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(photo by Sam R.)

Can you believe we’re just two weeks away from our 1-year wedding anniversary already! Holy cow! Not even finished posting our wedding photos and our anniversary is sneaking up on us… haha!

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So this post is all about the decorations, design, and stationary for our wedding. Our design theme was all about transparency (to reflect how transparent we are about our relationship to family and friends, and how we wanted to confirm our love on our wedding day to them) and texture. Our colours were ivory, champagne, and chartreuse (which is a pompous way of saying light green-ish).

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One of the craziest, harrowing, and most awesome aspects of planning and executing our wedding was transporting all the insanity all the way to Tofino in a giant, giant truck across Vancouver, then on a ferry and through a treacherous winding road across Vancouver Island. Why did we need a giant truck you ask? Well, to transport our huge-ass wedding arch, 105 chairs, 3 leather benches, 3 cocktail tables, glassware/place settings, and all of our custom/homemade decorations. Oh, and some trees.

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Once I had my heart on a transparent theme, I quickly realized that a) there were absolutely no transparent decor options available on Vancouver Island and b) there actually wasn’t much in Vancouver at all. Fortunately, we managed to source a large number of clear acrylic ghost chairs from just outside Vancouver and were able to transport them to Tofino. We re-used our chairs at our ceremony and reception, so there was the added fun of crazily transporting them all quickly in half an hour (thanks amazing Groomsmen and Mat for that miracle!).  All-in-all, the chairs were one of my favourite things about the wedding and I personally felt they really added a lot to the decor without taking anything away from it. Plus they looked pretty cool against the deep blue sky and deep blue Pacific Ocean!

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The other part of the craziness was transporting and assembling our giant transparent acrylic wedding arch for the ceremony and reception. The wedding arch was a collaboration between my design, my dad and Allan’s handiwork, and a Surrey plastics company who sourced the right sized and thickness pieces of acrylic for us. The arch was a huge 8 feet high by 10 feet wide and consisted of two base pillars, a large trough across that could hold flowers, and bases that were filled with water to keep them grounded in case of high winds (luckily, we didn’t have any!). The best thing about doing it all custom made and yourself is that no one else will have our wedding arch and chandeliers in their wedding and when I look at the photos it feels really great that it was a unique expression of us!

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In addition to the flowers on the arch, I also spent many hours measuring fishing wire and tying thousands of glass balls to a multi-tiered chandelier.

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It’s funny, the end result actually doesn’t look like much, but the chandeliers (we built 3 multi-tiered ones total) were a labour of love… all the way from importing a custom order of a thousand glass balls from China… sending my money halfway across the world without actually knowing if it was a scam, eventually receiving after many months the shipment of the balls, then dealing with customs and warehouse fees, driving out to the warehouse, packing Allan’s tiny ’97 VW Golf with 10 giant boxes of glass balls… and storing them in our small apartment for months. Was it worth it? LOL. I’m still not sure.

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We spent many late nights hanging the balls on the chandeliers at specific intervals and specific heights (to get that cascading effect) and yep, there were many casualties. It was also tricky to get the ribbons perfectly weighted with the two levels of acrylic rings so it didn’t slant over unevenly. Not to mention packing and unpacking the chandeliers (we had to pack each glass ball individually) for transport was… uhh… tricky. Lastly, the balls were filled with beautiful fresh orchids from our florist.

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{photo by Sam R.)

All that being said, when I finally stepped out onto the patio overlooking the ocean staring into Allan’s eyes when I walked down the aisle… it was a beautiful sight to see it all come together. While we said our vows, the glass lightly clinked together almost like wind chimes (a happy unexpected effect!) as the breeze ruffled through them, and strangely enough, it’s one of the sounds that is most lucid and memorable to me from that day.

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One of the other aspects of our wedding that we really wanted to have was to make our guests feel special and unique. Aside from putting lots of thought into our invitations and thank you cards (see end of post), we created custom wedding programs for each guest.

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Each program had the guest’s name, what table they were going to be seated at, some details for the day, and a section that listed our favourite memory of all time with that guest. As with all of our logos/branding/stationary, I custom designed these myself in Illustrator. It took several hours to write the memories and list out all the guest names, but it was important to me that our guests remembered as we were walking down the aisle that although they were there for us, we were there for them just as much and really valued their presence and effort to come all the way out to Tofino for us.

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Here’s another shot of the flowers for our ceremony. We built custom acrylic pillars for the flowers. Beautiful flowers from Crab Apple Floral…. see my previous post on flowers!

