Today we have a first here on the blog… a contest! When I launched the blog’s new design in March one of my intentions was to run some contests to give away unique and beautiful items from the many talented wedding professionals I love to feature here! … so today we start with the gorgeous work of Erin McDermott Jewelry.
First, let me tell you a little bit about Erin’s spectacular bridal collection .. then we’ll get to the contest.
Erin’s wedding collections are extremely popular. Why? Because she personally designs and crafts each piece. Bridesmaids love having something different to wear that they can’t find at a store. After the wedding, Erin’s pieces are treasured because they can be worn — not only with cocktail dresses and formal wear — but also with jeans and a t-shirt for a casual, yet one-of-a-kind mix. Her Bridal Collection highlights each girls’ personality, style, and individual charm. Erin can work with each bride to design pieces that showcase the unique friendships and histories between the bride and each member of her bridal party. This is the bride’s chance to flaunt her creative side In less than 2 years, Erin has designed for over 150 weddings.
And now you have the chance to win one of her pieces!
Here is how to enter:
Most couples want to include something that makes their wedding stand out from all the others. So we want to know what you’re planning for your wedding or what you’ve seen at another’s. Submit (via “Comments”) one of two things: either the most unique & unusual element that you are planning for your wedding (or actually had at your wedding) or something you’ve seen at a wedding you’ve been to (not from TV, wedding blogs or books!) that was unique and unusual. All entries may be shared here on the blog.
Submission Deadline: Thursday, May 19th
Erin and I will select the person who submitted the best out-of-the box idea to win their choice of one of the beautiful items below:
Artist's Palate Earrings
For more info. on the Artist’s Palate earrings go HERE
Bridget Earrings
For more info. on the Bridget earrings go HERE
Courtney Necklace
For more info. on the Courtney necklace go HERE.
Contact information for Erin McDermott Jewelry
~ Website: www.erinmcdermott.com
~ Blog: www.erinmcdermott.com/blog
~ Facebook: Erin McDermott Jewelry
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My fiance (now husband) and I LOVE Mexican food and decided we wanted our wedding to be one that was full of love and just a dash of fiesta-ness. We started with the menu; tacos and grilled margarita lime chicken and decided to carry the Mexican flair into a lot of the little details of our wedding. We served Sangria and Spanish champagne, handed out bubbles adorned with decorative sombreros and maracas to our guests and we hung a pinata stuffed with lots of goodies, for the younger wedding attendees, just outside of our outdoor reception tent. We wanted small splashes of fun and fiesta, without a “themed” wedding. The day was perfect for us, extremely memorable and could have only been improved by our very own Mariachi band. Perhaps when it comes time to renew our vows
I’m planning an outdoor, rustic wedding for this coming June. We’re using burlap on the tables (which I realize isn’t all that unique). However, yesterday we found out that one of our vendors just recently purchased FARM TABLES that we can rent. So – we’re going to do that for our head table. Literally, imagine what farmers would use years ago. That’s what we’re going for and I can’t wait to see how it comes out! We think it will blend great with the burlap, but also be a great unique thing people will remember.
Also – we’re renting the bathroom trailers to make sure there are enough stalls for all our guests and we’re going to play music in them – DVD players are located under the sink
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I was married last month and we added a few details that I absolutely loved and was thankful to have had. We had a slight underlying recycling theme, so two things were along those lines!
1. Our guest book: I found an amazing artist on etsy named Harmony (www.feedyoursoulart.com) who makes fabulous art books. I contacted her and paid her to personalize one for my husband and I for our wedding guest book. The book is made from scratch out of recycled paper from old books, magazines, craft paper, etc. I told her things about Nate and I that she included as part of the book: wedding colors, love and marriage references, things about the outdoors, pages of music, and even photos of us she had me email her. I got so many compliments on it and will treasure it forever alongside with our photos!!
http://www.etsy.com/shop/feedyoursoulart?section_id=7058789
2. Ice resin collage magnates: My awesome friend and coworker came up with an idea for our wedding favors. Thinking about the recycling aspect, I collected a bunch of baby food jar lids. We made little collages in the lids from handmade paper in the wedding colors, postage stamp-size photos, stickers, and thread. We then filled the lids with Ice Resin and glued magnates to the back. The personalized magnates made awesome favors which were inexpensive and fun to make.
3. Painted backdrop: The third thing that was really memorable about our wedding was our photo-booth backdrop. I am a photography teacher and a photographer, so I am always thinking about photos. Once I decided that I was going to set up a photo-booth at our wedding, I started thinking about how I could make the photos unique to our wedding. I know having photo-booths are a new wedding trend, but all the ones I have ever seen have white or neutral backdrops. We got married at Shenandoah Crossing Resort in Gordonsville, so there were beautiful Virginia views there. We also had decided to wear cowboy boots and to tell our guests to do the same…funny since we are both from Ohio! I decided that a Virginia scene with rolling hills, hay bales, and the Blue Ridge Mountains in the background would be perfect! Two very talented students at CHS painted the backdrop for us. It was key to making the photo booth images truly unique wedding keepsakes!
http://rachelzahumensky.blogspot.com/2011/04/favorites-by-frank.html
Our whole wedding has a beer theme (my fiance is a homebrewer and my parents own a bar) and instead of having table numbers, we’re using beer tap handles! When the guests get to the reception, rather than being told that they’re seated at Table 2, they’ll be directed to the Sierra Nevada table or the Starr Hill table. We’re going to mount the tap handles on a wooden base and set them up alongside our centerpieces. (We also aren’t using any flowers, but instead will have hop vines and artificial hop flowers in vases.) We may even do a black and tan ceremony as our unity ceremony during the wedding.
