We continue with Part 3 of an ongoing story of two girls who fell in love. Part 1/4 of Carrie and Stasia’s wedding was about the gathering of friends and family from afar. Part 2 was a sneak peek at their wedding film which is in the workshop as we speak and Part 3 here is about planning an amazing event what you may want to thinking about if you are planning one yourself.
Details… what do they mean anyway?
When you finally get to live out the dream of planning a wedding – literally a dream for many girls – you want it to be perfect, memorable and unique to only you. The details of a wedding are what set you apart from every other wedding your guest will ever attend. Your wedding is about YOU. You as a couple and you as individuals. The joining of two unique people that have their own interests, style and tastes. Two people welcoming all their closest family and friends the see and hear the story of them. Who they are as individuals and who they are as one.
Carrie and Stasia had so many personal elements to their day and wanted to keep it environmentally friendly and use many small local businesses so I asked if they would share their thoughts and reasons for choosing the vendors they did.
Carrie & Stasia: “Since we wanted truly unique and vintage inspired photography and cutting-edge creative video we found our photo and video vendors right away, as this was one of the most important wedding elements for both of us. We quickly booked our date with Kim Thiel Photography who turned out to be just as amazing as we could have ever hoped for! We were thrilled when we were able to drive up to Appleton, Wisconsin to meet Kim Thiel, her husband Jason & her sister Kari. They were so welcoming and fun and we definitely felt as though we were among new friends! When Jason & Kari arrived on site at our wedding, along with Steve and Ryan Kurkowski of Ash & Ember we continue to be so amazed and thankful at how our photos and video turned out and bring us right back to our wonderful day (along with our family & friends!)
When we were planning our wedding we each had a unique vision for the look and feel we would deliver to our guests. Carrie wanted a more modern artistic look, while Stasia wanted to go with a more traditional vintage look. The first task was invitations. Having two visions led us to a wonderful compromise – ordering separate invitation to send out to our respective guests lists (both printed on recycled paper!). Carrie ordered fun invitations with blue fishes from an independent designer from minted.com, while Stasia found Jessica at Tulaloo who created her perfect coral rose wedding invitations. Tulaloo also did all the printing for the table numbers, programs, menu cards, bouquet jar tags and favor stickers for the popcorn bags. Jessica is awesome to work with and fused together the separate looks of out invitations to create our day-of stationary.
We wanted to find the most beautiful flowers grown right in the state of Massachusetts! We were extremely happy to find Julie Crites from Petalena who had worked before with providing gorgeous flower arrangements with locally-grown flowers in season and sustainable resources! Julie went above and beyond to fill our reclaimed wooden antique cheese boxes with ferns and mosses and our recycled vintage bottles with stunning blooms. Our bouquets were both unique to each of our personalities and beautifully tied together with common elements. Julie understood our vision right away and was a such a pleasure to work with!
Carrie and I wanted to support a local business for our wedding cake and our vintage dessert table and found Artisan Bake Shop where Meredith Ciaburri wowed us from the very first moment with a wonderful taste test and tour of her eco-friendly bake shop. We were delighted to learn they use local and organic eggs and dairy and compost all of their waste! Meredith created an incredible cake for us with spackled frosting, alternating tiers of chocolate, vanilla and red velvet cake and also went above and beyond with our request to include sugared cherries on the tiers, as well as on all of the guests’ dessert plates. For the rest of our desserts, we picked up an order of fresh pastries from nearby Cottage Street Bakery.
Kris Pavao (Just Hair) and Kelly O’Keefe (Blush) were the BEST stylists, and are all-around wonderful human beings. We booked Kelly first and she recommended Kris for our hair and we were so lucky to have them both for our wedding day. This was the first time they had worked on two brides and they were so supportive. We have never looked (or felt) so beautiful as we did on our wedding day. Both Kelly and Kris own their own companies – yay, small business!
Wanting to support a local catering business with eco-friendly sustainable practices we found Cosmos Catering up in Provincetown who support local farms and fisheries to source their food, and have very eco-friendly business practices. We met Laura for a taste test about three months before our wedding and everything was so yummy! Their menu had so many choices, it was hard to narrow down – and they worked with us to book all our rentals as well (tables, chairs, dinnerware, tenting, etc) through Party Cape Cod. This was especially helpful since we were planning from so far away. Cosmos staff was remarkably professional and helpful on the day of our wedding and we were so happy with our choice!
All of our vintage needs were met by Jillian at her starter company New England Vintage Rentals. We rented all the tea cups and saucers, mismatched vintage silver ware, croquet set and burlap table runners. It helped created the total vision for our day and renting vintage helped keep new items from being unnecessarily made.
The Winslow Estate, owned by Ken and Ginger Winslow, was the most magical venue we could have ever imagined. It slept all 16 of our fabulous bridesmaids AND their dates! It was so fun to spend the whole weekend with all of our friends at the Estate. Their are surprisingly not many venues on the Cape with a water view, so we were lucky to stumble across this gem of a place!
We both supported Brides Against Breast Cancer with dress purchases at resale events.
Thumbprint Balloon – Bleu De Toi (etsy)
Cake topper birds – Strawberries and Cream (etsy)
Ring warming dish – Paloma’s Nest
Our wedding and engagement rings! BOTH made with Canadian diamonds that were environmentally mined conflict free and set in recycled gold – Carrie’s from Leber Jeweler in Chicago and Stasia’s from Brilliant Earth (online)
Favors – Chicago’s famous Garrett’s Popcorn
Alcohol was local – Cape Cod Beer & Truro Vineyards of Cape Cod
Lastly, one of our favorite vendors was us, because it was so much fun!! (especially because we worked for free!) We made all of the guest napkins, collected all the boxes and bottles for the tables, made our own Save the Date cards, burlap wreaths, fabric twister mat, cake bunting and cake stands, dress hangers, fabric streamers and our wedding day jewelry! Desiree Spinner Events was our amazing coordinator. Desiree and her assistant Sarah tied up all of our last minute details and allowed us to enjoy our day, stress free!
One of the most common themes we found that couples stated after their wedding was that the day went by so fast and much of it was a (happy) blur. But, ironically for both of us, the day was vivid and lengthly and so detailed. It seems we both can remember almost every minute of wedded bliss. (Even though we didn’t get more than 4 hours of sleep each night from Monday of the wedding week on). We hauled boxes and deliveries back and forth from Boston, had last minuet meetings with vendors and put finishing touches on craft projects. We were actually putting the final moves on our first dance as the sun rose on our wedding day. We left our vows for last. We always put off writing these because I think we knew how easily we could write them at the last minute – we are pretty certain about how we feel about each other.
We could not have asked for a second more on our wedding day. We choose the first line of our ceremony as the first line of the prayer that the chaplain at Stasia’s work uses to bless the stem cells, right before the donor cells are infused as a life saving gift into it’s hopeful recipient. So, as our officiant stated in our ceremony opening, “This is the day. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” And we did.
Carrie & Stasia