Tuesday, September 28, 2010

The Reception

Well hello again! Let's pick up from the receiving line shall we? After we had hugged and kissed all our guests, they grabbed their escort cards out of the wheatgrass on the barnboard table Dan and his friend Luke built. It was gorgeous! The button on each escort card was covered in fabric that matched the jam (caramel) jar skirts on each table. Each table had its own fabric pattern that my sister and I picked out on a trip down to Buffalo where we discovered the amazingness that is JoAnn Fabrics.


Once our guests were settled in and the wedding party had been announced we had our first dance to Joshua Radin's Today

 

And from there, we sat down at our sweetheart table for our first meal together as husband and wife. I'm so happy we decided not to do a head table. We chose our wedding venue based on having our favourite chef/caterer Ezra Title with us. It's nearly impossible to find a venue who will allow you to bring in your own caterer as we discovered, but it was worth all the hard work. Ezra's meals are such special and important nights to Dan and I, we wanted to make sure our wedding meal was equally as private and special as when we have him in our home. Our guests loved that we had our own table and I appreciated being able to eat without 150 people staring at us! 

 
 

I'll step back a moment and show you the whole tent. My wonderful husband and a literal team of helpers worked for two solid days to set up and decorate the tent. It was a huge schmozzle to say the least, but it got done and it was gorgeous. Some of the little details that were supposed to happen had to be missed but only myself and Dan knew about them and overall, I think it still turned out beautifully. 

(The chairs are over at the ceremony in this photo)


This tree was a total show stopper for me. The Alton Mill built a huge firepit in the middle of the event space after we booked with them, and while we loved the look of it, we weren't really sure what in the world we were going to do with it to make it "wedding pretty". Enter our friend Luke again. He somehow found this corkscrew hazel bush while traipsing out in the woods one day and dragged it home for us. The thing was literally about 18' long and we had to cut it down to size (about 10'). I purchased stems of orchids and some different types of moss from a wholesale florist shop (one of the perks of being an interior designer is access to cool stores not open to the public!). Two of my very good friends spent hours decorating the tree wiring on the orchids, placing the moss and votives around the base to make it perfect for me. It was breathtaking. I couldn't stop staring at it. Seriously, whatever it was I had in my head that it would look like, they totally surpassed. And as beautiful as it was in the daylight, at night with all the votives lit and the uplighting.... oh gosh.... it was like a fairytale. Simply stunning. It was the perfect backdrop for our sweetheart table.


The whole look of the wedding I called rustic elegance and were inspired by our silver teapot centrepieces sitting on barnboard at each table.


At each place setting, each guest got a little jar of homemade caramel, a packet of Forget-Me-Not seeds from the Alzheimer's Society of Toronto, a menu and their place card. I cut the menus and the little birds on the place cards using my Cricut and then punched the corners using a cut and emboss corner punch.

 
 

And then we feasted! Unfortunately as of yet, I only have two photos of the meal because it was so tasty everyone was too busy eating to take photos! Trust me when I say it was a m a z i n g. Simply the best food I've ever had at a wedding if I do say so myself! 


During dinner it started raining pretty heavily and the heaters we rented weren't really very effective, so we moved inside early to start dancing. We'll pick up next at the late night buffet!

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