Hello friends!

WOOHOO, I’m back! And I’M MARRIED! So far I absolutely love being Sully’s wife. 🙂 Thank you all so much for your lovely wishes – we had a perfectly beautiful wedding and a wonderful honeymoon too. I have so many posts to make for you guys: behind-the-scenes pictures of our wedding, a few of my favorite photos from the professional photographers, pictures from our honeymoon (we went to the beach!), and a tour of my new house.

Today I’m going to start with some wedding preparation pictures. Our wedding was so gorgeous and fun thanks to the many, many friends and family members who volunteered to help in all sorts of ways. That will become evident in the pictures below. Enjoy!

TENT SETUP

We originally planned to have the ceremony in the open field in front of our house, but the forecast was calling for rain or extreme heat or both for that day, so we opted for the tent our friends use for dances and such. It was perfect!

Some of our friends who own the tent, as well as Sully’s family and my family, helped set it up on Saturday, the day before the wedding. It’s always quite the process, phew. We also had to clean it a bit. I love the picture of Megan, Sully’s mom, and my mom hard at work. 🙂

Once the tent was set up, we had to fill it with chairs. We just barely squeezed in almost 300 chairs for our guests, thanks to the siblings and lots of math. That was one of the most difficult parts of wedding setup, for some reason. But we got it! Later we hung up lights inside the tent.

WEDDING DOUGHNUTS

(These categories aren’t in order, by the way.) We made around 300 doughnuts a few weeks before the wedding and froze them. They turned out great, despite the fact that we forgot to add the eggs until after the dough was already rising, but MAN was it a long day of doughnut-making!

We had a very professional setup. *nods* A tin can sliced off at both ends for the doughnut cutter, a toothpick marked with the proper thickness for the dough, and a doughnut-hole cutter with a makeshift handle of a (clean) nail to push the dough out.

We made some regular glazed doughnuts and then dipped some others in varying shades of purple glaze. I can’t wait to get all the professional photos back so I can show you guys the doughnut pegboard we had! It looked so pretty.

Tulle & more DECORATIONS

Actually wait. The chairs weren’t the most frustrating part of wedding setup – preparing the tulle was. Our neighbor came over to help with this, thankfully, since Mom and Megan and I would have been lost without her. We had to cut sets of six layers of tulle from the big bolts we ordered, then accordion-fold them one at a time, and string them all through with a needle and fishing line on both the top and the bottom.

Honestly it was NOT fun. Especially when it got twisted or the knots came untied. But we eventually got it all stuffed into garbage bags ready to hang. (More on that later.) The chairs and couches in the Great Room looked like ghosts.

Since the wedding was right around our house, we had to do some maintenance things in preparation, like replacing the glass on this lampstand, painting the house where the siding needed replacing, and fixing the crumbly parts of the steps.

The day before the wedding was so much fun! A bunch of people came over to help, including my bridesmaids. 🙂 Here they are picking some wheat to use in the bouquets and boutonnieres. The bottom picture is Chessie diligently raking up piles of grass in the cemetery that Logan had mowed earlier.

Sully’s dad used to be a construction worker and so was VERY helpful the Friday before the wedding, helping to hang the tulle and lights and such. He even climbed up in the rafters for a better reach. :’D You can see a sneak peek of the tulle on the walls in this picture!

Oops, these are out of order… anyway, we got the rental tables set up, with more math skills from Sully’s dad and brother. On Friday night we set up an example table with the centerpieces and everything and AHH, it made me so happy! It felt like thing were getting real, and also felt like I was in a Pinterest wedding! Everything was looking so pretty.

We couldn’t fit all the guests in the big barn, so we set up more tables in this barn across from it. I love the cozy string lights, don’t you?

One of my jobs for wedding decorating was lettering various signs for parking, reserved seating, and this welcome sign. I used a glass frame and white paint markers, after sketching it out with washable markers first. I love how it turned out!

FLORALS

The flowers were probably my favorite part of wedding setup. (Are you surprised? 😉 ) Aria, my matron of honor, came down a few days before the wedding and helped my mom and sisters and I forage the woods for lots of greenery.