I am a Texas girl born and raised and being a Texan is very much a part of me. One of the famous things about Texas is its unmistakable shape. I have cookie cutters, baking pans, Christmas ornaments, and much more in the shape of Texas. When we got engaged, I mentioned the option of having a groom’s cake at our wedding to my fiance. He had no clue what a groom’s cake was and didn’t really care whether we had one at the reception or not. So I decided to start my own wedding tradition. In addition to the traditional tiered cake, we are going to have a bride’s cake…in the shape of Texas! It will go great with the cowboy boots I have on under my wedding gown. And just to give the wedding another little Texas meets Virginia touch (my fiance is born and raised in Charlottesville) I want to have little decorative bags of pecans (because the pecan tree is the Texas state tree) and peanuts (because of the famous Virginia peanuts) as favors for my guests to take home with them!
My fiance and I have brewed ALL of the beer for our wedding from scratch, using all-grain recipes that my fiance has created over the last few years. So far we have 6×5 gallon kegs of beer (yep, that’s 30 gallons of homebrew!) and we’re naming each of the brews after one of the places we’ve lived, either together or before we met. We have Rose City Red Ale (for his hometown of Portland, OR), The Bishop’s Tarwater (an Imperial Stout inspired by the founder of our residential college in New Haven, CT), The West VirGinger (a ginger beer after my own home state of WV), and finally, the Shenandoah IPA. We’re striving to create as many parts of our wedding that we can ourselves and to get as many things as possible locally, and are going for a “farmyard barbecue” vibe. Our venue is a family friend’s working farm. We’ve made strawberry jam favors for our guests, found a caterer who would locally source as much of the food as possible, including a pig to roast.
We decided that instead of doing the traditional table number/letter (1, 2, 3 or A, B, C) or even the typical winery themed table categories (Cabernet, Merlot, etc) we were going to use a number, color, or saying that had meaning to us, and then write the story behind it. Each “card” will be printed as an 8×10 photo, framed, and placed in the center of each table. This way, people will want to walk around and see each of the frames and can read a story about my fiance and I at the same time
Very simple example would be Table 7: We met 7 years ago at college… and write a brief synopsis of how we first met each other.
I have always had a special bond with my dad’s parents, they have recently suffered serious setbacks due to illness and will not be able to be at our wedding three weeks from yesterday. We (my fiance and I) really wanted to honor them in our ceremony. So, we came up with this idea: we have taken a book and cut out a heart in the pages and glued the pages together. The rings will be placed in the heart/hole and carried by our sweet ring bearer down the aisle. My grandfather proposed to my grandmother (almost 70 years ago!) by handing her a storybook he had written and had bound. In the back, there was a small heart shaped hole with an engagement ring in it. To add to the layers of love here, the book we have chosen is “One thousand and one nights” which details the story of Aladdin- my grandparents have called me “Jasmine” since the days that the three of us spent mornings playing pretend (with my grandmother as my fellow princess and my grandfather as Jafar or Nana’s prince- depending on the day
Last summer, my fiance and I went to a wedding of good friends of ours out in California. Most of the wedding ceremony was traditional, but their vows were quite unusual. When it came time to recite the vows, instead of joining hands, they joined pinkies. This idea to ‘pinky swear’ their vows seemed funny and cute at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more meaningful it seemed as well. At its core a wedding is just a chance to make a big promise in front of all of your friends and family, so it made perfect sense to bring back the element of childhood that meant you’re making a promise you won’t ever break. It was such a cute idea, and something I’d never even heard of in the wedding world! But it might not remain completely unique for long… my fiance and I want to do the same thing at our upcoming October wedding in Charlottesville!
Family means a lot to both me and my husband. We has a table at our wedding that included the wedding pictures of all of our immediate family. From sisters/brothers, parents, grandparents, great grandparents! It also had the wedding date for each. It was such a nice way to look back at the history of our families as we joined together.
My fiance and I are getting married in the spring of next year. This is a second wedding for both of us, and it is most important for us to include our four boys in the ceremony (we each have two boys – ages 10, 12, 14, and 17). We do not plan to have any bridesmaids or groomsmen only to have our boys in the service. We’re in the process of thinking up roles for each boy, looking for ideas that are out-of-the box, beyond the normal “doing a reading.” We want the ceremony to feel fun and accessible to the boys.
One role we have decided on is for my fiance’s 12-year-old son. He is a genius with remote controlled airplanes and helicopters. In fact, he loves to use his helicopter to deliver small things to us around their house and is able to do so with incredible precision. We have decided that when the officiant says, “The rings please,” we will all look around, seemingly confused. Then we will have my fiance’s 12-year-old soon pull out his pocket remote control box and fly a small helicopter that is carrying the ring box over the guests heads, right into my fiance’s hands!
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