Eclectic Romance | My DIY Wedding! - Whimsy Design Studio

You guys!!! I am beyond excited to finally share photos from my own wedding – featured on Junebug Weddings today! Steven and I were married this past September and I’ve been dying to share the images all over the interwebs. Check out the feature on Junebug and see some of my personal favorite images below. I’ll be posting additional photos specifically for my stationery and signage details later – stay tuned!

All About My Very Own Big Fat Greek Wedding

For our wedding, we had a traditional Greek Orthodox ceremony followed by a vintage, laid-back barn reception with loads of personal DIY details. It sounds pretty disjointed, but our wedding came together as the most beautiful and perfect day that truly represented our love and lives together.

My new husband is Greek Orthodox and I am not. When it came to planning our wedding, getting married in the church was very important to us both but I desperately wanted to be outdoors, breathing in that fresh, Rocky Mountain air. We struggled on which route to go and then finally just gave ourselves permission to “have it all” – a church ceremony and an outdoor reception in the Denver foothills across town!

Our ceremony location, Assumption of the Theotokos Greek Orthodox Cathedral, is breathtaking on it’s own; a huge gold dome lined with intricate paintings Orthodox icons and religious imagery. The Greek Orthodox marriage ceremony is very traditional and the Bride and Groom do not in fact speak vows to each other during the service. At first, this was very concerning to me as a non-Greek who always imagined saying “I do” on my wedding day. We decided to get around this a bit by writing private vows to each other and reading them separately before the ceremony. It was a beautiful way to combine our traditions and now we have these adorable vow journals as keepsakes to remember our marriage promises to one another.

Our reception venue was the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield across town. The first time we visited, we fell in love with the rustic barn and large, open outdoor space it included.

The Details & DIY Decor

As a stationery designer I am constantly surrounded and inspired by the beauty of the wedding world. This made daydreaming about décor for our big day easy; but the reality was that we did not have the budget for everything I was dreaming up. That’s when my husband and I got creative and started imaging all the ways we could DIY to conserve our budget. For a year, we collected dozens of wine bottles for our centerpieces; cutting half for candleholders and using the rest for floral arrangements. We sliced logs, built marquee letters, made lawn games, crafted a seven foot paper flower wall for our photo booth and a paper flower curtain for our dessert table.

One of my favorite things about our wedding was the subtle scooter theme throughout. My husband, Steven, rides his moped to work everyday and it is undoubtedly his favorite “toy.” With so much of our wedding being my taste, I wanted to give Steven some ways to really show off his personality. We not only entered our reception on the scooter, but we also had a custom bow tie made with a tiny scooter pattern just for the big day!

With so many small and personal details, my favorite part of the day was sitting down for dinner and taking it all in. Everyone always tells you that your wedding day will be a blur and they were completely right; after months of planning it really does fly by. Those few precious minutes sitting down beside my new husband looking out at this event we worked so hard to carefully craft and make our own, surrounded by the people we love most, will always be one of the most treasured moments of my life.