Here are a few more images and details from Nole’s wonderful little wedding…

More details from Nole…

In order to stay in our budget, we kept our guest list to only our closest family and friends (around 50 people) and prioritized some wedding elements (such as food and photography) over others (such as floral arrangements). We also tried to do as many DIY projects as we could.

We made most of the big decisions pretty early on, including our color palette, flower choices (but not a florist, which came much later), caterer, bakery, and photographer. For the flowers, I knew that I wanted a bouquet of lilacs and sweet peas, ever since I’d seen a similar bouquet in Martha Stewart Weddings a couple of years ago. For the reception, I wanted a mix of spring flowers — peonies, ranunculus, anemonies, etc. — in shades of purple and white.

For our caterer, my husband and I are both big foodies, so having great food at our wedding was a big priority. We also knew that we wanted a global-inspired tapas meal service for the reception, and worked with our caterer to develop a menu that included Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Latin dishes with enough choices to satisfy all of our guests. For the cake, we used three 9″ cakes from a famous DC bakery called CakeLove, which makes just the most amazing cakes and cupcakes. Our families are big coffee and tea drinkers, so we also bought heart-shaped sugar cubes and sugar swizzle sticks from Sur La Table to use as sweeteners when the coffee and tea was served with dessert.

For photography, it was important to us that we have a photojournalist-style photographer that would document the entire day, particularly as we had some important family members (my grandmother) who were not able to travel for our wedding. We found our photographer, the amazing Punam Bean, via Weddingbee, and instantly fell in love with her work and documentary-style approach to wedding photography.

Throughout the planning, we looked for ways to save that wouldn’t affect the overall look and feel of the day…we saved a lot by having a friend play the music for the ceremony and using our iPod to provide the music during the reception, both which probably saved us thousands of dollars. We only served wine (which we purchased directly) rather than having an open bar at the reception. And we find a lot of our decorations on ebay, including the mason jars used to hold the floral arrangements and moroccan lanterns which lined the entrance path to the venue.

We ultimately spent around $13,000 on the wedding, so we didn’t do too bad - particularly since we live in one of the most expensive cities in the country!

We have MANY more pictures to come, so stay tuned!