Wedding DIY: Wedding colors and "theme"

As all the blogs will tell you, no wedding is complete without special wedding colors and even a theme. Picking colors was very easy, I immediately declared that they would be coral and turquoise because a) I love these colors, and b) following from reason a, almost everything in our apartment is one of these two colors so it would make it very easy to steal decorations from our home and pass them off as wedding decor (and to use leftover paint from past projects on new wedding-related projects). However, I mostly treated these as our base colors and then used lots of other colors in the wedding that I thought complemented them. So for instance, I thought coral or turquoise bridesmaids dresses might be a little intense, so instead I just asked the ladies to wear blue dresses in any style and hue of their choosing and then gave them statement coral necklaces to wear.

(Note the turquoise ribbon wrapping the bouquets)

Our moms got in on the blue theme too:

Similarly, we used yellow flowers for the bridesmaid bouquets (sunflowers) and some of the table arrangements (novelty mums) because yellow seemed to go well with turquoise and coral.

That being said, we also had plenty of coral and turquoise scattered throughout:

The flower vases (which were pasta sauce jars I'd saved for months) had turquoise ribbons tied around them:

My shoes:

My earrings:

My bouquet:

 Our seating sign and basket for programs (both DIY):

The programs themselves (also DIY):

The escort cards and guest favors (more DIY):

The tags for the wish tree (which we had instead of a guest book -- more details to come in future posts):

Picking a theme was harder. I brainstormed with friends and family and had many wonderful contenders such as "Drowning in Love" (this would be a nautical theme in which we tried to suffocate guests with our over-the-top declarations of love and dogged adherence to nautical decor) and "White Whale" (this would pit me, in my white dress, as the Moby Dick to Sam's Captain Ahab). (To those who don't get my sense of humor, these options were actually discussed but only sardonically considered.)

Ultimately, I decided to go with a simpler theme: love birds. This arose because I was picking a template for our wedding website (we used wedding wire), and the turquoise scheme that I liked the most happened to have some birds kissing on it. And then I found turquoise invitations at Michael's that also happened to have love birds on them. I asked Sam how he felt about "birds kissing," he expressed appropriate confusion about how to respond to this question, and our theme was born.

Basically I just used the "theme" to try to make everything look somewhat intentionally cohesive, even though it actually started as total coincidence. To avoid paying exorbitant fees to have other wedding-related materials designed to match the love birds theme, instead I found a vendor on Etsy to make us a $25 rubber stamp that I then used to my heart's content on things like our ceremony programs and guest favors. (I bought black, turquoise, and coral ink pads to use in different contexts.)

Thus we ended up with this smorgasbord of birds scattered throughout our wedding materials:

Wedding website:

Invitations:

Ceremony programs:

Guest Favors:

Receptacle for cards (it's a bid cage, though its hard to tell from the photo):

And there you have it: turquoise, coral, a bunch of other colors, birds kissing. It's all so romantic.

Next up will be a deeper exploration of our DIYed printed materials (Save-the-Dates, invitations, programs, and signs), and then more about the DIY decor throughout. I know you're on the edge of your seats.