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We also brought in two large trees from Vancouver for the reception. We set them up in the room and hung a glass ball chandelier off each of them. The chandeliers for the reception were filled with hundreds of ivory silk flowers that myself and my cousin/bridesmaid Loi spent many hours sewing by hand.

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Unfortunately the candles didn’t really work out, we found that once we lit them over time the heat of the ball touching the other fishing wires would melt them and cause them to fall. Yikes! Haha. So we didn’t end up lighting any candles in them, but the flowers still looked quite nice.

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We also showed a collection of family photos near the “guestbook” signing area just outside the reception room. We also used old frames that were around my parents’ house growing up to house the photos.

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In hindsight I wish we had collected more! I really loved having them on display.

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We also filled the reception room with hundreds of candles. Candles are such a fantastic inexpensive way to make a room look romantic, and they were definitely worth the fire hazard!

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Our reception was a mix of long tables for big groups of friends, plus round tables for family and friends. We also had our long head table facing the dance floor and the room. We used two different linens for the room, this one was an ivory linen called “Confetti”. Each table in the reception hall varied between high and low centerpieces and flowers, and we re-used the ghost chairs.

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This was our table of “welcome drinks” for the reception. We brought in a small rosemary herb plant to add some fragrance to the hallway as well as it be something we could have and use after the wedding. See this blog post for more info on our food and drinks for the wedding.

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Here’s a shot of the head table with the bridesmaids’ bouquets alongside the places settings.

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Things sounds crazy, but I really wanted nice linens. The room was pretty bare and since we weren’t allowed to hang things on the ceilings or the walls, I figured linens were the only way to really bring any texture or elegance to the room. Both Allan and my family thought I was actually insane for express flying up linens from California and then having them transported across the border by our amazing DJ Austin Beaver (thanks Austin sooooo much!) but yep, I did. This linen is a beautiful unique antique ivory silk linen called “Monique” from La Tavola Linens in Beverly Hills. Vancouver doesn’t actually have that much selection for linens (and you kind of see the same ones over and over again in local weddings), and I fell in love with their linens. The “Monique” linen is actually inspired by Monique Lhuillier dresses, so it felt sort of fitting and I just looooooved the texture. La Tavola has one of the best linens selections of pretty much anywhere in the world, so I definitely recommend taking a look if you want something different. Yes, it was a totally OCD move.

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Here’s a better shot of how the linens look underneath our transparent theme. We used gold beaded glass chargers, gold flatware, rimmed glasses, and ivory napkins. We also custom designed and printed our menu on thin acrylic pieces. We also used the glass balls at each placesetting with a round name card cutout as placecards.

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We wanted some fun pieces to add to the room as well as be functional, so we custom design and constructed acrylic cocktail tables that we also used as our podium. We had two of these around the dance floor and one for the podium. Each had a fitted lid so you could put stuff inside it, and we filled it with orchids, greenery, and west coast driftwood. Also in the corner of the photo you’ll see the custom acrylic candlelabras! These were laser cut by an artist in the states, and we used them to hold flowers and candles on all the guest tables.

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Another fun piece was the custom wedding logo gobo that I designed and ordered from the States for the light projection on the dance floor. We had to rent the stand and light for the projection, but it actually turned out really well and was quite bright! For those of you thinking about wedding gobos, I recommend ordering your own gobo glass with your custom design, and then renting the light. A lot of the wedding gobo lights are really dim that come packaged, so it’s nice to get a professional light from your local A/V shop. It ends up being cheaper, too!

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Here’s a shot of the room with some of the decorations… the wedding arch (from the ceremony), the trees, the chandeliers, the high tiered display boxes with flowers for the parents’ table (featured in the Flowers post), the warm uplighting (thanks Austin!), and the flowers and candles.

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(photo by Przemek M.)

We also got custom engraved table numbers on acrylic from another artist which we placed on each table.

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Here’s a shot of how we did signage at the wedding for notes to guests — our wedding logo plus our fonts in a gold frame.

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(photo by me)

Here’s a quick reminder of the DIY wooden wedding invitations we did, printed on thin birch wood with a wedding directions map (that we designed and illustrated ourselves!).

