Vintage Santa Barbara wedding: Julia + Todd

Let’s call this the first unofficial Pop-Up Shop wedding, kay? The Forage bow ties, Air Plants (conveniently on sale again this week!), and Bountiful cake stands we had on sale last year, all made an appearance in Julia + Todd’s oh so colorful gold, hot pink and teal wedding. How awesome is that? And how awesome is it that they own and run a coffee shop together, roast their own beans and have a baby named Castle on the way? Congrats are definitely in order for these two, especially since they pulled off one big 250 guest wedding with a whole lot of DIY. Here’s how they did it!

Our close friend Sarah Wilkinson, who owns a letterpress company called Tabletop Made, helped us design the invitations and printed them for us. I quickly realized that sending out invitations sets the tone of the wedding and excitement level for the guests. The colors for the whole wedding ended up being based on our invitations: gold, hot pink, teal. Once you see something printed in gold foil, you have to do it. We bought the vintage stamps from The Paper Nickel Stamp Company, which were so worth it. Everyone told us that when they got their invitations in the mail, they knew they couldn’t miss this wedding, just based on the excitement it created.

An amazing Erica Weiner gold and crystal necklace paired with a vintage dress for $250 – we’re loving this.

We gave everyone a toy wind instrument with their programs, (vintage recorders, slide whistles, shell whistles, flutes), which all our guests were blowing and playing while they waited for us to walk down the aisle. This gave the air an electric feel and was so exciting!

How cute are these bridesmaids in their pink tulle dresses from Betsy Johnson?

We’re excited to tell you that we have a variety of Air Plant Shop plants for sale in our Pop-Up Shop right now! You can place them in and around your event like Julia + Todd did for a beautiful unique addition to your decor.

We wanted our guests to find special little surprises throughout the day. On the bar we had bowls of pins we made with our pictures on them. On tables scattered about were heart shaped sunglasses. In the bathrooms we stocked baskets of bright multicolored tights for the ladies in case they got cold (this was seriously one of the best things: around 9pm I looked around and everyone had utilized the tights, even my aunts!).

We used Todd’s great-aunt’s vintage slide collection as the escort cards. My dad built us these custom slide holders out of antique frames, and I typed everyone’s names and table numbers on an old typewriter. They had a major wow factor, as we were outside with the light shining through all the slides, it was beautiful.

Other DIY projects included taking polaroids of themselves holding numbers to use as their table numbers and hand stamping name tags for each place setting.

In lieu of a traditional guest book they had graphic designer, Madeleine Eiche design a Wedding Declaration silk screened in black and gold, and had all their guests sign it in hot pink pen.

The overall theme of our wedding came from our collective relationship’s history. We called it “An Exhibition of Love and Magic”, because we have always felt so unbelievably lucky to have found each other, and to have accomplished so much in our relationship so far. Our wedding became not only a celebration of what was to come, but what has already happened. We pulled all these things that are the lore, the tales of our lives, and displayed them and celebrated them.