Real Wedding | A Vintage California Wedding

Fair warning: you are going to love this wedding! Well, I am in love anyway, so I am sure you will too! Who wouldn’t fall for a wedding with darling vintage details, chic sophistication, and amazing and meaningful moments?? One of my favorite details is her grandmother’s gorgeous gown she got to wear for her get away dress (and a few pre-wedding shots!) I am also loving their sweet escort card idea! They took time to write each guest a personal note, so everyone really felt the love! Definitely a steal worthy idea!

The stunning bride Chelsea shares:

Alex and I met the very first weekend of our freshman year at Pepperdine University in Malibu and got engaged at the beginning of our junior year. Although my family lives in Houston, I really wanted to get married in California because that’s where our story unfolded. As Alex is from Seattle, almost all of our 200 guests came in from out of town. Accordingly, I wanted to make sure the venue would be something special and worth traveling from Texas or Washington to spend a day at. Rancho del Cielo totally fit the bill. The ocean views from the hills of Malibu were spectacular and the whole place is so romantic and charming. You really wouldn’t have to add a thing to the venue to make it beautiful, which made the rest of the planning much easier.

It’s hard to compress all the things that made our wedding so special to us but here are some of my favorite things about it. We had 8 kids in the wedding! We have a lot of little ones in our lives that are really special to us (including Alex’s two little brothers) so we decided to embrace the chaos kids bring and it was a blast! For my processional, my cousin sang the first three verses of “In Christ Alone” along with the string quartet and then all the guests joined in on the fourth verse when my dad and I walked in. It was so beautiful and made me cry at the rehearsal and the wedding! As part of the ceremony, we asked both sets of parents to each choose a verse from the bible as blessing for our marriage. Strangely, they both picked the exact same verse so both of our dads read it to us before we made our vows.

I poured over blogs and loved how fun all the vintage stuff was. But I was pretty torn because the often the vintage stuff had the more casual, backyard feel and I still was drawn to the elegant black-tie vibe. So I wrestled with combining these two elements. The breakthrough was when my mom started collecting silver trays for the center pieces. They had all the character that makes the vintage look so special but also were also suited to an elegant dinner party. I tried to maintain this throughout by having a base of the classic and neutral (black tuxes, gold bridesmaids dresses, string quartet) with colorful details (antiques and bright colored flowers). It’s weird to see this huge event that you only ever see in tiny pieces come together to look so complete. I was super blessed to be surrounded by family and friends that materialized all the visions in my head.

My grandma got married in France in the 1950s and her wedding dress is awesome and fit me perfectly. I wore it as a “going away dress” and took some pictures in it before the wedding. One thing we did that ended up being really great was that we wrote personal notes to all our guests and put them in the little pockets we made for escort cards. As we went through and wrote them the week before the wedding it gave us an opportunity to think about what each of our guests meant to us which made seeing everyone on the day way more significant. What sticks with me about our wedding was the pure joy that permeated everything. It enveloped us and affirmed the step we were taking in a way I never could have imagined. It is my prayer that we continue to carry that joy throughout our marriage.