The Wedding Files – Project #2 Decorating With Memories
St Peter’s Cathedral – Where Adam & I were married, Oct 21, 2006
When planning decorations for the reception it was important that we included items that would beautify the room, but also items that would be interesting, entertaining or treasured to our guests, and one of the simplest ways was to use treasured photographs as a decorating medium. We used the photographs in a number of ways, and collecting them all was tricky as we had to dig quite deep to attain a few of them, but the result was a display that was not only beautiful and in-keeping with our theme of vintage romantic, it was interesting to guests to peruse our collected pictures and remember people,places and times they knew.
The Key Players: The first set of photos I gathered was a baby photo of Adam, of me, of each of my parents and of each of his. These were each placed in vintage-type frames from the dollar store and labeled little tags that said “Bride” “Groom” “Mother of the Bride” “Father of the Bride” “Mother of the Groom” and “Father of the Groom” in the same font used for all other wedding stationary. These were set on the presentation table as people walked in, beside the board with the escort cards.
The “I Do”‘s that made us who we are: I then tracked down the wedding photos of his parents, my parents and all 5 or our grandparent’s weddings (Grandma Carpenter married again after the loss of Grandpa Shortt). I printed these as 5×7 and inserted into simple black frames, again from the dollar store. I made a small card label for each again, and placed on a display table with some keepsakes we could collect: My mother’s veil and their guest-book, my grandmother’s cake topper and a few other treasures. Everyone has kept something from their special day, and all were willing to pull a little something out of hiding.
The Wedding Book: While searching for the wedding pictures of our parents and grandparent’s I came across many other wedding pictures and it made me think of the shoebox of wedding pics I have at home sent in numerous thanks you cards through the years. I took all the collected pictures that had no home and asked friends and family for more, and included as many wedding pictures of the guests that I could find into a small journal with the picture, their names and the date of marriage and I placed this on the gifts table for people to peruse. It was neat for people to see their own pictures in there and fun when they found an old picture of someone we knew in common. I have kept this book and plan on adding any new pictures we get in the future.
Random pictures: With a little patience and a lot of photopaper (courtesy of Kieran at Henry’s – thank you!!) I rounded up extra pictures and any copies I made for the other projects that did not get used and made a small picture packet for each table. I tried to include cute pictures of the table occupants or perhaps a wedding picture of one of the guests seated there. From what I could see it was a good conversation starter at the tables with particularly goofy pictures or very old wedding shots, and brought back many memories of inside jokes, mischief or embarrassing haircuts. I tried to do this for every table, but there were a couple I was just not able to round up pictures for (friends of parents, for example) but I think they had fun looking at other’s funny pictures.
Blast from the past: I also came across many very old photos of family that I put in an album near the family tree (that’s another project)and almost every family present at the wedding has asked for scans of the precious old photos. Most of them came from Adam’s mom, but I was able to supplement our collections with some neat photos from my Baba, some dating back to when her Dad was young.
So there you have it. Simple ideas not requiring too much skill, just a lot of digging. These project has doubled our collection of memorable family photos, and provided some simple decoration and simple entertainment.