Wedding Blog

Our fabulous photographer Dina of Andrena Photography has been slaving away to get us our pictures back. She sent us an online album of over 2000 images! I don’t even know where to begin in terms of ordering albums and I am even more confused about where to start blogging. Since she still has to retouch many of the images, I will start with the images of our decor that she’s already done for us.

We had such a specific idea of what we wanted for the florals and decor, and I was floored when I saw it all put together. We had notions of this romantic, garden wedding but with vibrant colors and an ethnic/Moroccan feel. The ceremony and mandap/poruwa were beautiful, but the reception honestly blew me away. It was like Jill, our florist and Mary, our coordinator had literally pulled the ideas from right inside my head. I am not going to lie, after the ceremony and pictures I was completely and totally exhausted. The ceremony ran longer than we thought, we had to rush through our couples pictures and family pictures and we missed the cocktail hour (we knew we would). I just wanted to go to bed. Then we walked up the winding path lined with hundreds of candles and when I saw our dream wedding I was instantly re-energized. I wish that someone took pictures of that candle-lined pathway because it was so dreamy and romantic.

So here are some pictures of the beautiful decor:

Here’s me and Mr. Marg cheesin’ on the mandap/poruwa.

I was nervous because there were SO many people staring at us and it was just really really bright and hot. We stepped on the stage and kinda stood there for a moment waiting for it all to begin. The thing is that I was standing a really awkward distance away from Mr. Margarita and missed all his “subtle” gestures to get me to scoot over. When I finally noticed and moved over, the entire audience was cracking up. I’m pretty sure this was shortly after I moved over and I was kinda trying to play it cool.

Here is an overall look at our ceremony set up. We choose dark cherry chairs with copper seat cushions. My florist created little paisley designs in the grass with different shades of orange fading into white.

I feel like this image of our cake captures the feeling of the reception. This structure was what we were supposed to get married under. We thought it might be too small for the ceremony so we moved it up to the reception area as our little cake tent. We just added the plum colored fabric drapes to enclose the cake.
Here are all the details:

Top: The first image is an overview of our head tables and the dance floors. We added all the orange colored stars over the dance floor.

Second row, left: Our programs

Second row, right: A close up of the sweetheart table place settings with napkins and individual plum colored dahlias.

Third row: The stunning trees that Jill created—tall manzanita trees dripping with candles and crystals, roses, dahlias, orchids, succulents, succinct, and lotus pods. M’s flowers really outdid themselves on all the centerpieces.

Fourth row, left: Escort cards tied to wood screens we bought on sale at Pier 1.

Fourth row, center: Our table numbers—I used affair font, our lotus design from our invitations and printed these at Kinko’s.

Fourth row, right: Orange stars that hung above our dance floor. All lighting was done by the amazing Sid from Aspect lighting.

Fifth row, left: Gorgeous cake by Erica O’Brien Cake Design.

Fifth row, right: Close up of the long tables’ centerpieces by M’s Flowers. Manzanita branches crawled along the center length of the table and were filled with clusters of roses, succulents, orchids, lotus pods, and succinct.

Bottom (sixth) row: Close up of our sweetheart table. This is an adapted design idea from Mary at Occasions. It’s a half moon shaped table covered in loose florals. Then a piece of glass is placed above it (held up by glass vases I think). On top of the glass is another mini centerpiece and our table settings.

Obviously, it would have been a spectacular day regardless of all these details because I got to marry Mr. Margarita. These details were just some wonderful additions to an incredible day. There are probably even more details I could share with you, but I’ll spare you for now.

Next up, the outfits and accessories.

*All pictures courtesy of the uber talented Dina from Andrena Photography