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(photo by me)

We wanted to keep the same theme for our “thank you” cards, using the same golden seal with our wedding logo, keeping the same fonts and theme etc. For our wedding registry we actually did a “honeyfund” which is a honeymoon gift registry. One of the big reasons people usually think this is a bad idea, is because you give money to the bride and groom and then you just assume it goes into their pockets. What we did was have guests purchase specific items for our honeymoon, such as “A dinner out in Barcelona” or “Surf rentals in Portugal” or “champagne on your first night” as we did a month-long honeymoon cruise trip around Northern Europe and the Mediterranean. To make sure that guests knew we used their gifts for their intended honeymoon purchase, we took photos all throughout our trip and sent custom cards to each guest with photos of their purchase on it.

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(photo by me)

Here’s a shot of some of the final custom “thank you” cards. We used Moo.com to create individual thank you cards for our 100+ guests, and I also got a bunch of our official wedding photos printed up on little mini cards. So, each guest received photos of their specific gift to us, as well as relevant cards of them at our wedding plus a photo of Allan and I. We really enjoyed putting these together and it made us super grateful that each of our guests were so generous and were able to gift us with such a lovely honeymoon!

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(photo by me)

All our decorations, design and stationary took quite a bit of time, but it was also the most fun part of our wedding (at least for me!) was planning and being crafty/DIY with all of it. Not only did it save us a lot of money, but it ended up looking a lot more unique and was super FUN! Here’s a before-shot of our wedding reception venue. A big empty hall!

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And here’s the after shot. There’s a lot of time and effort that went into this from all our family, friends, and vendors… so THANK YOU to everyone for all your help and love and look what you were able to help us pull off!

All photos copyright by our amazing Vancouver wedding photographers JONETSU Studios unless otherwise specified.

Follow @VancityAllie

And finally the second installment of our wedding photos series! Thanks to everyone for being patient. The last two months were insane as we were out of town every weekend for various trips (Big White, Vegas, Seattle, Hawaii) and we’re still trying to catch up

In this post, I will be covering the various food, drinks, and dessert we had at our wedding. For those of you that have been following my blog for a long time, you know that food and drinks are really important to us. The planning of this portion of the wedding was actually very tricky, as… for one — it was in a remote destination in Tofino, and two — it was being catered offsite. We actually had to bring over a lot of supplies and people over from Vancouver to Tofino via the ferry and highway, so it took me a long time to plan and sort out all the details. Some of my friends who are getting married have asked me to describe all the details so bear with me as this is a long one!

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(Photo courtesy S. Ritter) Pictured above are the welcome drinks that we served just before our dinner reception before guests were let into the main hall. We also used these as our escort cards, which let guests know which table they were sitting at. We made these “escort cards stir sticks” ourselves, I picked up these cute green striped straws on Etsy (our wedding colours were ivory, green and champagne), and our bartender prepared these himself with fresh ingredients. These non-alcoholic drinks were modeled after my favourite cocktail at West Restaurant. The drinks are a mix of fresh apricot puree, peach puree, honey and ginger with a squeeze of lemon and ice.

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It took us some time to put these together at home. I designed all the stationary, logos and designs for our wedding in vector format on the computer, including these escort cards. We printed out these designs on glossy paper, carefully matching each guest’s name to their table number. Then we sandwiched these on wooden stir sticks and used food-safe glue to bind them together. It was neat — some guests actually hung onto them afterwards and stuck them in their pockets as name tags.

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(Photo courtesy A. Flower) Pretty!

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The welcome drinks table were all setup outside the main dining room. It was a warm day in Tofino that day, so guests were able to sip on the cold drinks before heading in for dinner.

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Here’s a photo of our AMAZING bartender David Wolowidnyk and his wife Nancy who helped him out. David is the Bar Manager at the prestigious West Restaurant and has been named Bartender of the Year across all of Canada several times. He’s also won a number of international and local competitions. David and I have been friends for many years and so it was such an honour that the person who makes my favourite drinks of all time was able to come out to our wedding from Vancouver.

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David brought his own special collection of bitters and also made his own fresh fruit purees, syrups, and garnishes for the drinks at our wedding. We got a lot of compliments from guests on the drinks and I know I drank quite a few! I can’t say enough good things about David and his bartending. Not to mention — the cost of the all the drinks, bartending services, and alcohol was a LOT less and WAY more unique than it would have been if we had gone through a local provider or the resort.

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Here is a shot of our drink list. This is one of the things I am most proud about of our wedding. Allan and I took a long time to personalize, name, and craft the ingredients for our own special drinks in collaboration with David. The “Bride’s Drinks” consisted of The Longboarder, Whistler Pow Pow (a blended green tea mojito!), and An Afternoon at Granville Island. The “Groom’s Drinks” consisted of The Hardtail, Tamarindo Swell (with homemade ginger beer!), and Incinerator Rock. Click on the photo to see all the ingredients.

