Images: Porter Watkins
This WEATHER! Amiright?! Football is back, there’s a crisp & coolness to the air and MAN what an amazing wedding I have for you today. I mean, of course it’s super rad, it’s from one of my favs, Porter Watkins, and the bride’s friends are supic designers and made chandeliers & backdrops and really it’s almost hard to believe just how DIY this wedding was. A complete army of family & friends made the flowers, the cake, the pies, and MORE. Happy Tuesday Romancers.
Let’s see, why we chose stuff… James found the farm doing a search of the area because we wanted to be married outside and liked the idea of a barn reception. We met in college in rural Vermont so we have a fondness for outdoors settings. We went to visit and just fell in love with the site, its beautifully secluded for being right outside DC and the people who own the farm are so friendly and excited about people’s weddings happening there.
My bouquet was tied with a ribbon that was made from leftover fabric that was used when my grandmother made my mother’s wedding dress.
We knew we wanted a large suite of wedding colors because we knew we didn’t want the attendants all in the same color so we picked a range of greens from chartreuse to aqua to dark teal with accent colors for the flowers of mauve and peach. Our flower girls (James’ nieces) wore dresses made by my mom that combined the three greens and the groomsmen and groomswoman wore ties and a scarf in those shades.
We chose Ruie&Grace to make the chandelier in the barn and the backdrop for our ceremony because I had worked with them in their previous capacities as Display Coordinators for Anthropologie and loved their work, they are so talented at creating whimsy and beauty!
For the ceremony: We found A.C. through an internet search and had such a great rapport with her right away, she rose to the very tough challenge of finding Nietzche quotations to include in our ceremony. The music was performed by Bill Perdue (brother in law of the bride), Ben Perdue (brother of Bill), Anastasia Pavlovic (cousin of the bride), and Liz Pavlovic (cousin in law of the bride). The music was one of the Bach suites for Cello performed by Bill Perdue, This Must be the Place by the Talking Heads arranged by Ben Perdue and performed by all, and Us by Regina Spektor performed by all.
—> CLICK INSIDE FOR THE REST OF JAMES & MORGEN’S DIY, ANTHROPOLOGIE INSPIRED MARYLAND BARN WEDDING <—
I knew I wanted to process to This Must be the Place right away because it says just how I feel about being married to James. We found both our rings on Etsy (Down to the Wire Designs for James’s and Linden and Lychee for mine) and during the ceremony we had them tied together with a ribbon and passed around to all the guests for them to hold and bestow good wishes on. We opened our ceremony with a quote from Mike Birbiglia (which is a little offbeat.) Bouquets and boutonnieres were made by my mother and aunt.
Dahlias are my favorite flower so I wanted them to be central to the floral arrangements. Our dahlias were purchased from Swan Island Dahlias and they are amazing, so helpful and such great quality! Our other flowers were snap dragons, Queen Anne’s Lace, roses, green hydrangeas, and lisianthus with rosemary and seeded eucalyptus.
For the reception, the greens where brought in in the napkins (also handmade by my mother with help from my aunt and a close family friend) and in the vases we used to hold the flowers on the tables. My mom found a set of vintage vegetable seed packets which we thought was appropriate for the farm setting, and we color copied them to make our escort cards.
We had wanted wooden farm tables but that turned out to not be feasible so we found some vintage boards which had been used at a mushroom farm and cut them to be runners on top of the white table clothes on the tables. Vintage vases were used to hold flowers and vintage punch cups were used to hold tealights. Whenever I had envisioned getting married I saw lots of candles and flowers.
James and I made our favors which were small jars of seasoned salts, two blends, one for each of our tastes, with labels we printed and hand tied ribbon around the lid.
My father made our cake and it was decorated with simple feather eucalyptus and flowers in the china swans that had been on my parent’s wedding cake. James mom employed a whole crew of family and friends to help her produced 10 beautiful pies. The cake was lemon thyme cake with raspberry filling and buttercream frosting and the pies were nectarine and blackberry crumble with the nectarines formed into rosettes. It has become a tradition in both sides of my family to have cream cheese mints at all weddings and for this reason they are referred to in my family as “Wedding Mints.”
Vendors —> Photographer: Porter Watkins | Venue: Rocklands Farm | Décor: Ruie&Grace (chandelier and ceremony backdrop) | Cake: Karl Pavlovic (father of the bride) | Pies: Heather Shay (mother of the groom) | Mints (traditional to weddings in the bride’s family): Kris Pavlovic (mother of the bride) | Food: High Point Catering | Flowers: Sourced and arranged by Kris Pavlovic (mother of the bride) and Joanne Dean (aunt of the bride) | Hair and Makeup: Melissa Shwartz Jones of Georgetown Bride | Officiant: A.C. Warden, Capitol Ceremonies | Dress: Lumiere by Ivy and Aster, found at Lovely Bride in Georgetown | Invitations: Katherine Hubbs (friend of Bride and Groom)
