I’ve received a lot of compliments on our big day, and I welcome and am grateful for them all.  I will truly be forever reminiscing on our day and how amazing it was.

There was obviously a lot of planning and designing that went into our day, much of which you can read about here.  The goal of all my planning was to create a day that was as authentic to us and who we are as a couple as it could possibly be. To make that come to fruition, there were a lot of intimate details I implemented; some of which may have gone unnoticed by majority of the guests-but what’s important is that Joey and I knew they were there.

Now, I’m going to share some of those intimate details with you, just in case you’d like to implement any of them into your big day as well!

• Bouquet: My bouquet held the favorite flowers of all the women in mine and Joey’s families. I had both his and my grandma’s favorite flowers and my mom’s and his mom’s favorite flowers represented in my bouquet, in addition to the filler flowers that tied the aesthetic all together. I loved that I was holding a little piece of the generations of women that came before Joey and I, and loved paying respect to them in that way. You can read more details about all our flowers here. 
• Dress: I lost my grandpa earlier last year, right as Joey and I started to plan our wedding day. My sister and I were lucky enough to be able to visit him in Kentucky during his final days and on one of those days, I asked him what his favorite color was. He said blue.  I immediately knew how to honor him on our wedding day. I had my alterations lady sew the word “Papa” in blue on the bottom of my gown. It was my something blue and something very special to me.

• Music: A lot of your wedding day is all about your music choice. I implore you to choose music that means something to you, rather than what you think guests might want to hear. All of the music for our “big” moments were songs that maaayyybbeee half of our guests had heard before. All of our songs were carefully chosen by us so that we didn’t use anything that could simply be”googled” results for “Mother-Son Dance/ Father-Daughter Dance/ Bouquet Toss” etc. A post dedicated to music is coming soon! I will give this detail away though, being a BIG Disney fan, I had to sneak some Disney into our day somehow but didn’t want it to be cheesy or overstated. SO, I walked down the aisle to “A Whole New World” from Aladdin, the orchestrated version. Which I’ll link here if you want to give it a listen 🙂 

• Signature Drink: Really the one area of your wedding day that you’re pretty much expected to customize in some form. We named our signature drink “The Bentley” after our cat, and actually made a sign with Bentley’s face on it for the bar. The drink was Horchata and Rum, which I know is a Rumchata, but naming it after our fur baby gave us a way to include her in our big day.

• Signage: In addition to the sign we created to show off our Signature Drink; we also made additional signs with special quotes that meant something to us. We put a sign right infront of the gateway where guests entered the venue that read “To all who come to this happy place, welcome” -Walt Disney. I’m a HUGE Disney fan, as previously mentioned and having this quote to really set the mood as guests came in was super important to me. It’s a quote from Walt Disney, from his Disneyland opening day speech. We also put a sign as guests walked downstairs into our venue that read: “The love we were promised in fairytales was never something for us to find, it has always been something for us to create.” I read that quote years ago on Pinterest and have always loved it’s message. I’m actually keeping the sign to hang in a nursery one day, when we decide to start a family! You can really get creative with your signage to make your day more unique to you and your fiancé. We’re big fans of the show The Office, so we even had a sign outside the dance hall that read “Sometimes you just have to be the boss of dance.” -Michael Scott  We also had a custom neon sign made to hang above our sweetheart table (which now hangs in our kitchen).

• Wedding Date: SO many people I know rush to get married after getting engaged. They rush the most amazing stage in their lives and I’ll never understand why. My advice is to really soak up the “just engaged” time in your life and only start planning when you feel absolutely ready to do so. We were engaged for 3 months before I even started thinking about throwing a wedding. Going off that, don’t rush to chose a wedding date just because you feel like you have too. This date is going to mean something to you for the rest of your life. Mine and Joey’s favorite season is Fall, so we knew right away we wanted Fall wedding. We got engaged in February of 2018, so clearly I wasn’t going to throw a wedding in 9 months- sure you could and I know people that did- but that wasn’t me and I didn’t want to feel like I was rushing to plan the biggest day of our lives. So we decided on November 2019. We found our venue and luckily they had an open availability for the month. We knew we wanted a Saturday wedding so the dates were narrowed once again. When we found out that daylight savings would start on November 3rd, we knew it was going to be November 2nd to take advantage of as much natural light as possible. Also, my favorite number is 2, so it was basically meant to be!

• Decor: There are TONS of ways to customize your decor and throw in personalized accents. In our lounge space, I had a bar cart that I put framed photos of me and all my bridesmaids on. On our guest tables, I had small, white pumpkins scattered throughout the middle of the farmhouse tables. I’m a big pumpkin freak so having pumpkins scattered EVERYWHERE was very, very on brand! We also had a 6 foot tall donut wall that we had custom donut bags for, with our names and wedding date labeled on them for the guests to take donuts home in! On our guest dinner plates, we had small tea bags wrapped around purple flowers that read “Thank you for sharing our first meal as Mr. & Mrs. Franco. November 2, 2019” on them. We also had a custom cornhole game for guests to play with our initials on it. There’s literally no shortage of ways to customize your day with all sorts of decor!

• Color: The most obvious way to customize your big day is to use colors you love! My favorite color is purple and has been since I was 4 years old.  So obviously, my bridesmaids wore dusty, purple dresses and all my colored accents were a deep purple to match with the Fall/boho aesthetic.

• Ask your friends and family to lend their talents: My old roommate and good friend is an absolute AMAZING knitter. When I started planning our wedding, I knew I wanted macrame accents just about everywhere, I found pieces to order on Etsy but thought that if I could include our friends into our big day, that would be even more meaningful. SO, I asked her if she could learn macrame and she was over the moon excited to do it. She made me 5, 9 foot macrame table runners, one 3 foot “F” hanging piece, and a 6 foot hanging piece for our bar. I’ll keep them and reuse them FOREVER! My cousin is an artist, so I asked if she’d like to make one of our bar signs  and our welcome sign. Again, she was so happy to be asked to be involved! One of my friends from college owns a metal shop, so I asked her to make our cake topper! Which she did PERFECTLY! Having your friends and family help create your vision is something so special and is something that you’ll always look back on and feel grateful and happy about!

Well, what do you think? Are you ready to add any of the items into your wedding or next event?