black and white wedidng portrait of mountain bride and groom
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Tender DIY Wedding In Colorado | Real Hindsight Advice

black and white wedidng portrait of mountain bride and groom

One of my favorite parts of blogging is sharing these real mountain wedding with real hindsight advice. So many times these savvy women cover the things you’d never find in a mainstream wedding magazine. Case in point: Bride Stephanie wishes she hadn’t brought her dog to the hotel. All the commotion, guests and hubub were too much for him. Now this is not to say no bride should bring her dog, but is does get you thinking about all the littlest details and considerations, doesn’t it? So thank you Stephanie for sharing your Hindsight Advice and thank you to the amazing Shauna Benoit for sharing such fun pictures! You’ll love all of the tender emotion and unabashed revelry in this wedding!

From the Bride

When my husband proposed to me we were halfway down a mountain strapped to our snowboards. This says a lot about the type of couple we are. We both love nature, hikes, adventures and just the outdoors in general. Therefore, we tried to incorporate nature into our wedding as much as possible. I was inspired mainly by all of the DIY wedding sites. I loved seeing what other brides had done in the past and tweaking their ideas to fit my own. The things that I wanted at first were changed throughout the preparation for the wedding when family and friends got involved, but every decoration turned out gorgeous (of course I am biased :-)).
I wanted thick slabs of tree with the bark still attached to be under our centerpieces, but since my father-in-law is a Shop teacher, we had something more intricate cut out of wood that was absolutely perfect. The centerpieces incorporated nature by having pine cones and Sycamore tree balls inside of a hurricane vase with a candle of our color. We had birdhouses as favors with a note enclosed asking each guest to take it home and paint it and send us a picture so we can make a collage from our wedding.

Colorado wedding ceremony by a Mountain Lake

purple colorado wedding flowers

Father walks bride down the aisle

Three things I am glad I did

  1. DIY centerpieces (they were so much more personal and affordable)
  2. Personalized cake topper (it was a salt and pepper shaker set of two ducks Mike had given me and I made a veil and hat for them)
  3. Moss letters for the head table (they hung from painted stocking hooks and really dressed up the head table for pictures)

Three things I wish I had done

  1. Spend more time on the little details in advance
  2. Have a wedding closer to home
  3. Get a manicure and pedicure the night before

Three things I wish I hadn’t done

  1. Bring my dog to the hotel (someone had to take him back to their house in Denver because he was disturbing guests in the hotel)
  2. Fall in love with a pair of shoes that hurt my feet (they only lasted a half hour before I went to my back-up pair)
  3. Bought way too much alcohol

Cutting the wedding cake

Three things I wish I hadn’t worried about

  1. Where our family was going to stay (they figured it out on their own)
  2. The drops of rain on the car windshield as we were driving to the lakehouse (it cleared up and was the most perfect weather)
  3. Crying during the ceremony (it was inevitable)

Best Hindsight advice

My best friend who got married before me told me that not everything happened according to plan on her wedding day, but when the day finally came none of it mattered. Things have a way of working themselves out and when you are surrounded by so much loving family there are always helping hands around.
My husband told me on our wedding day that it was the easiest thing he had ever done (of course he was talking about the getting married part, not the planning). Have fun with the details and make it your own special day!

Projects DIY’ed

  • Centerpieces
  • Wooden trivets under the centerpieces
  • Altar vases (we painted them and bought the bundles separately)
  • The moss letters on the headtable
  • The flowergirl baskets
  • The ringbearer pillows
  • The songlist
  • The caketoppers
  • The decorations on the fireplace mantle, gift table, guestbook table, etc
  • Our programs (designed, printed, cut and stamped by us)
  • Our invitations
  • Gift bags for each hotel room (stamped, decorated and personalized with info about the town)
  • Birdseed bags
  • Favors

(numbers 2, 5, & 6 were done by my mother(and father)-in-law)

Team Wedding