Details, Detials, Details.

If you have ever planned a wedding, you know how many details there are to think about! Every little thing adds up to make your day spectacular. Now, not every wedding needs all of these little details. There are a lot of things that I probably didn't have to do, but I wanted to! I thought that it was my one day to make perfect, so why not add in personal details to make it just that!? Check out some of the little details that might have gone unnoticed by some of our guests, but made our day AWESOME:

I hand dipped our unity candle in white wax from a bare wick. I worked at a summer camp where they had a candle making activity, so a friend/coworker and I worked on it for days! The two candles are our baptismal candles that we used to add symbolism to the typical unity candle tradition. Our Mom's lit them at the beginning of the ceremony, which added even more to the meaning. Our Officiant loved it!

I love an extra bit of decor in a church (to really show off that it is a wedding, not just an everyday mass) so we had mini baby's breath wreaths hanging from the pillars on the sides of the church. I wish we would have used these again at the reception!

I'm not a huge fan of garters, but I felt like if we were going to do a garter toss, it needed to be legit! I bought the cheapest garter set I could find (because it wasn't that important to me!) and I bought ribbon and buttons to replace the cheap ones that were on it. It turned out to cost about $3 extra but I loved having a personal touch to them! I also did them for my bridesmaids! More on that in my DIY post to come soon.

Although I dislike this photograph, I HAD to tell you that I hand placed all of these crystals on my bridal shoes. Yep, I bedazzled a pair of white flats that I found online for $7 and I couldn't have been happier. Or more comfortable!

I loved my bouquet, but I loved what was on it more! My Grandfather had passed away from cancer when I was 15. He had put this hand-embroidered handkerchief in an envelope with my name on it and told my Mom to give it to me on my wedding day to use as my something old. She gave it to me a little before the wedding day so that it could be put on my bouquet to carry around with me all day! It was embroidered by my his mother. Wow.

I wanted baby's breath as something to tie all of the decor together from ceremony to reception, so I had the bridesmaids include it in their hairstyles! All the girls did something different with their hair, so this brought it all together. Some had it all over like above, and some had just a small tuft of it tucked into an asymmetrical design.

Speaking of baby's breath, these balls above our head table really pulled the flowers from the tables into the whole room!

Can you see them in the big scheme of it all?

We had a few different types of table decor. This was one option where we had charger plates covered in a baby's breath wreath and pillar candles. Some were blue candles like this picture, and some were white candles. Other charger plates were on the tables with large doilies and rocks on them instead of the flowers!

Another centerpiece we had were these tall wine bottle candelabras that I painted and put lace onto. I added the sparkle to the wine bottle candelabra and our florist added the flowers and candles during set up. They were gorgeous! 

As an art teacher, I loved the idea of having a coloring book available for the little ones to keep busy. I took photographs of Dillon and I and created a custom coloring book of us and our decor/cake/etc. for them! Of course, a Pinterest idea!

Here were the hand-bundled crayons that were too pretty not to show you.

It is so hard to see all of our day through just a few photographs, but I used doilies as a part of the reception. I made these doily wreaths and hung them on the windows in the cocktail area to make it more festive! I had the doilies already and only used hot glue and ribbon I had already to make them, so they were less that 50 cents a piece to make! They were just time consuming!

Wine bottles and doilies were a big part of our reception, so using the extra wine bottles we had to create time capsules for our guests to put advice/well wishes/letters into for our future anniversaries was awesome! I drew the numbers on free handed, and had too much fun! I can't wait to open them! (Pinterest idea again!)

I really loved creating escort cards by hand for all 360+ of our guests. It was fun to write down who was going to be there, and to make them feel special. We had them all on one table so the guests could grab their card to go save their seat that in the reception hall. This way, I didn't have to assign that many seats. It was a buffet style dinner, so it worked out great! I decorated the bridal party's cards a bit more than the others! (Again, see the doily I used? All of the papers were different colors that coordinated with our wedding colors: navy blue, copper, silver, and sparkly white)

I wanted a card box that we could reuse. My father-in-law is a carpenter, so I asked him to create a birdhouse for our card box that I could decorate! The top says "Love Birds" (It had nothing to do with the rest our wedding except the colors!) Although it was HUGE, it was perfect. It might end up being a dog house for a little dog one day! More on this project in that DIY post!

It was fitting for Dillon and I to have this quote (like we saw on Pinterest!) because his groom's cake was a Maker's Mark bottle. He is a huge whiskey fan, and I love my wine so it was cute to have on our cake table as a conversation piece. Also, see the groom's outfit on the whiskey bottle? There was a dress on the wine bottle too. The wine bottle we used was the one we drank on our engagement night. We are waaaaay too sentimental! I also designed all of our signs to match our wedding invites that I created too! 

We did the traditional garter toss and bouquet toss. We saw a Pin that said, "You're Next" on the football that you wrap your garter around to throw to the men. We had a sports based grand march, and did some pretty hilarious handshakes/stunts/skits to go with it, so the football garter toss fit perfectly. I even windmill pitched  the bouquet like a softball instead of the traditional toss. We got so many compliments on tying it all together!

Some other details we included but didn't get photographs of was decorating the bathroom and having bathroom baskets full of personal goodies. We put fabric over the stalls and hung big bows on them. We went ALL OUT for our wedding! The guests walked into the bathroom and said, "EVEN the BATHROOM?? What haven't you done!?"

And... all I thought was, "Mission Accomplished."