“Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.” (Anonymous)
Every couple wants their wedding to be memorable and to reflect their own tastes, styles, and traditions. While I’m very aware that a wedding is not a marriage, but only the start – these occasions come filled with a promise and hope for love, family, and life, that matches no other earthly celebration. All the images in the collages here were taken at memorable weddings of close family and friends. Enjoy!
This was a Disney themed wedding and roses were the flower of choice by this couple. Flowers are an essential part of decor and bring joy and happiness to all. “Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you.
If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do.
This bride chose a Disney cake because she’s a Disney fan. The colors on the cake matched the colors of the flowers. The caption on the cake is how all fairy-tales end: “And they lived happily ever after.” The cake was beautifully displayed and tasted good too.
I like to do experimental things with my collages – so for the lettering in this collage, I photographed “pretty” and “roses” from a Gardening Magazine. I could have used my own Text function on the computer but it wouldn’t have been as pretty.
We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.
— John Lennon
This wedding was at a Banquet Hall and, as you can see from the above collage, there were chandeliers and fabric delicately draped from the ceiling. The setting was beautiful and dinner was a sit-down affair. Time to move on to the next wedding now.
In the above collage, the scene has changed. This wedding is in the Ukrainian tradition and, instead of wedding cake, you can see bread. This wedding bread was made by a friend for the couple. You can also see the Ukrainian design on the table-cloth. There is a separate post called “The Korovai” about the wedding bread in case you are interested.
Flowers were an important part of decor at this wedding too. They were beautiful and of many different varieties. “Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.” – John Lennon said. There was much love here – the love of the couple for each other, the love of family, and the love of friends. May this love keep growing.
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
That’s by Pablo Neruda. This wedding was a very elegant affair and I hope the above collages captured this for you. The traditional Ukrainian wedding ceremony was held in a beautiful Ukrainian Orthodox Church with their own Banquet Hall a stone’s throw away. The table settings were exquisite and the dinner was sumptuous.
The next wedding is how weddings used to be long ago when weddings were kept at home. The family used their own space and did the decorating themselves.
This was a winter wedding and was indoors. Everything from the front door to the porch table (with snow on it) had some decoration. A wreath above the fireplace and decorations on the mirrors was all part of dressing up the home. It was fun.
On the piano, the window-sill, the hallway table – here, there, and everywhere – there were simple flower arrangements lovingly arranged by the family. There were two arrangements that had little lights in them.
There were only twenty guests at this wedding and the hallway table served as the bar.
This two-tiered wedding cake was baked and decorated at home. It was a traditional fruit cake and the fruit had been soaking in liquor for several months. The guests enjoyed it and especially the bride and groom who were pleased that the parents made it and decorated it.
The dinner was a buffet for this wedding and the food was home-cooked except for the Thai food which was ordered. On to the next wedding!
This was a “Destination Wedding” in Barbados. It was beautiful. The decor for a destination wedding is the sand and the sea and the palm trees. Everybody’s hair is wind-blown and nobody bothers about it. The flowers are tropical. The atmosphere is relaxed and a canopy is all that’s needed. The restaurant this wedding was held at was called “Tapas” and there were many different kinds of tapas (appetizers) as well as a served dinner. The next collage shows the spectacular view the guests had from the party area on the second floor.
Isn’t this gorgeous?
Because this last collage was of the sea, this post will close with something from Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “Gifts from the Sea.”
“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
Hope you enjoyed this post and the collages! Weddings are serious business.