Monday, March 31, 2014

The Great Big Wedding Post!


The silence is over. The wedding has passed, and now I can share all the crazy crafting projects that have taken my attention away from cooking, blogging, exercise, and everything else but wedding crafting. It was worth it for the things I am going to show you now! (All images not credited are my own measly attempts to capture what I was doing, the gorgeous ones are all professionally done and credited.)

When we were forming the idea for our wedding it had started out as a much broader book themed wedding, but when we lost our first venue we changed it, realizing that our second choice venue (Lawry's Prime Rib of Beverly Hills) would be perfect for a Harry Potter themed wedding. Ideas started churning in my head about what I wanted, from the goblet of fire, and the house points to Bertie Botts Beans. There was too much to choose from to represent it all, so we concentrated on enhancing the restaurant's Hogwarts like features.

I am not a fan of cut flowers, and I cringed at how much plastic goes into fake ones, so we originally tried making paper flowers, but those had mixed results. (See the past post on this subject.) When those didn't work we went back to the drawing board. We experimented with various media until we stumbled upon ribbon roses. I happened to have a friend who turned out to be brilliant at making them and so we decided to create brooch bouquets with ribbons, since I loved the idea of brooch bouquets.


Since our theme gave us the option to use many colors we took advantage of that. We let the bridesmaids pick out a style together, and the only criteria was that it came in all 4 house colors. This allowed us to create bouquets with the house accent colors, pulling our theme together without making anyone wear robes, or uniforms.
Image Credit Candice Benjamin Photography. (candicebenjamin.com)

I got the chance to really try my hand a few different crafts I hadn't tried before, as well as breaking out my old calligraphy skills. One of my favorite new crafts is needlefelting, where you use a small serrated needle and stab it into wool to tangle the wool and shape it, much as a clay sculptor would. This allowed me to create some special items to decorate the tables such as Dobby, below.


Another example was the Platform 9 3/4 sign and brick fabric. We wanted people to feel like they were being transported to Hogwarts, starting the moment they arrived. Being greeted by Hedwig and Harry's truck certainly helped.
Image Credit Candice Benjamin Photography. (candicebenjamin.com)

Since I was going to be wearing a regular wedding dress, I wanted my accessories to be matched to the theme, as well as the groomsmen. I bought Harry Potter silk ties off Amazon for the men to wear. I bought a Time Turner from the Noble collection and found a pair of earrings I liked at Charming Charlie's. The other bracelet was what I wore out that night with my Ravenclaw party dress. I found that at a Harry Potter craft fair at Whimsic Alley, a charming little nerd boutique in Hollywood. My co worker created the garters, by dismantling some HP earrings that are sold at hot Topic.
Image Credit Candice Benjamin Photography. (candicebenjamin.com)

We really wanted people to keep discovering new things as they moved through the wedding venue, from the ceremony room to the reception hall. We had House banners created, and our venue let us choose house colors for all the different tables so that people really felt like they were sitting in the great hall at their house's tables. Various friends who I can not give enough thanks to, helped create and set up the decorations. We were pleased with our Monster Book Of Monsters Guestbook, created my by cousins, who took my idea of a Trelawney book of predictions and even made a scroll to go with it!
And the table of cake pops and candy looked great. We really wanted our guests to feel like you had visited Honeydukes. (The candy table got Marvolo Gaunt rings instead of Truffle Snitches because Wormtail found them in the office and ate them all. We even decorated the bathroom stalls.
Image Credit Candice Benjamin Photography. (candicebenjamin.com)

All in all it was a huge success.
Image Credit Candice Benjamin Photography. (candicebenjamin.com)
Wands Came from Wands and Wood
Banners were made by Men of the Cloth
Hair by Leanne Hare
Makeup by Megan Vigil

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