It's Personal
- Kaz Palladino
- Aug 13
- 4 min read
(In which I branded the shit out of our wedding)
It has almost been a year already, and I've procrastinated this whole time about putting together this post. (i.e. the excuse for why I had little work to show for most of 2023-4. Although I'm arguable pretty bad at posting/showing work/etc). However, I truly did spend a large amount of time designing the shit out of this wedding, and the void should hear about it! (So that I may feel less guilty about all the time I didn't spend working on business stuff. Responsibility write-off, of sorts.)
Anyway, we love a themed party, and especially love to decorate for them, however, nailing down this particular theme (as a stereotypical Libra) was daunting. It was too final. Too serious. Too big. Nothing like our palm tree knighting ceremony. So classically, I refused to make anything coherent and went with general whimsy.
Wedding Invite Design
Well, the invitations had a movie poster theme. I later repurposed them into an actual movie-poster-guest-book. That design merged elements from both save the date and formal invite, because I liked the StD silhouette with our cat, Mount Hood and trees, but mushing our faces together is definitely more accurate to our level of (adult) cool. As someone who designs geeky wedding invitations, this was honestly what I was most worried about. I didn't want to overwhelm the design with my personality (otherwise, it would have been entirely Lord of the Rings). Was it supposed to be the pinnacle of my wedding designs? I mean, we didn't even have a real theme! At some point, you just have to give in. I mean, I wasn't even getting paid for this shit.
I'm sure the pink and yellow theme was heinous, but we wanted vibrant and summery and a little bit unusual. His favorite color is yellow and mine is...well, purple (but we really didn't want to bring the Lakers into things any more than 8-24 did already. Nothing against the Lakers, but that wasn't in the range of the almost-theme we had going). Anyway, pink and yellow just worked, it felt punchy and obnoxious and I've heard that is the goal of a wedding vibe. I swear it's all over Pinterest.
As for the rest of it....diy decor madness
You'll see a lot of advice about wedding DIY, the pros and cons, the actual cost and time. I'm not really going to give a recommendation either way. I am incapable of relinquishing design control to anyone else, so that is all the justification I can give for the DIY fugue.
Flowers
Flowers are objectively, universally loved, but the thought of spending lots of money on them, only to watch them die and be thrown out, kinda didn't sit right. However, fake flowers can be pretty expensive, tacky, or just sad. Is there an uncanny valley for flowers? Anywho, the wood flower idea intrigued me, so I went with with Sola Flowers. Seemingly eco-friendly (plus I could get peonies out of season). Then (with my insufferable need for control) came the onslaught of dying, adding stems and assembling for bouquets and other details. Flower arranging is certainly not something I had ever tried before, but the Sola tutorial page definitely helped, and I think things came out rather decent!
The Bouquet
After making what I thought would be my bouquet (left), I realized the display piece for our lightsabers was deep enough to hold some stems, so naturally I decided my flowers absolutely needed a hilt (ideally would have been this one, but you have to work with what you got). By that point, the amount of wood flowers I had left wasn't quite as large as the original bouquet, but day of I stuffed some real-life (Trader Joe's) flowers and fluffed it out a little. I have no arranging experience (or even patience) but it worked out well enough. And hey, I have a souvenir! I've been told my husband is not a souvenir.
(Final Bouquet)
Centerpieces and Accents
For the centerpiece, I wanted something minimalist but unique, so I painted a series of wood blocks with acrylic then drilled holes along the edges to add the flower stems and in the center for the number (which also repeated the painting texture).
Flowers would also go into the head table wood block, as well as the gazebo floating curtain, chair accents and boutonnieres. Painted heart stakes lined the walkway and the abstract painting texture was dragged throughout other designs (kicking and screaming).
So there you have it. My wedding diy invite design and decor for the ages. Weird, it really felt like a lot more work than that. All in all, it was a success. It had whimsy. No one talked shit in my presence, and all the documents got signed, so I'm pretty sure that's the whole wedding goal, right?
Professional photos by Steele Photography
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