Brad and I wanted to plan a wedding weekend that made all of our guests feel incredibly welcome, and loved. We wanted the weekend to be a true merging of our families and friends, and wanted friends to enjoy the Rocky Mountains where we fell in love. We created this sense of warmth by with a hospitality suite at the main hotel with drinks and snacks for everyone to hang out in, a Thursday night event with s’mores and cocktails, inviting everyone to the rehearsal dinner, and hosting guided hikes for folks on Beaver Creek Mountain on the day of the wedding. We chose Red Sky Ranch as it allowed us to have our ceremony and the reception on the same site, and in a place with majestic views of the mountains.

Brad I met when I was living in NYC, and he in Colorado and spent a considerable amount of time on planes to be together and wanted to pay homage to that with some vintage travel thematics at the wedding, starting with our gorgeous travel themed save the dates, and the vintage postcards that folks could write notes on to wish us well, and the trunks used as risers for the desert bar.

I chose a dress made by Carmella Sutera with incredible lace detailing. My veil and feather head piece were made by my friend Molly from Molly Gee Designs. She carefully worked with me to create each piece, and other pieces for my maids of honor. My Bridesmaid dresses were a bit more of a challenge as two maids were expecting, and I wanted something that would look amazing on everyone. An empire wasted gown from Vera Wang worked out very well, and I thought everyone looked lovely. Brad and the groomsmen wore classic tuxes with bow ties, and we gifted the groomsmen handmade shirts. I hand selected perfume for each bridesmaid to thank each of them for sharing the day with me.

We also wanted to blend our faith traditions in a way that was respectful and loving towards both of our families. I wanted a traditional Jewish wedding, but wanted to make Brad’s Catholic family feel included in the tradition. We decided that we would have 7 friends and family members recite blessings of their own choosing mirroring the traditional 7 blessings of a Jewish wedding. His aunt Mary read a passage from Corinthians during the service. We also made sure that the program explained the different parts of the service clearly for those who were not Jewish.

We had a purposely longer cocktail hour to allow guests to mingle with upbeat jazz classics playing. After that, we were escorted into the gorgeous tent where we had 8 long tables of 20 ppl covered in candles, and our low arrangements of flowers. Vintage lightbulbs dangled throughout the tent and made the whole space glow. At the head table we left two open seats in front of Brad and I so that folks could come over and join us. It was a nice way to get to spend time with other guests from the wedding. We served three courses, a spectacular corn bisque course, a middle course with baby quail, and guest chose their entree on the day of between Colorado Trout or Colorado Short rib. We chose a chocolate peanut butter wedding cake as brad is a choco and peanut butteraholic.

After dinner we broke into a Horah, the traditional Jewish wedding dance, and Brad, myself, and our parents were hoisted into chairs above the crowd. Dancing continued with our band playing everything from funk to Journey. Later in the night Mike Emmeth from the Israeli DJ crew Soulico spun an eclectic set to keep guests on the dance floor. We were thrilled everyone seemed to have such a great time, and while many bumps came on the day of, we weathered them with a laugh.

Venue: Red Sky Golf Club /  Wedding Planner: I Do Wedding Services /  Luggage & Trunks from Hobby Lobby / postcards from Etsy / Printed Materials: Lilah Paper /  Hair & Make-up Stylist: Inga Cox (970) 471-9820 / Transportation – Beaver Creek Village Transportation (970) 949-1938 / Celebrant: Rabbi Lev Baesh (603) 767- 5265 cell  / Lighting & Tent Design: (drape, lighting, lounge furniture): Pink Monkey / Linens: Wildflower Linens / Rentals: Alpine Party Rental /  Cake: Mountain Flour /  Floral: Rose Braden (970) 904-1632 cell / Photographer: lunaphoto / Ceremony Music: Bill Parish Productions / Reception Band: Funkiphino All-Stars

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Post tags: Alpine Party Rentails, Beaver Creek Mountain, Colorado, I Do Wedding SEervices, Lilah Paper, lunaphoto, Mountain flour, Pink Monkey, Red Sky Golf Club, Red Sky Ranch, Rocky Mountains, Vail, Wildflower Linens, Wolcott
Post categories: Casual Elegance, Traditional Elegance

And Amy and Matt’s wedding, sent to us by lunaphoto is one that anyone would love, filled with a simply elegant style and sweet but utterly sophisticated details.

From Amy…Both my husband and I have two sets of parents and we really wanted them to feel included, so we decided to have a moment during the ceremony were they all came up and made a circle around us and vowed to continue to love and support us as we join our families together. This became especially important to us since 10 days after our wedding my husband’s step-dad passed away. We are so thankful that we were able to have such a special and intimate moment with him before he passed.

For our wedding favors we decided to give different types of trees for our guests to plant. Instead of having a guest book my mom had a great idea of making us a quilt, so we had a table where guests wrote little messages to us on squares of cloth to be sewn into the quilt. It will be something that we can keep forever and as my mom put it “feel surround by love”.

From Amy…

Our caterer (Primizie) and baker (Coco Paloma) are small companies that we found locally in Austin; and the best part is that they both only use the freshest most natural and/or organic ingredients! We saved a ton of money by doing a dessert table instead of a big wedding cake; we had a small 8 inch cake, different sized cupcakes, cookies, 2 pies and a big bowl of fresh fruit. Our invitations (made by Viola from Chewing the Cud, who I found on SMP!) were made using all environmentally friendly products, and we had a local artist do the calligraphy on the envelopes.

We chose to not do the traditional cake-cutting, flower and garter tossing, etc so that we could have more time to spend with our family and friends, particularly because most of them flew in from all over the United States and even Singapore! There is so much that I could write about our wedding; everything went so well and since we were planning everything long distance we hired Aimee Villa with Lizze Belle Event Management to help us bring everything together, she did such a wonderful job of helping make our wedding magical for us. Along with hiring Aimee, one of the most important things that we did was hire amazingly talented photographers; Mike and Paula Luna of lunaphoto were a joy to work with and did such an incredible job of capturing such a special time in our lives.

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Thank you so much to Amy and Matt for sharing their day with us!! We have a pretty awesome giveaway coming up next and later, find out who won the Sarah Darcy Giveaway!

© Style Me Pretty : The Ultimate Wedding Blog, 2009. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Allen House, Amy and Matt, Austin, budget, Coco Paloma, Lizze Belle Event Management, Luna Photography, lunaphoto, Primizie, Texas Weddings
Post categories: Budget Beautiful, Casual Elegance