Today we have a fun and modern New Year’s Eve wedding. I’m loving the fresh pops of green, especially the bride’s shoes! It’s rare to find a modern budget wedding, but this couple pulled it off with an amazing night with family and friends!
The beautiful bride Sara shares all the details:
From the beginning, we were most interested in planning a really great New Years Eve party for our guests with an eye towards not going overboard on budget. We love to entertain and thought our wedding was our best opportunity to entertain we would have! Food and drink were most important to us, so the majority of the budget and thought went there. We love to eat lots of different types of food and don’t like to have to commit to a single plate of food, so we worked with our caterer to create a tapas and heavy appetizer meal.
Some of my favourite parts of the day were the most unexpected. I had thought that our first reveal would be the most personal between us because it was just us, but in fact it was the ceremony that felt the most personal. I did not expect how great the ceremony was going to be! It was great to have our family stand up for us and have our friends around us. We didn’t have a wedding party as there was little traditional about our wedding so we thought we would save our friends and not have to choose among them!
Some other great memories are surrounding the unusual things that happened. We had my step father perform the ceremony thanks to an online ordination. I had written out the ceremony details from a book of ideas I was given from a friend. The day of the wedding in the movement to the ceremony, the notes were left at the hotel, and about 10 minutes before the ceremony we organized the details again! That made for a fun memory. Another unexpected part of the wedding happened surrounding NYE fireworks. One of the many reasons we picked our venue was it had a great view of downtown Columbus through all glass walls, and we had planned watching the city fireworks to be part of our party. It was an incredibly warm day (over 60 degrees that night) so everyone went outside to see the fireworks at 10:30pm. And we all heard the most fantastic fireworks ever. The whole display happened on the other side of a very low building in front of us (city couldn’t afford to shoot the fireworks high as it turned out!). No one saw anything but smoke. What a funny memory.
As for DIY, most of it was in one way or another, but with lots of help from friends. Our STD and invites were designed by my great friend who is a graphic designer in Toronto and I had them printed in town. I had two friends help me stuff them and address them. Another friend helped me make moustaches on a stick for the photobooth. A friend who was just starting her own wedding consulting business helped me with the day of co-orientating and put together all our fabulous flowers on a very tight budget. In the end, there weren’t many actual crafty DIY projects, but I spend almost a year finding the best deals I could online for everything we bought. Candles, vases, even my wedding shoes. Coupons helped the budget ;)
Finally, having our family and friends there having a great time however they wanted (dancing, smoking handrolled cigars outside, sitting and chatting, photobooth-ing it, drinking, etc) for our wedding and for NYE. Everyone looked great and was carefree and enjoying themselves. It was exactly the party that Abe and I wanted to throw!
Photography | Kevin Keefer
Venue | The Venue at Smith Bros’
