Today I’m sharing a sunny lemon ranch DIY wedding from wild{whim} design + photography. I love all the eclectic and eco-friendly details this couple incorporated. My favorite idea? The personalized favor bags to let guests pick lemons in the orchards during portrait time. Such a great reusable gift and gives guests something fun to do during cocktail hour!
When we started out we weren’t sure if we wanted a wedding at all but the pull to have all of our friends and family in one place to celebrate proved too enticing to pass up. So we made a pact that we wouldn’t let the wedding turn into a stressful event. Our mantra became “simplify, simplify, simplify”. We did away with a lot of traditional wedding. It was also really important to us that the wedding reflect us and not cost a small fortune so we decided to do a lot of things ourselves. Crafting and collecting all of our decorations ended up being something we really enjoyed. We love to travel, be outdoors and hunt for vintage furniture pieces so that became our “theme”. We found a coffee place giving away their used coffee bags on craigslist so we used those to make our table runners (we loved the “green” aspect of this too).
We fell in love with the site as soon as we saw it and decided that formal flower arrangements would look out of place in that beautiful setting so we decided to pot our own succulents for centerpieces (pots from Ikea and succulents from our local nursery). Any flowers we did use were from my Dad’s garden. We also collected mismatched glass bowls from our favorite thrift shops and filled them with lemons from the site. We got a door, cabinet doors and vintage frames from the Habitat ReStore (we love Habitat for Humanity) and painted them with chalkboard paint for our signage.
The site has an orchard where guests can pick all kinds of lemons, oranges and rare citrus plants so we thought the perfect favor would be reusable bags which we customized, and we invited everyone to go pick some fruit after the ceremony. This tuned out to be really fun and unique for our guests. We were lucky enough to have one of our close friends marry us which made the ceremony all that much more special. Also, since my family is Middle Eastern we opted for Middle Eastern sweets from a famous bakery in Michigan and they turned out to be a hit. Dessert table serving dishes were also collected from thrift and antique stores.
Overall it was the perfect day with all the right people there and we love that it “felt like us.”
Photography | wild{whim} design + photography | Venue | Limoneira Ranch | Catering | Plated Events | Desserts | Shatila | Dress | Dolly Couture | Hair & Makeup | Michael Kelley Salon | DJ | DJ Josh Adams
