Trish & Ned’s Vintage Inspired, DIY Maryland Wedding at Glen Echo Park

Images: Cassidy Duhon Photography

 It’s no secret how I feel about Glen Echo Park and I am SO pumped to get to work my first wedding there next year. However, I especially love today’s real Maryland wedding at Glen Echo because of the way the couple chose to go more vintage than bright/carnival themed. It makes the Bumper car pavilion look SO different, no? Ned & Trish picked a FABULOUS list of DC area wedding vendors and threw in a ton of vintage touches and DIY projects. Trish, being a graphic designer, had fun with the wedding invitations, and I love the pop of whimsy the oversized paper flowers throw in! Plus the couple opted for good old fashioned ice cream cake and I think this is just the BEST wedding cake idea EVER! Thanks to Rebecca Dick of Blue Canary Events for submitting this one!

We chose the venue because we just loved the vintage aspect to it and the open air of the structure. It gave us that barn/outdoor feel without being far from the city and it just had so much more character. The carousel was amazing and we wanted something fun for our guests to experience. Actually when we saw the carousel, we were just entranced and we even moved our wedding date from October to late September so we could make sure the carousel was going to be open. A lot of our family is from out of the area, so we wanted to give them a broad view of all that DC has to offer – it’s not just all monuments and pillars!

However, with this awesome unique venue, we didn’t want to go too overboard with a carnival theme. A lot of people suggested things like balloons, pin stripes, and lollipops, but we really just wanted to let the setting speak for itself. I also tried to steer away from having set colors and make it a broad color palette. We ended up going with a lot of pinks, peaches, neutrals and turquoise.

Click inside for vintage cars, DIY oversized paper flowers, ice cream cake, and MORE!

The vintage car pulled everything together. That was a last minute decision because I wanted to just have Uber. Since we didn’t have a big wedding party, I thought a limo was unnecessary. However, my mom said things were getting a little bit too “weird” so we got a car.

All my friends pitched in with all the DIY details to it. We had paper flower making parties and all sorts of craft sessions. Ned’s mom also helped with sewing projects and my mom also got her friends to assist with decorating the church. We made the oversized paper flowers with tissue paper and PVC pipe.

Seemed like everything was DIY!  We found the fabric for the napkins and Ned’s mom made like 250 napkins. Ned’s mom also made the bunting that went around the photobooth stage. We made the tissue poms that hung from the ceilng. We made smaller paper flowers out of books and tissue paper and gave that to the florist to incorporate into the vases on the cocktail tables. I’m a graphic designer, so I did a lot of little things like make the stamp for our favors – little packets of carousel tickets for our guests, all the signage, the menu, the program. I made the board with the seating arrangements by making a frame our of crown molding and using pages from Romeo and Juliet as the back drop. I also made the cake toppers! GAH!

ICE CREAM CAKE! It was always a dream to have ice cream cake at my wedding. I must’ve called a bunch of ice cream shops. Finally Baskin Robbins (My favorite) said they could do a simple two-tiered chocolate chip ice cream cake. For our guests, we had Captain Cookie make a bunch of ice cream sandwiches. It was the best! It was so fun for our guests to order from the truck.

Vendors
Photographer: Cassidy DuHon Photography | Wedding Planner: Rebecca Dick, Blue Canary Events | Ceremony: Christ the King Church Silver Spring, MD | Catering: Main Event Catering  | Reception Venue: Glen Echo Park | Floral Designer: Tonya Evans, Occasional Flowers | DJ: Mike Bell, My Deejay | Hair & Makeup: Alison Harper and Company | Transportation: Classic Car by Prime Transportation | Dessert: Captain Cookie & the Milk Man | Cake: Ice Cream Cake (!!) from Baskin Robbins