We drove the Mule (it’s like an ATV, not an animal) around the woods with buckets of water in the back, stopping to cut huge bunches of plants like privet, honeysuckle, locust branches, hawthorn, and ferns.

We got a few of these purple phlox, but the girls are actually picking ferns in this picture. We have so many ferns in our woods!

Mom grew a lot of flowers for the wedding, but we supplemented with a few buckets from a flower farm (delivered by some friends as shown below), eucalyptus from I think Trader Joe’s and Sam’s Club, and a BUNCH of “borrowed” blooms from a ton of generous ladies in our church groups. We stored all the flowers in Jeff’s drum studio. Oh my, I wish you guys could have seen it. Phone pictures don’t do justice to the stunningly beautiful masses of flowers overflowing the room.

The old piano in Jeff’s studio looked quite picturesque covered in all this purple and white and green.

We got this insane amount of flowers because that’s basically all I used to decorate – that and tulle + string lights. We lined the reception tables with cute bud vases filled with a bright flower or two. SO many bud vases. Here’s just one box.

This is a selection of the “borrowed” flowers. Did you know you can pick peony buds when they’re just starting to open and store them in the refrigerator for weeks or even months? That’s what we did with 200+ peonies from a bunch of friends and they worked BEAUTIFULLY. It made me so happy. They looked very wedding-y alongside the buckets of eucalyptus!

Mom’s friend Adina is super good at flowers since Adina’s mom had a florist shop growing up. She helped Mom make my bridal bouquet and it was STUNNING. I think it’s almost done here. My piano teacher who played piano for the ceremony was also part of a crew of ladies who helped create all the florals. I couldn’t resist taking the picture of her with a flower in her mouth, heh.

One of my favorite memories from wedding prep was Saturday morning in the garage, creating tons of bouquets with a bunch of lovely ladies. It was impossible to step into those rooms overflowing with flowers and not be filled with joy. I honestly was hardly stressed out at all the day before the wedding, and maybe part of that was flower therapy. 🙂 Actually it was probably being surrounded by so many wonderful people, but the flowers sure didn’t hurt! These are two of the bouquets I created to decorate places like the gift table or the guestbook table.

REHEARSAL DAY

To be fair, quite a few of these pictures were taken on rehearsal day, but… well, I didn’t really know what else to call this category. XD Jianna and Aria are making pew bouquets on the left, and all the hardworking helpers are taking a lunch break on the right. Ah, so many happy memories…

The actual wedding rehearsal was a lot easier and faster than I expected it to be. We ended with a nice rehearsal dinner in the barns and tried not to roast as it was upwards of 90 degrees Fahrenheit and very sunny. Sully and I were reunited with our adorable flower girl, Caroline. Sully is clearly the best (and cutest) uncle. 😀

After the rehearsal dinner, I got some of the guys to set up the dance floor for the next day. Sully and I even got to practice our first dance, which was so fun! I’ll have to show you guys a video of the real first dance in a future post.

We ended the day with low-key bachelor and bachelorette parties. The guys went to a local bowling alley and the girls stayed at the house and did face face masks, painted our nails, and chatted. Thanks to Dad for this picture of our slightly disturbing mask-covered faces. 😛

Dad tried out some of the face masks too, hehe. The girls thought he was, like, the best dad ever for letting us do that to him. I agreed. 😉

Last but not least, Aria got us to take a speaker out to the dance floor under the lights and danced to a bunch of random songs. IT WAS SO FUN. My bridesmaids are amazing. 😀

Phew, that was a massive post, wasn’t it? Get ready for lots more! But I’ll stop here for today. I hope you guys enjoyed that sneak peek of what our actual wedding looked like. It was so so beautiful, oh my. I can’t be grateful enough for all of the amazing friends and family who made even the hard work of setting up for the wedding a fun and special event. You guys are the best. ❤

How have you guys been during my break?? Are you excited for this wedding series? What was your favorite part of the wedding prep to read about?

Thanks so much for reading, my friends, and have a lovely day!

***Allison***

P. S. Check out the other posts in my wedding series below.