By now you probably know there’s very little that warms our hearts like a couple planning a wedding that’s 100% THEM. Which is exactly what STG Brides Club member Samantha, a writer, and groom Jeff, who’s in finance — as Samantha says, “our careers are as disparate as our heights!” – did.
Their wedding was so full of unique DIY touches, we’re not even sure where to begin! Well, we could tell you that Samantha made ALL the décor herself – and she so enjoyed crafting chalkboard signs explaining everything from the game board guest book (yep, another personal touch) to the unplugged ceremony that she’s started a side business for wedding décor and stationery, Lettered in LA!
And how lovely is it that the couple used Samantha’s late grandma’s lace tablecloth as their chuppah canopy? Set atop birch poles and adorned with wildflower arrangements, it not only had sentimental value but looked totally stunning – see the beautiful pics from Rachel Stelter Photography for evidence!
We also love that Samantha and Jeff wrote their own ketubah text – which they then had Smashing The Glass Recommended Vendor Ink with Intent turn into a true piece of art (and, as a Brides Club member, Samantha even got a great discount!) – just as much as we love that the pair opted to flout tradition by waking up together on their wedding day and exchanging cards they’d written to each other. Awww! We’re not surprised Samantha reports this was one of their favorite parts of the entire day – and it just goes to show, it always pays to follow your heart in wedding planning.
Now over to the bride, who looked beautiful in her WToo by Watters gown…
How we met
Samantha, the bride: We met at a dinner party with friends about a year before we started dating. We were friends and then one thing led to another and we haven’t looked back – 6 years into our relationship and 6 weeks into our marriage, we’re both still as in love as we were at the beginning.
Venue
We got married at The Newhall Mansion, a beautifully restored Victorian mansion in Piru, California. When we set out to find a venue we really wanted a place that we could stay with both of our families for the wedding weekend and hold all our events in the backyard. Newhall Mansion was so much more than that though – not only did we get to stay in the beautiful home for the weekend, but the venue had a fabulous caterer and an in-house coordinator. The staff was so unbelievably helpful and made us feel special every step of the way. After the event the venue manager even invited us to come back to visit if we’re in the neighborhood. It all just felt very personal.
Theme
We wanted the event to feel intimate even though we had a lot of guests coming, so we tried really hard to incorporate details that were unique to us. For example we love hosting game nights, so instead of a traditional guest book we had guests sign a Scrabble board and a set of Jenga bricks. I also made all of our decor and we added personal touches to our ceremony like using my late-grandma’s tablecloth as our chuppah cover. We didn’t use a wedding planner, so relied heavily on google sheets and email folders to keep us organized leading up to the big day.
I joined Smashing The Glass’ Brides Club to take some of the pressure off and really relied both on the online resources and the Facebook group where I received lots of encouragement when I started putting together the decor for our reception.
What ‘Smashing The Glass’ Brides Club’ Did For Us
The resources you get as a Brides Club member are invaluable. I used the sample timeline and programs, action plans, and utilized the Brides Club Facebook group for advice and encouragement along the way. We also got a great Brides Club discount on our ketubah from Ink with Intent which was an added bonus!
Invitation
We decided not to go the traditional formal route for our invitations and instead designed our own. After spending quite a bit of time on Pinterest, we decided to create an accordion fold invitation that would have a tear off RSVP postcard as the final panel. We were able to include tons of information on our invitation which our guests found handy (a map of wedding locations, directions to our venue, and information on hotels and dress code). We also included a Fun Facts and FAQ section that included a timeline of our relationship and answers to some questions like “Will last names be changing?” and “Can I bring a date?”. Our RSVP cards also included a space for our guests to write in a song request – they were really fun to get back in the mail!
Dress
I bought my dress from Le Marriage Couture in Los Angeles. I went to try on with my mom and some of my close friends and it was a great experience. After a cousin struggled to keep her strapless gown up at her wedding, I knew I wanted to have an illusion neckline, so I’d be comfortable all night. At the shop, I tried on a strapless WToo by Watters gown that I fell in love with and they teamed me with a master seamstress who did all my alterations and built me an illusion neckline from scratch. I felt like I had a custom gown on my wedding day and it fit like a glove!
Accessories
I wore pieces from my mother’s veil in my hair and borrowed my grandmother’s pearls from my mother as my “something borrowed”. I also wore a pearl bracelet from my maternal grandmother, and earrings from my paternal grandmother that my cousin had worn in her wedding and gifted to me. I also got to use the lace from my maternal grandmother’s wedding dress to wrap my bouquet. Everything was very sentimental.
