Sand | Love, Pasta and a Tool Belt

When planning my wedding I knew I wanted a few creative touches to the ceremony but I did not want it to be too long. I didn’t want to be standing up there forever, I wanted to be married! So today I am going to share with you a few ceremony ideas and I am pulling these from my wedding, my best friends and my sisters.

-Unity Sand- I had known for awhile that I wanted to do unity sand. So I went on the hunt for a pretty unity sand vase and I wanted it to have a top because I’ve heard stories of them being knocked over. I found this beautiful unity sand vase holder with a lid! It was so pretty and I thought it would look great in our house for years to come. It came with white, black and gray sand. I was wondering what the black sand was for, well we learned to late. The black sand should have been poured in the bottom in the part you cannot see. Because we did not do that our sand only comes about halfway up. And a note: it doesn’t travel well, ours is a little mixed together but it looks pretty and it’s a great memory. We took a time in the ceremony to do the sand while the trio played music.

-Prayer Time- So this is an idea my best friend did at her wedding and I got married two months after her and she graciously allowed me to take this idea. At a point during the ceremony the pastor spoke about prayer and the importance of prayer in marriage and then invited the bridal party and the parents of the groom and bride to come up and lay hands on us (the bride and groom). There was a short silent time for everyone to pray and then the pastor said a prayer. I really loved this idea!

-Communion- Instead of doing a unity candle or sand my sister and her husband had a time of communion. There was a little table set up ready for them to take it. The pastor spoke about communion and then they had a time of communion and prayer to began their marriage. It was really beautiful and an idea I hadn’t really seen.

So these are just a few of the ceremony ideas I have been a part of and had not seen a lot. Do you have any unique ceremony ideas that you used or are planning to use? I’d love to hear any that you have!

So this week I am going to tell you about my centerpieces from my wedding! Tyler gave me some great ideas for wedding posts coming up soon but I have to dig out my wedding planning notebook for the information so stay tuned for that next week 🙂

Ok the first centerpiece is one that we used at my sisters wedding and before her wedding this was a centerpiece I had never seen before. In all my research for centerpiece ideas I don’t think I came across one like this. So what we did was we got a cylinder vase and then stacked miniature fishbowls topsy turvy in the cylinder vase. In the miniature fishbowls we put white roses. At my sisters wedding we put yellow roses. We put a little bit of water in the bottom of each fishbowl. There are so many options you could do with these. You could put food coloring for colored water, you could put live fish if you loved fish (we actually saw that at a wedding at our venue), pretty rocks, sand and shells and so much more just depending on the theme of your wedding.

The second centerpiece that we used was a completely last minute decision. We had ordered the flowers and were doing our own flowers and a wholesale flower place where you put together all of your own flowers, more on that later. So we showed up with fishbowls to have flowers submerged in the fishbowls. Well it ended up what they got us was not going to work so fortunately they had these lovely vases available two days before my wedding to rent. We places pins in the bottoms of the flowers to anchor them down with the rocks in the bottom. We placed the flowers in then added the water on the day of the wedding. These ended up being my favorite centerpiece and they were completely last minute. One of the wedding stressors, changes in plans. Something you learn in weddings, you must be flexible!

As you can see in the pictures we surrounded the centerpieces with little votive candles because who doesn’t like candles right? My other centerpiece involved a lot of candles. I don’t have a picture of it it seems but it was pretty straight forward. If you can see my tablecloths are lavender, they were supposed to be gray. Another unexpected change from a mistake that we unfortunately had to deal with. It looked great still but my colors were dark purple and gray. Flexibility. And really on the day of your wedding you don’t even notice everything it’s all a blur. It was a wonderful day!