The Sew*er, The Caker, The CopyCat Maker: Ahhh! Wedded Bliss

Well here it is, my post bursting with photos from the wedding last month. The happy couple are home from their honeymoon in Europe and life has started to feel normal again. What better time to look back and remember just how gorgeous everything was that day.

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The wedding took place at the Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis, MN. With all the running around on the day of the wedding, I didn't even get a picture of the Basilica. I had to borrow this one from the library of congress ;0}

This church is just breathtaking. It was built between 1907-1915 and was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. I guess this month would be it's 100th birthday as the Basilica of Saint Mary was dedicated on August 15, 1915.

And my little brother was married there the month before ;0}

A while back I posted on all the options for flower girl dresses. We went with all white, crochet topped white tulle tutu dresses. I lined the crochet part with t-shirt fabric, the skirts with a satin slip, and added a cap sleeve so that the dresses would stay on during the LOoooong walk to the altar.

Eli looks just thrilled to be escorting the two Jr. bridesmaids, doesn't he?

Flower girls...then the boys...then.....

The bride! Davie, my new sister-in-law looked absolutely breathtaking walking down the isle escorted by her parents.

David was pretty excited to see her ;0}

He does, she does,

Now kiss the bride cause it's time to party!

My three kiddos. Madison, this is what you get for making faces when I am trying to take pictures.

So, I was not ever familiar with the idea of a "Grand March" until we moved here to MN. So once everyone is seated at the reception and happy hour is over, there is a big announcement, then the wedding party comes in the room one by one. Each set of attendants does something goofy or cool or dances all crazy, then the next set comes in until you get to the bride and groom.

First enter my children...They take after their father's side. Actually, it is pretty obvious that my terrible genes have dominated on this wedding day, LOL.

All kidding aside, the reception was so nice. The wedding party all took turns toasting the couple.

I had to slide a picture of the Grandma's in there. It didn't even turn out clearly and they still look so cute!

Alright. This is a craft blog. Let's get down to the particulars here!

Davie's theme was peacock feathers using purple, green and gold as the colors.

You can see the cute table numbers she made here, along with the centerpieces.

There was a candy bar. My contribution was the kiss labels and the Love is Sweet sign. The silhouette cut file for that sign is HERE in my dropbox if anyone wants it.

The gift table. Davie made the birdcage card holder. You can't see my "And they lived Happily Ever After" sign, but HERE is the cut file for that too.

Here is the cake that Davie picked out. The reception was at Plymouth Creek Center in Plymouth, MN. It was a very nice venue, but you have to have a licensed baker make your wedding cake. I looked into becoming that licensed baker, but I had to have a commercial kitchen totally separate from the family kitchen to cook the cakes in.

We finally decided to make a fake-cake for the reception, and Davie chose cheesecakes from Costco to be the cake we served.

With the two cakes I made for the grooms dinner the day before, I didn't get to start this cake until 10pm the night before the wedding. I worked through the night making all of the flowers and managed to slip into bed about 5:30am on the day of the wedding. It was all worth it to see the cake come together so beautifully and see Davie happy with how it turned out.

I made the labels for the sauce bottles and a few extra flowers to put on the cheesecakes. I talked a bit a while ago about trying to figure out how to display the cake and the cheesecakes. My wonderful neighbor gave me this cake stand and it turned out to be just perfect for the Costco-sized cheesecakes.

There is really no way I could show you the stuff made for the wedding and not show you this crazy thing. I blame David. He saw this idea and was just obsessed with it. This was the board that housed all of the seating assignments. They blew up a colored photo and a sepia toned photo of the same picture.

It is kind of hard to see...but there is one name tag still on there...

See? I cut the names out of vinyl on my silhouette. One Sunday afternoon David and every man in Davie's family plus Scott and Eli helped David work on cutting the pictures/foam core pieces apart while the ladies put the vinyl names on. Later table numbers were added to the backs of the pieces.

Here is that big picture again...

Can you see the three name tags still on there now?

So when everyone came, this board was covered with sepia colored tiles. Slowly the tiles were taken away and this was what was left. Pretty cool, but SO MUCH WORK! Seriously. David and a large number of people worked more than 40 hours on this thing. It was amazing though, so I guess it was worth it ;0}

The dinner was served buffet style in the next room. That was the best wedding food I have had in a very long time! I will have to find out the name of their caterer. They were excellent.

Emmalee got a kick out of all of the photo props. They had a photo booth service come halfway through the reception with a nice backdrop and filmstrip styled photo cards.

Davie sent me a couple pins she wanted made for the wedding. This was one of them. It was a large window in the pin, but we wanted to use a frame instead, hoping it would fit better into their house after the wedding was all over.

These anniversary wine bottles were another thing she really wanted. I made the bottle labels, she brought the bottles. The idea was, near the sign-in book, people could write their wedding wishes for the couple and slip them into the wine bottles. On the specified anniversary, David and Davie can open the bottle and read the messages left for them on their wedding day. So cute.

I made this little sign to go on the table. You can get the cut file HERE. Or, if you don't have a vinyl cutter, email me and I can hook you up through my Etsy site.

This sign can be found HERE. You will have to change the dates though ;0}

I believe the font is Great Vibes. I love that font. I used it for the last two weddings and it was perfect even with the different styles.

There was dancing after dinner. David and his mommy. I can't really handle the idea of this being me and Eli one day.

But this, Scott dancing with Emmalee, too cute! The only thing sweeter to me that night was Eli dancing with Emmalee.

You can see here the colors we put in the train of the dress. After the ceremony, Emmalee made me cut the tulle shorter so she could run around and not trip, otherwise her dress had a bit of a train in the back that drug behind when she walked. It was gorgeous for the wedding, but having it shorter was a must for the party.