Guest Post: Low Budget Wedding from Christina's Adventures

Hi My Girlish Whims readers! I'm Christina from Christina's Adventures. How excited are you that Rebecca's getting married?! I think she's just so cute...and it's been so fun to "see" her get ready for her wedding through her blog! It makes me wish I was hooked into the blogging world when I was planning my wedding almost four years ago. We definitely didn't do a ton of DIY for the wedding, but we did manage to pull off an elegant wedding without totally breaking the budget.

My husband and I got married in June 2008. I had just graduated from college, and he was one year behind me.

Here's some of the details our simple and elegant wedding:

We had our invitations done by a printing press in Bethlehem - SO much cheaper (we paid less than 1/2 of what we would've paid from an official "wedding invitation store") and we still looooved our invitations. Here's a picture of our framed wedding invitation:

So you can see our lovely flowers in that picture as well. We actually had a retired florist (she went to our church) take care of our flowers for the wedding...she did a wonderful job! Another way we saved some money :) My bouquet was simple ivory roses with calla lillies in the middle - I LOVED my bouquet:

One of the BIG ways we saved some money was by having an early wedding. Our ceremony was at 11:00 AM, and then we had a lunch reception. I DO NOT DANCE, and neither does my husband, so we didn't even have dancing at our wedding. Were some people upset about this? You bet. But it didn't matter - it was OUR wedding and we LOVED it that way! :) The hotel worked with us a lot ... and in a sense we were a "bonus" for them, because they were able to get us cleaned up and out by the time they had to set up for a more traditional evening reception. So we got a big break on that one. We also didn't have an open OR cash bar, but we did a wine offering at the tables during the lunch and had mimosas offered during the cocktail hour.

We had the ceremony and reception at the historic Hotel Bethlehem which was one of my most FAVORITE parts of our wedding. It was an amazing venue, and I am in LOVE with the character and charm of the building. It was built in 1922, and the floor-to-ceiling windows and original brickwork with a Moravian star just can't be recreated. Amazing!

We had the chairs set up in an "arc" - which made for a more intimate feel for our wedding of 120 guests. It also meant a short aisle, which was amazing for me since I was petrified of falling down the aisle :)

It was a little different trying to figure out music in this set-up since we were not in a traditional reception area, but we were fortunate enough to have friends (who are sisters) that play the harp and violin for weddings. We used them and it was absolutely perfect & beautiful.

We had my uncle marry us (he is a pastor down in North Carolina) and that made the whole wedding so much more personal and intimate. We LOVE Uncle Peter :)

I made the centerpieces with things from Michaels. Nothing too fancy...a hurricane vase, glass beads, candle, ribbon, on a mirror with more glass beads and rose petals strewn on the table around it:

We had an AMAZING cake that I got to design from Village Bake Shoppe in Bethlehem. They were so reasonably priced and easy to work with. We had a strawberry shortcake with REAL sliced strawberries and whipped cream icing in the middle...perfection!!

We had all of our guests sign a thick mat instead of signing a guest book - and it's been the first thing we hang in all of our places we've lived at since the wedding! We love it!

We also didn't do wedding favors, but took the money we would've spent on favors and donated them to a ministry through our former church:

None of my bridesmaids had extra money to spend on an extravagant dress, so we found a simple dress, tried it on in the stores, and then found it online for a good price. We were also able to work around my best friend being 6 months pregnant at the time we got married! My niece was my flower girl, and her grandma made her adorable dress:

I got MY dress from a local dress shop. I was so anti-princess pouf - and it was SO hard to find a dress that wasn't princessy-pouffy!! But after much searching, I found my perfect dress for about 1/2 the price of the other dresses I was looking at. It was technically made for a destination wedding...but I thought it tied up the simple and elegant feel perfectly :)

The men's tuxedos were rentals (I think we got a "rent 3 get 1 free" deal):

Finally, our amazing photographers were from The Moment Photography. They weren't exactly a "deal", but were who we splurged on a little bit more. Let me tell you - they were worth every penny! They were amazing to work with from start to finish, and I would recommend them to anyone! Here's some of my favorite moments they captured:

Rebecca - thanks so much for having me! It was SO much fun for me to reminisce over our wedding day again. What makes the wedding day so much fun to look back on is that my husband and I have such a wonderful marriage - and that was the day that it all truly began. :)