A wedding is like a Where’s Waldo book: You understand there’s an end goal (watching someone get married is akin to finding the aforementioned Waldo), but there are a whole lot of fun details and hidden “extras” along the way.
Because these details can be fleeting, I wanted to salute the thoughtful touches my sister included in her wedding and reception. The photos are, once again, courtesy of Picture This! Photography in Atlanta.
Chelsea is well-known for her ability to comb through Etsy to find weird and wacky gifts. (She famously bought my husband a Rob Ford T-shirt for Christmas one year.) Happily, she didn’t abandon her knack for this personalized approach for the bridesmaids gifts.
Chelsea gave each girl a bracelet engraved with the global coordinates denoting where she met each girl. My bracelet is engraved with the coordinates of our childhood home; the other bracelets include a preschool, a dorm and even Switzerland! Every bride should steal this idea — I’ve been wearing mine every day since the wedding.
My sister’s obsession with the Golden Girls TV show is legendary, and she wanted to incorporate the show into her wedding — but it can be a challenge to fold in references to a TV show without veering into campy territory. (Now I’m just picturing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer wedding.)
Chelsea had been mulling an idea for a signature cocktail for the wedding, but she balked when she saw the price. Instead, she incorporated a golden sugar rim, which guests could request with ANY cocktail of their choosing. Not only was it elegant, customizale and personal — it was more cost-effective than a signature cocktail.
As I’ve mentioned, the flowers were done by Atlanta-based duo Petal + Fold. Their aesthetic is singular and specific — undone arrangements featuring unusual wildflowers with bold shapes and LOTS of greenery. There were lots of things I hadn’t seen before — like a floating eucalyptus garland over the estate table.
Instead of a table runner, the estate table was covered with a carpet of leaves interspersed with small jarred bouquets.
There were a variety of heights and vases, too. This table, for example, had individual buds in small vases surrounding a larger branch in the center,
Chelsea had a two-pronged cake approach. The visual cake — here, with another nod to the Golden Girls — was actually not truly edible. It was a stand-in for the real cake, which was pound cake with chocolate frosting.
Each cake slice was striped to look like a piano’s keys. Chelsea played the piano for years — a fact both my dad and I mentioned in our speeches. (We had no idea what the other was planning to say, so it was a huge surprise!) And in another coincidence, Chelsea had no idea we would be mentioning her musicality, so this was both charming and surprising.
This is the penultimate post in the series about Chelsea’s wedding. The next post will be about the post-wedding brunch — and then we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming.