the wedding: ceremony and reception

Are you ready for the third and final wedding post?! It’s a big one…

So after all of the preparation and group photo taking, it was finally time for the ceremony. Our ceremony and reception were both at Sovereign Estate Vineyard in Waconia, MN. Since the location of our ceremony was already incredibly beautiful, I wanted to keep the ceremony decorations minimal. Since I had a mason jar theme going (more on that….) I decided to hang mason jars filled with flowers from shepherd hooks at every other aisle. Simple and pretty.

We chose to have a guitarist play the music for the ceremony. The inspiration actually came from the wedding episode from How I Met Your Mother. I just love how whimsical the guitar sounds and it was a great fit with the setting. We used Nick Haas and he did a wonderful job.

When thinking about the logistics of the ceremony, I was a little weary of how I was going to actually get to the ceremony site, as it’s a little bit of a walk from the winery. Marc’s mom mentioned that she knew someone who had some Norwegian horses and a carriage who could possibly help. While the thought of making such a grand entrance made me nervous I thought, what the heck? It’s my wedding day and if there’s one day to make a grand entrance, that would be the day.

Our dear friends Thomas and Abigail married us, and we couldn’t have asked for a better ceremony. It was a combination of funny, personal, and romantic.

This was probably where Thomas made a Hurricane Taylor reference.

Since we were outside, we decided to do a wine pour instead of a unity candle. I had a glass of white wine and Marc had a glass of red and we poured them together. It was quite fitting for our setting.

First kiss as a married couple!

After the ceremony we took a ride in the carriage while our guests enjoyed cocktail hour. It was so nice to have a few minutes to reflect with my new husband, and our carriage driver even had a bottle of champagne waiting for us to celebrate!

While we didn’t get to enjoy the cocktail hour, as we were in the carriage and taking some pictures with our photographer, I heard it was great and from what I can tell in the pictures, the presentation was beautiful.

Our seating chart was written on some old windows that my mom and I found. We painted the glass panes with chalkboard paint and then wrote on them with chalk markers. I found Catherine from Printerette Press at my yoga studio, as she does their announcement board, to do the printing for the names. She was super fun to work with and very accommodating to what I wanted.

The reception was closer to the winery in a tent. Our centerpieces were wood planks cut and finished by my dad, including the M+T brand! On top of each plank we had three mason jars decorated with various ribbons by my step-mom and I. It was so fun to see our work in the “final product”…especially with the beautiful flowers!

Marc’s dad made the head table, which was actually 3 harvest tables put together.

In addition to using the mason jars for flower vases, we used them for our place settings too. I mean, what is more fun than drinking out of a mason jar? Catherine from Printerette Press did the labels for the mason jars too.

I found these forks on Etsy from Pretty Paris’s shop, and we used them for our cake cutting. Cute, eh?

I got our table numbers from an Etsy store too. Simple and cute.

My dad also made the cake stand. Our cake was made by Buttercream Bakery in Saint Paul, MN. I wanted the design to be simple and chose the stucco style of frosting plus some flowers from our florist. I love how it turned out. We had two flavors of cake, an Almond Praline and Chocolate Cake with Baileys buttercream.

Our caterer was Green Olive Catering, which is a local catering company from Waconia. I loved working with local vendors because they were so much more accommodating than a bigger company would have been. Mary from Green Olive basically told me to pick whatever I wanted for her to make, but that was a little too overwhelming for me so I asked for her input. She said her specialty was Coq Au Vin so that’s what we went with. The bone-in chicken thighs were so incredibly flavorful and fell off the bone. She served it with blue cheese scalloped potatoes and bourbon roasted carrots. The plates were beautiful.