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Friends enjoying the cocktails.

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Another aspect of our wedding was the “Champagne Reception” at Black Rock Resort, which took place right after the ceremony and right before the dinner reception. Guests went downstairs from the ceremony into the wine cellar room which was lit with candles and a patio that overlooks the ocean.

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Here’s the view the guests had from champagne reception. You can see the ocean waves breaking and spraying up through this rocky surge channel. Guests could choose either to stay inside where the food was or get some fresh air on the balcony.

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Champagne (organic!) was passed to guests as they came down the stairs into the room.

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Guests could either help themselves to side tables set up with food such as a cheese plate, croissants, fruit and vegetables, salad… and more!

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(Photo courtesy A. Flower) Or pick from passed appetizers such as Albacore tuna, bocconcini and heirloom tomatoes atop smashed peas on a crostini, crispy yam fries, and more.

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(Photo courtesy A. Flower) Oh, or have more champagne!

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After the champagne reception guests headed over to the Ucluelet Hall where we had our dinner reception. One of my favourite parts of the wedding decor was our custom clear acrylic menus. I did the typography and layout design in Illustrator myself for these. I’m super stoked with how these turned out! We got these screen-printed by a printer in Richmond on thin acrylic pieces (custom milled by a glass company in Surrey) and I think they ended up looking really cool against the candlelight at our reception. They also went well with our “transparency” decor theme (will be featured in a separate post).

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Although Black Rock did off-site catering for the event, Allan and I crafted each and every food item on our menu, right down to the presentation, plating, and garnishes.  The majority of the food featured was locally sourced. First Course: Choice of West Coast Seafood Chowder (with locally caught seafood) or Roasted Butternut Squash Soup

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Second Course: Choice of Qualicum Bay Scallops with Apricot Puree or Wild Mushroom Ravioli

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Third Course: Choice of Herb Crusted Tofino Halibut, Braised Beef Short Rib, Crispy Duck Breast in a Golden Raison Sauce, or Spicy Smoked Chicken Tagliatelle (also available veggie)

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Fourth Course: Choice of Denman Apple Crumble, Key Lime Pie, or Sticky Toffee Pudding

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A note/review about Black Rock Resort and their catering for weddings: We were not happy overall with the quality and service for their catering and food. We spent a lot of time doing tastings and meetings to get the menu and flavours right (and everything was perfect in the tastings!), but unfortunately on the day some of our family members noted a couple of their dishes arrived cold and/or tough. Although many guests really enjoyed the food, the lack of consistency really disappointed us. We really stressed we wanted the food to come out hot, and even paid extra for more staff in the kitchen and the reception room for this purpose. I have already provided my feedback to Black Rock but I would caution future brides against Black Rock Resort for wedding food aspects if you are a foodie

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Our wedding cake was provided by the fabulous Ganache Patisserie in Yaletown. Ask my maid of honour Kim about our crazy adventure transporting the cake ourselves through the bumpy wild roads on the way to Tofino. It was a lot of fun though and a funny memory to look back on. And hey, it made it!

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Plus, it tasted delicious. The cake was dark chocolate ganache with a crispy hazelnut praline and a real raspberry filling sandwiched between moist chocolate cake layers. Yum! Thanks Ganache!

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And finally, the last edible piece of our wedding was our wedding favours! Guests were encouraged to take home their selection of chocolate from our “Chocolate Tour of Vancouver”. We really wanted to incorporate Vancouver somehow into our Tofino destination wedding, so we brought along several collections of chocolate from various Vancouver chocolatiers.

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I made custom little stickers and placed them on clear favour bags.

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Chocolate selection from Chocolate Arts, including vegan chocolates, native art chocolate sculpture box and a “Cheers” chocolate champagne bottle…

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… the meticulous chocolates and truffles from Thomas Haas, Chocolatas on Granville Island chocolates, a box of Mink chocolates (Allan and I used to go there on secret dates when we first started going out), and not pictured some Purdy’s chocolates.

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Perhaps one of my favourite parts of the whole wedding was our custom wedding chocolates! They were dark chocolate mint filling (both our favourite flavours) and printed with our wedding logo and colours. We still have a few in our freezer and I’m desperately trying not to eat them!

Thanks for reading and putting up with my ridiculousness! Love you all lots! Till next time…

All photos unless otherwise noted courtesy of our amazing wedding photographers JONETSU Studios.

Follow @VancityAllie