All Leah wanted was a tree—a tree under which to marry Adam. “My family knew I wanted to find a big, beautiful tree to be married under and it became a joke between us,” Leah said. “Everywhere we went, my family kept pointing out beautiful trees that we could get married under, even ones by the interstate. “
In the end, Leah and Adam found their tree not by the side of the road but inside Tanglewood Park. “We also wanted our reception to have a casual, relaxed feel,” Leah said. “We both enjoy outdoors, and thought a park would fit us perfectly.”
The couple “went with a natural theme,” Leah said, using neutral colors with pops of red and blue throughout their décor and paper products, which Adam made. “We also slowly started to incorporate vintage pieces as we shopped around at antique stores and thrift shops,” Leah said. “We painted some and replaced some of their hardware to make it cohesive with the look and feel we wanted. As a family, we stained and assembled eight Adirondack chairs and three tables. I would definitely say it was a DIY wedding, and it wouldn’t have happened without our family and friends.”
Leah’s advice for other brides? “Don’t sweat the little things–like ripping your slip nearly in half right before you put on your wedding dress or torrential downpours five minutes before the ceremony is supposed to start. Yeah, those happened,” she said. “Not everything will go perfectly, but you will be married at the end of the day.”
Years after Nikki and Reid were set up on a triple date—not with each other, mind you, but with one another’s roommates—the pair was planning an April wedding.
“I’m an out-of-the-box, break-tradition kind of thinker,” Nikki said, “ but I also knew that a wedding is about family. So we met in the middle with a lot of my crazy ideas.”
The former college soccer captain “didn’t want your stereotypical pink and girly wedding, so I chose navy blue for one of our colors,” Nikki said. “I also knew that April in Minnesota could mean snow, so I really wanted to create spring inside. I chose an apple green for our second color, and made the majority of our centerpieces with grass bases.”
The couple’s commitment to God and church took a front seat at their ceremony, Nikki said. “Our number one thing was that we wanted the gospel to be shared,” Nikki said. “Second, we wanted everyone to enjoy themselves. So, we built our reception around that. We had a wonderful meal, photo booth, great dancing, a fire pit outside on the patio where people could get away and roast s’mores, pizza brought in for people just coming to dance, and a relaxing atmosphere.”
The only thing complicated about Raylene and Kevin’s wedding were the buttons. “The décor revolved around this idea of buttons,” Raylene told Pretty Little Weddings. “I have always loved that each little button you find in a drawer or a basket somewhere has a history, a story—where it came from, where it’s been. I asked friends and family to send a button so I could make a bouquet from them. They ended up being on everything.”
The bride crafted a birdcage veil from Etsy supplies and buttons taken from her mother’s wedding dress and her grandmothers’ garments. And, “the bouquet was very special to me,” Raylene said. “I worked on it over several weeks to make each sprig and put it all together the night before with baby’s breath.”
Even Kevin wore a few extra buttons—his mother and grandmother’s buttons, sewn to the back of his tie.
The couple, who wed in the woods of Pemberton, British Columbia, “wanted it to be very simple, which it was,” Raylene said. “It truly reflected how laid back we are and how much we wanted it to be about spending time with our family and friends.”
Bill sat five hours alone to have an extra few minutes with Erica. That, she said, is when she knew he was special.
“Bill and I were introduced at a conference,” Erica said. “He asked me to join him for a walk around the conference grounds. I was charmed by his southern accent and how much fun he was, but the time did come for us to leave the conference and go back to our homes across the country from one another.”
“At the final session of the conference, Bill tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could share my taxi to the airport,” Erica said. “That meant he would be arriving more than five hours early for his flight, but I said yes.”
A year later, Bill proposed along the creek where the couple would later wed with only their Officiant and photographer. “It was very important to us that the ceremony be just us,” Erica said.
She said, “We wanted to get married somewhere out in nature, and because the creek is also the place where Bill proposed, so it seemed just perfect. It was everything I’d hoped for—a quiet and beautiful place where we could truly be intimately connected, read our vows to each other and really feel them, and start an inspired married life.”
