Eclectic Watercolor Wedding

When my husband and I got engaged it seemed pretty obvious that we’d get married at my parents’ house, an avocado farm in Carpinteria, CA. It was April and we wanted a fall wedding, so we decided to just go for it and plan it all in 6 months–I knew more time would only mean more obsessing! I also really wanted everything to have a hand-made feel and come out of the talents of our community–we are lucky to know so many creative, wonderful people, so we enlisted them all to make the wedding as homegrown as possible.

I’m a wedding photographer myself, so photography was of huge importance; Nancy was my first and only choice. She led me to Emily, my new friend and dream dress creator. I’d found an old lace dress at a vintage show, and she reworked it entirely, making a hand-dyed ombre slip to go underneath and putting in panels and sleeves made of tulle from my husband’s grandmother’s veil. She also dyed an old silk bedcoat I had lying around to match the dress. The invitations were based on a watercolor I did–the guys at Aardvark letterpress worked with me to create a custom two-ink press so that the colors would bleed like watercolors! I asked my mom, an incredible florist, to do the flowers.

I wanted the tablescapes to feel wild and blowsy, like a fairyland. For centerpieces, she gathered my husband’s family silver and planted it with succulents, then filled in with smaller flower arrangements, pomegranates, baby apples, and acacia branches from one of her trees. I cut napkins out of sari fabric and used painters’ dropclothes as tableclothes. For escort cards, I used cut-up watercolors I’d painted; table numbers were old house address numbers I found on Etsy.