Shoes
I am very short and my husband is very tall (a foot and a half difference between us!), so I knew from the get-go I would wear heels, but I also wanted to be comfortable. I ended up finding a bright blue pair of stacked heels from Naturalizer – which may not be the sexiest brand to wear on your wedding day, but I was comfortable dancing all night long in my 3″ heels!
Hair + Makeup
It was really important to me to look like myself on our wedding day. I don’t wear a lot of makeup and have curly hair, so wanted to make sure whatever products I had on were light/wouldn’t need reapplication, and that my hair wouldn’t frizz or go limp no matter what the weather was like. I found Emily (my hair and makeup artist) through a Facebook group for Southern California Brides and her subtle, natural style was perfect.
The handsome groom
Jeff is very tall, so we decided to have a custom suit made for him. He picked out a teal-blue, which stood out beautifully amongst his groomsmen’s navy. The suit was made by a company called Indochino and they also custom made his white shirt. He was able to pick every detail from the buttons to the style of lapel. Jeff has very strong feelings about ties, so our whole wedding was tie-optional and Jeff didn’t wear one!
Bridesmaids
I had five bridesmaids and they all got their dresses from Show Me Your Mumu. I chose two shades of blue and let each girl choose the style of dress they felt best in. My hope was that everyone would feel comfortable in their dress and be able to wear it again in the future.
Chuppah
I have a lace tablecloth that my grandmother handed down to me before she passed away a few years back and I wanted to honor her memory by using it in our ceremony, so it became the canopy we designed our chuppah around. Our florist had some birch branches and, paired with a beautiful pop of color from a wildflower arrangement, the whole thing came together beautifully.
Ceremony
We tried to make our ceremony feel really personal. Our friend David married us and did a fabulous job with our ceremony. We decided to circle each other 3 times and then circle once together. We wrote our own ketubah and included our promises and hopes for the future we plan to build together. My grandparents read it aloud during our ketubah ceremony and Jeff and I read it aloud under the Chuppah. We also invited family and friends to give blessings they wrote on the theme of each of the Sheva Brachot, which was really special. David suggested we incorporate the ancient priestly blessing and led our parents in saying it while they wrapped us in my father’s tallit, which was another really special moment. And Jeff did a fantastic job smashing the glass!
Our music choice
Our procession music was an acoustic version of The Beatles’ ‘Across The Universe’ and I walked down the aisle to an acoustic cover of ‘Hooked On A Feeling’. which is Jeff and my song. We then had Blue Suede’s “Hooked On A Feeling” play for our recessional, which was really fun! Jeff and I entered our reception to Queen’s ‘You’re My Best Friend’ and danced our first dance to The Beatles’ cover of ‘Till There Was You’. The Father/Daughter dance was to ‘Father and Daughter’ by Paul Simon and the Mother/Son dance was to ‘What the World Needs Now Is Love’ by Dionne Warwick. Our DJ did a fantastic job curating an evening of music that kept our guests on the dancefloor up until our final song of the night, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ by Queen!
Flowers
Jeff and I both really like color and thought wildflowers would be perfect for our summer wedding. We also didn’t want huge floral arrangements for the tables, so our guests could all see each other and converse all through dinner. Acton Creative Flowers, our florist did a spectacular job! The colors popped and we loved all the unique blooms the florist picked for us. The bouquets and boutonnieres brightened up our wedding party and our flower girls and junior bridesmaid looked adorable sporting flower crowns! Our florist outdid herself!
Photographer
We found our photographer through a recommendation from another bride. We loved the composition of her photos and the bright, natural look of her shots. The cherry on top was that Rachel was also awesome to work with. She loves weddings and offered us vendor recommendations and sent helpful emails throughout our planning process. We ended up also hiring her husband Karl, who is a videographer and he did a fantastic job, even filming interviews with both of us about how we were feeling the morning of our wedding! A good friend who edits professionally offered to edit our wedding video, so Karl shot with his team all day and then turned over the raw footage to us. Our friend Dana cut together our highlights trailer and did a fantastic job – we can’t wait to see the whole video soon!
