Ceremony decor

We were originally planning to have the ceremony onsite at our reception venue, the Prallsville Mills, but about 6 months out, we decided we preferred to use this wonderful little church we recently started attending. Luckily for us, St. Andrew's was available on 6/21! The church is small and really very pretty without many decorations, but I did still want to add a few touches of our own...

For the two sets of red doors, I found round moss wreaths (I think 10in) at Joann's for eight dollars each, and I tied 1.5in ivory double-faced satin ribbon in a half windsor knot at the bottom of each wreath (ala Martha and her elusive cushion moss wreath--go ahead and try to find that stuff). After the ceremony, our coordinator took the wreaths and hung them around the Mills, so they did double duty! (And now I have one on my front door and I gave one each to my MOH and MIL.)

For the windowsills (6), I purchased small pillar candles, simple glass holders, and river rocks from Ikea (about $2 a set-up). Hairy Mary's was able to make up small half-circles of greens and moss to curve around each candle. These were also transferred to the Mills for use in the windowsills there. (My poor coordinator was an angel and switched the pillar candles out of the Ikea holders for church to mason jars for the Mills at my request!)

I was in love with pew decorations, but didn't want to budget much for them. Luckily, there are only 6 or 7 rows of pews on each side of the church! Using big sheets of khaki cardstock from Paper Source and thin green gingham ribbon, I fashioned my own pew cones using this guide (there are tons out there, but this size worked well for me). Our florist provided white hydrangeas and a bit of greens for each cone. I ended up doing 6 cones total, so we just placed them on the first three pews on each side. (FYI--make sure you measure how much ribbon you need in advance! I just estimated, and the poor florist couldn't get the cones over the pews. My wonderful bridesmaids went down to the church prior to the ceremony and re-tied all the ribbons for me--and they took all of these detail pics to boot!) The pew cones were also rounded up by our coordinator and taken to the Mills, where they hung on shepherds hooks to decorate the outdoor cocktail hour.

Finally, we did have a few standard floral arrangements as well. There is a small shelf at the front of the church that I wanted to leave an arrangement on for the congregation, so the florist made up this:

And, in retrospect, I think we went a little overboard with the altar arrangements. They could have been much smaller, or potentially single, and we would have saved some cash. They were beautiful, but a little more than that small space needed. They were also transported to the Mills for reception decor, which was nice. However, at the end of the night I realized I had these two ginormous arrangements, so my father swung back by the church after the reception and placed them back on the altar. Had I thought ahead, we could have donated them to a senior center or something maybe?

The amazing thing with all of this, and really throughout the day, is that even though bits and pieces of things may not have been exactly how I envisioned, it didn't matter one little bit. Everything was perfect. :)

Here are a couple of my favorite ceremony shots taken by our amazing photographer, Laura Billingham.