote almost 200 letters (one for each person attending our wedding) in the months leading up to our wedding and placed them in antique brass letter holders at the welcome table for guests to find before the ceremony. Yes, writing all those letters took forever, but we deeply wanted to express how much it meant to us that each person was there. Some of our guests we hadn’t seen in a long time and knew we wouldn’t get a ton of time in person with everyone, so the letters allowed us to tell everyone why we were so glad they specifically were at our wedding, and convey our excitement to celebrate with them later.
One of my law school friends finding her letter!
We had this welcome sign set up behind the rows of letters explaining that guests should find their name.
Our seating chart was also set up in the entryway area, where guests would return after the ceremony to find their seat for dinner.
While we were getting ready, our photographers took pictures of some of our personal details.
We read our vows from this sweet vows booklet during the ceremony, and I had a few of these handkerchiefs made with our wedding date embroidered on them, for happy tears. On two of the handkerchiefs, I had them stitch “Mother of the Bride” in blue above the date, and gave them to my mom and Grace’s mom before the ceremony. I figured they might need them!
I knew I wanted a special hanger for my dress, but there are so many to choose from! I ended up going with something simple: our wedding date and a cute blue ribbon tied at the top.
Our wedding tablescapes were also simple. I wanted it to feel like a carefree summer night, so we had garlands of eucalyptus and blossoms on the dinner tables rather than large flower arrangements, and our table numbers were meant to blend in seamlessly with the rest of the decor.
One of my favorite moments of our wedding day was walking out from our ceremony through a shower of rose petals, tossed by our guests. To make that happen, we had little glassine bags of petals on each seat. I ordered custom stickers to stick on each bag, which read, “please toss as the newlyweds make their way back down the aisle!” with our initials in the middle.
I thought long and hard about whether to do a cake topper at all, but when I found out I could have custom dog-shaped toppers made, I was sold. I used this Etsy shop and was thrilled with how they turned out. Although Willie and Jellybean weren’t physically at our wedding, they were there in spirit!
I also had a gold cake cutting set engraved with our names and our wedding date that we used to cut our cake. I can’t wait to use it again when we slice into our top tier (frozen in our freezer right now) on our first wedding anniversary!
Planning these little details was so much fun, and I highly recommend using small details to bring an extra layer of meaning to your celebration.
All photos are by Jesse Marble and Jimmy Marble for Our Labor of Love