Food and cake
The Newhall Mansion has an in-house catering staff and they were awesome. We went for tasting night and couldn’t believe how delicious the food was! Everything was perfectly cooked! We opted for a summer salad with peaches, salmon with herb butter and lemon, steak with chimichurri, cheese ravioli with sage butter sauce, and grilled market vegetables. All was served family style and we were so thrilled with the end result. Everyone is still talking about how great the food was! For desserts we hired Wolf Creek Restaurant (who also catered our rehearsal dinner). They brought an array of mini desserts – chocolate cake, banana cake, cheesecake, lemon bars, and gluten free chocolate mousse cups. We also bought a naked cake at our local grocery, since it was not the focus of our table – and it actually wasn’t eaten at the wedding! After we cut the cake, our coordinator put it in the fridge and we ended up taking the top tier to enjoy on our mini-moon.
Entertainment
We worked with Good Mood Events for our DJ. It was really important to us to have people on the dance floor all night long and our DJ Wes did just that. We gave him our song selections and talked with him about the moods we wanted each part of the evening to have – jazzy for cocktail hour, oldies for dinner, etc. Then for the dancing part of the night Wes suggested that we play our slow songs at the beginning of the night and once we got the party started, just keep the energy up the rest of the night. We spent almost our whole party on the dance floor and every guest got into the dancing!
Favours
We opted to make donations to a couple charities we love (GiveWell and Wags & Walks) in lieu of favors. We told our guests this on the backs of fans we provided for our ceremony.
A Wedding That Feels Us
We wanted our wedding to feel very personal, so customized as much of the day as possible. I made a bunch of chalkboard signs explaining everything from our game board guest book to our ceremony seating and our unplugged ceremony. We offered multicolored bug repellent bracelets to help everyone keep the bugs away and it was fun to see our guests sporting them with their cocktail attire! And we had custom coozies at the bar to keep drinks cold in the summer heat. We named a whiskey-ginger cocktail after our dog Rook, which guests seemed to enjoy. We both feel very connected to our families and wanted to honor them, so in our ceremony we included a flower ceremony where we each gave the other’s mother a small bouquet to signify our families coming together. In our programs we also included a note of thanks to our guests and a note of thanks to our parents.
One of the most special parts of our wedding day, which isn’t traditional, but was very us was waking up together and exchanging cards we’d written to each other. We’d each gotten the other a small gift (even though we agreed on not giving gifts!) and then spent the morning having breakfast with both our families and giving them meaningful cards and gifts as well before we all went our separate ways to prepare for the wedding. Those private moments set the day off to a great start and the love continued all day long.
Honeymoon
We are going to take our honeymoon next year. We’re planning on Japan if anyone has recommendations! But we knew we’d want a few days to decompress after the wedding, so we went to Ojai. It’s an artistic city about an hour and a half from our wedding venue. We stayed in a BnB where we slept A LOT, enjoyed massages, dips in the pool, read books, watched movies, ate good food, and drank good wine. It was the most relaxing couple days we’ve could have had!
Advice to couples currently planning their wedding
Walk into the day expecting something won’t go as planned and knowing you’ll let it go. Everyone is there to celebrate you and if you just focus on the incredible amount of love you are being showered with, there’s no way not to feel like the luckiest people in the world. Plus (and this is the best part), you get to walk away married to your favorite person in the world. Also — bring a bridal “oh shit” kit with things like band aids, safety pins, deodorant, neosporin, a nail file, etc. Ours didn’t come in handy until our mini-moon, but we were sure glad we had it to treat blisters and broken nails (and by we, I mean me). Also, if you’re able to do an after party, do it! We got to have much longer conversations with friends and family who stayed late into the night after our reception and that was a nice way to wind down from all the dancing!
Samantha & Jeff’s little white book
Photography – Rachel Stelter Photography
Ketubah – Ink with Intent {offers 10% discount to all members of Smashing The Glass’s Brides Club}
Videography – Karl Stelter Wedding Films
Venue – The Newhall Mansion
Coordinator – Tricia Dahlgren Events
Bride’s dress – WToo by Watters found and fitted at Le Marriage Couture
Bride’s shoes – Naturalizer
Groom’s attire – Indochino
Bridesmaids – Show Me Your Mumu
Hair + Makeup – Emily Lynn and Co
Flowers – Acton Creative Flowers
Decor – Lettered In LA
Sweets – Wolf Creek Restaurant
DJ – Good Mood Events
Transportation – Swoop
Rings – JK & Co
