Thursday, November 10, 2011

Day 20/30 - My medieval inspired Wedding

When I was younger I always thought weddings were always fun to go to. Especially when it was a close family members wedding, since I was around when they were preparing for it. My mother almost always made the faux wedding cakes, (just think the three teared intricately decorated cakes with lots of scroll detail and even hanging strands of icing) and always helped with making and wrapping fruit cake favours that were cut in long skinny pieces and wrapped in saran wrap and doilies and tied off with the wedding parties colours. I also remember making tissue paper flowers to decorate the cars the that bridal party would be traveling in.

So when it was time to plan my wedding I was excited. I did none of those things above but starting to plan made me nostalgic for those times again. Chris and I got married two years ago in July of '09. We had a medieval inspired wedding. We got married in our home town with family and friends helping to celebrate our union. I made a lot of the decorations and hand made our invitations. The bridal parties attire was also made with the help of my mom, my sister and Chris's mom. I had debated on making my own dress as well, but at the same time I didn't want to miss out on being able to go around and trying on dresses. I happened to find the perfect dress at the very first store we went to. It was exactly what I had imagined it would be. It had the split in the front with a splash of colour, it came in ivory and it had intricate embroidery along the edges and was just beautiful. I wish that it fit better then it did and I still think to this day the ordered it in a size that was WAY bigger then it needed to be ordered in since even after they "took it in" it did not fit me properly, but that is a rant for another time. (sorry that is one of two things that really still grinds my gears).


Being a crafty person that I am I made a lot of the decorations myself and tried to keep with the theme as much as possible. Our card box was a castle, our center pieces were castles, even our fake cake was a three tiered castle. Our invitations where sealed with hot wax, and were hand coloured by me and a few family members, (who I love for helping me do that since there was a lot of invites) and then finally highlighted with metallic gel pens in red and gold, our wedding colours. I even made a wedding program with lots of interesting facts about medieval times and medieval wedding traditions so my guests would have something to read while waiting for me to arrive. 

I loved our wedding, it went by so fast that I honest can't remember half of the day. I can't believe that it has already been 2 plus years since the day we got married! There were some things that I wished were different or better but I am thankful for the pictures I have (another rant for another time) and for the great memories that were made that night and am thankful that so many of our friends and family were able to come out and help us celebrate. There were some photos that we missed out on since when we went to our picture location it was sooo windy out that I was stressing that the photos wouldn't turn out and honestly now seeing the ones that we took outside you can barely tell that the wind was whipping our hair every which way.  We moved to the basement of the hall which had a really nice decorated room so the rest didn't turn out as bad.

This is my invitation assembly space. You can see in the folder the invites. They had a woven vined border that had flowers on it. The vines were coloured with green pencil crayon and the flowers were coloured with gold and red metallic gel pens. They took a lot of work but they turned out so beautiful! The return cards were made to match with a small segment of vines and flowers. You can also see the stamp I used for the impression on the hot wax on that ice block as well. This was the tedious part of it since I could only impress about three or four before the stamp got to hot and I had to wait for it to cool down again other wise the wax stuck to it and was really hard to get off. I had found a place online that sold coloured wax sticks that you could put in a glue gun. With the amount I had to do I doubt that I would have sat there and dripped wax on that many invites :).

Here are some of the envelopes newly sealed and waiting to cool down enough to stack. Sadly I just wax sealed the ones that were being hand delivered since I didn't think the post office would appreciate wax going through their systems.

This is our marriage program that was given to everyone at the church. The font you see is the font that we used on the invites and everything else with text. It was quite big having about 4-5 full sized sheets of paper. So they were pretty thick once they were folded and assembled but I love how they turned out!

Our guest book was a photo mat with our engagement photo in it which is now hanging on our great room wall. I loved this idea so now we can see everyone that attended 365 days of the year. There was even some gold treasure in the treasure box to the left.

Our faux cake and the cake to eat with jousting knights on them! We actually totally forgot about eating the cake later and since we had the food catered we had no plates! We did have napkins though but no plates or utensils. So there was lots of cake left over.

My center pieces with little medieval army guys. They took awhile to make. I cut cardboard pieces, taped them together then used paper mache and then painted them.

Our card box that was totally secure and there was no way anyone would get into that thing without cutting open the bottom. I love how it turned out. Also a knight guard with my brothers chain mail armor, helmet and sword. I kept forgetting that it really wasn't a person standing over there.

Our head table. Part of the wedding parties gift from us was medieval tankards and goblets that you can see here in the picture. We had a slideshow being projected on the back of this wall throughout the night with pictures of Chris and I through out our lives.


These are the wedding favours. Since I make chain mail inspired jewelry and other things I made everyone chain mail key chains in our wedding colours. This is the flower version but I also made a diamond shape. Chris came up with the little rhyme on the tag which said "come celebrate our rein with this finely wrought chain".

The beautiful church that we got married in. This is the Catholic church I have attended since I was born.

I did not carry down the traditional bouquet of flowers. Instead I carried down the same bible that my sister carried down when she got married. Mom just changed the flowers and the ribbon that hung down from the bottom (and we even changed the few tissues that were still in between the pages from my sisters wedding). This was my something borrowed. I also added a picture off my father on the flowers since he passed away when I was four years old. This symbolized to me that if he couldn't be here at least he was with us in spirit.

One of my favorite shots. The one before was beautiful as well since it captured the stain glass window above the door.

 My beautiful ladies in waiting. I really wish that we could have had pictures like this outside.

The knights and one of our little squires. I love our wedding colours! The pictures picked up the material so well. The gold crosses were hand painted on by me a few days before the big day and I have to say I was SCARED TO DEATH of screwing them up! I had to take like two hour breaks between each one because I was afraid of not getting it centered properly or getting paint somewhere where it shouldn't be.

We even surprised our MC aka the court jester (my brother in law) with his own medieval inspired court jester outfit. He literally found out about it minutes before he was going to introduce the wedding party after pictures were done. You should have heard the roar of the crowd and the applause he got when entering the hall. :) The jester hat also played a part of our kissing game since anyone that wanted us to kiss had to go and get it from him and do something to entertain the "court", like juggling or hula hooping while juggling.

I think this is my favorite picture of the two of us! Love it! I really wish that we had all went back outside to take photos but I can't change the past. I am definitely thankful for the photos that we did get! I have heard horror stories of photographers never given brides their photos!

I love this one as well. It was a awesome day and it really is crazy just how fast the day goes by! It felt like it was never going to get there then it's two years later! It was a lot of work but it was worth it!  There are so many other things that I made for the wedding but these are just the highlights. I hope you enjoyed seeing our medieval inspired wedding!

Did you do anything special or unique for your wedding?
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