My Handmade Wedding, Part 2

On to Part 2 of pictures from my wedding, where I'll talk about the favors, flowers, and other crafty decorations. If you missed it before, check out Part 1 for the jewelry and dresses.

As with Part 1, all of the photos you are about to see were taken by Jason and Juvenia, who own the copyright to said photos. Check out their website at www.jasonandjuvenia.com for more beautiful wedding photography.

We looked all over the San Francisco Bay Area for our wedding venue, but we found the perfect place at the nondenominational St. Peter's Chapel on the old decommissioned naval base only 10 minutes from our house:

I had originally envisioned having an outdoor wedding, but we loved this chapel for two main reasons. First, most of the chapel's 25+ stained glass windows were done by Tiffany studios, making it the largest collection of Tiffany glass under one roof west of the Mississippi. The colors in these windows are just breathtaking:

Second, my husband Darby is a professional French horn musician, and the acoustics in this chapel were perfect for a horn choir. He arranged all the music for our ceremony, and a group of his friends and colleagues so kindly agreed to play in our wedding. It was such a special gift to both us and our guests:

Darby even played in a few of the selections himself. He must have spent over 40 hours selecting and arranging the music:

Together with my Mom, we designed our wedding invitations to show our collective talents in music and origami:

And in keeping with the origami theme, the favors were a pair of paper cranes in the Rokoan style, connected at the wing. Rokoan style paper cranes are made from one sheet of paper that has been cut in a specific pattern to create connected paper cranes, usually joined at the wing tip or nose (Linda Tomoko Mihara makes breathtaking origami pieces in this style). No glue is needed for these connected paper cranes, but it can be difficult to fold them together without tearing the paper at the connections. I had thought about making the more-romantic kissing cranes for the wedding favors, but these can be rather delicate, so I did flat kissing cranes for the invitations and more durable wing-connected cranes for the favors:

I didn't make quite enough for a Senbazuru, but together with Darby we must have made close to 500.

Our wedding flowers were both fresh and beaded. Some french-beaded wisteria from Carol Benner Doelp's The Art of French Beaded Flowers were perfect for decorating the card-collecting box:

My bouquet included roses, orchids, and some kind of greenery from my backyard:

With one hidden french beaded flower made by my late great-grandmother Mimi:

My bridesmaids' flowers contained roses and some beautiful pink and purple hydrangeas:

And our display cake, baked by my expert-baker friend Shannon, was decorated with some pretty purple orchids:

The rubber duckie cake-toppers are a funny story: last March I went to a bridal fair and nearly had a nervous breakdown from all the pressure from the bridal vendors, and from what I can only describe as the "look" they gave me when I said I was planning my wedding in 6 months, not 18. My Mom and I went to Joann Fabrics afterward, where we ended up picking out the pattern for my dress, followed by a visit to a Michaels craft store. I found these duckies there and bought them on the spot, because I thought they were cute and whimsical and added a much-needed flavor of humor to the whole planning process.

The cake toppers led to the design of the floating-flowers-and-mini-rubber-duckies centerpieces, which were put together by some good friends from work. The big rose is from my backyard!

To wrap it all up, here's a photo of the whole wedding party:

And the happy couple:

Thanks for looking!