by: With all of its colorful and personalized touches, we're excited to feature Alex and Danielle's classic East Coast wedding. And we're also excited because Alex and Danielle chose MagnetStreet for their wedding stationery suite! We simply love all the clever ways they carried their cobalt blue and royal purple color scheme + damask pattern throughout their wedding look. Danielle is a lovely, thoughtful, and talented bride who had a very specific vision for their wedding and who did an amazing of job of communicating and following through with their many vendors. Some of those thoughtful details included feather-trimmed bouquets, classic cars, wedding cakes that delineated their French and Italian heritages, and a music-themed ice sculpture! Danielle was sweet enough to share a few special details from their big day! Enjoy.
Wedding Style: Classic with flair
Wedding Colors: Cobalt Blue and Royal Purple
Ceremony: Trinity United Methodist Church, Providence, RI
Reception: The Century House Inc., Acushnet, MA
Photographer: Manny Carvalho of Studio One Photography
Wedding Stationery: MagnetStreet Weddings
Starting their big day with a big bang!
There was a chance of rain ... It was beautiful as I got dressed and took photos with my family and bridesmaids before the ceremony. But as we drove to the church, it began to look gloomy and ominous. It began to softly rain just moments after we entered the church. As I stood in the back waiting to enter, a huge thunder crack erupted and the lights went out in the church. The rain came down in sheets and our limo driver ran inside, insisting that lightning had just struck the steeple. Our accompanist was playing on an electric keyboard so we lost the music, and naturally I started bawling my eyes out. Seconds later, the power came back on and everything kept going as if nothing had happened. The rain stopped just as we were ready to leave the church, and it was beautiful and sunny the rest of the day! Our guests pointed out that we started this new chapter of our lives together with a bang!
Save the Date and Invitation Suite
Alex and Danielle chose Flower Enchantment Save the Date Card and Damask Dream Wedding Invitation Suite
Damask Dream was pretty much the driving force behind our wedding style. From this design, I hand painted a number of decorations with a similar swirl pattern, our cake decorator made something similar on our cake, and it gave us that really classic feel that we ended up going with.
Advice you wished you took
Everyone kept telling me not to worry about the rain, that it was good luck if it rained on your wedding, and that almost everyone in my extended family had some sort of rain on their wedding day (not joking). It really did work out quite nicely in the end, I just wish I hadn’t gotten so worked up over it. I was literally glued to my weather app for DAYS before the wedding, watching the chance of rain change from 10% to 60% and getting very stressed out about it.
The Classic Cars
Both of our fathers are huge antique car fans. My father has a 1965 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and a 1976 Pontiac Grand Prix. We used both of these as part of the car procession. One car was for my parents and my husband’s mother. My father drove. The second car was for our two ring bearers and flower girl. My uncle, the ring bearer’s father, drove. Alex’s father passed away a little less than a year ago. He owned a 1959 Cadillac. In honor of his father, we rode in that car and Alex drove.
On choosing Damask Dream Invitation Suite
I found the design that we chose when I was setting up our wedding website through Wedding Wire. We chose it because it was a blue and purple design (even though the blue was a lighter blue rather than the cobalt). We really liked the classic feel that it had. I fell even more in love when I visited the MagnetStreet website and found all the coordinating invitations and programs. We just had to have it.
Best part of the day
The best part for me was walking in and seeing the room looking exactly as I had imagined it. I had spent countless hours making centerpieces and other decorations for the room and spent many more hours making color coded floor plans and sketches of the ceiling decorations. It was great to walk in and see it all set up perfectly! It was also amazing how well everything matched. We had rented so many items from different places (no one place had everything I wanted) and I had made so much more that it was great to see that everything matched and looked like it all belonged. The girls' dresses and mens' vests and ties even matched the napkins and tablecloths perfectly.
The wedding cake
I brought our baker color swatches and our invitation, and she managed to replicate it onto the cake beautifully. And it was so good! Alex loves chocolate cake with all sorts of chocolate fillings and I love white cakes with fruit fillings. He and a number of other family members are allergic to strawberries, so I picked raspberry. She managed to do a cake that had 2 layers in each slice. The bottom half of the slice was chocolate cake with chocolate mousse and the top half was white cake with raspberry filling. It was amazing. All of our guests got to have both of our favorite cakes!
The French and Italian Cakes
Since I am French Canadian, and Alex is Italian, we decided to include our cultural wedding cakes as well. The Croquembouche is the French cake. It was made of hundreds of small cream filled pastry puffs that were stacked over 2 and a half feet high! It was so delicious and everyone raved about it. The Italian Cookie Cake was a large pile of over 500 cookies that my aunt made.
Custom-designed Ice Sculpture
This was an impressive, custom designed sculpture featuring a tuba (my husband’s instrument) and a Treble clef and some notes floating on a staff (I’m a vocalist).
Congratulations Alex and Danielle! We wish you all the best!! Thanks so much for sharing your wedding day with all of us.
xo
Wedding Pro Praises!
Studio One Photography
Manny has been taking my photos since I was a baby. I couldn’t have imagined going anywhere else for my photos! Even with little time between ceremony and reception, he was able to move quickly and get some amazing shots of our families, wedding party and our father’s antique cars.
MagnetStreet Weddings
I actually participated in the user study that tested the personalization tool before it was released on the website. I had already been creating my invitations and ordered my save the dates, but I found the personalization tool very user friendly, and it made it very easy for me to change the colors on my invitation. When I was originally creating them, I was using a custom purple, not one of your pre-saved colors, and I needed to input CMYK numbers every time I wanted something purple. The “my colors” tool made personalization SO much easier! I remember being so excited when I saw in the user study that the site was now going to remember my purple for me. It was also great that, whenever I couldn't format something exactly how I wanted it, I could put the request in the notes and someone on the MagnetStreet team took care of it for me. Everything came out perfect! Our guests loved the magnets. We used a save the date magnet as an invitation insert and put our wedding website on it. People loved that it held all our wedding info on their fridge and directed them to the online site.
Acushnet Flower Shoppe
I walked in with some print outs of flowers my Maid of Honor had found on Pinterest. I had no idea what these flowers were, but they were blue and purple and perfect, and I had to have them. She knew exactly what they were and got them for me. She even made a demo bouquet of my flowers and my Maid of Honor’s flowers. I hand made some beaded flowers to be added in as accents and she found a way to work them into every bouquet perfectly. Every bouquet was also trimmed in feathers. She also made four huge feather plumes. We ordered custom dyed ostrich feathers that were almost 2 feet long, and she assembled them into these beautiful arrangements that accented both our ceremony and reception wonderfully. Everyone wanted to take a feather home as a souvenir at the end of the night.
The Cakes: The French Croquembouche Cake {Mairy Chessa (friend of the family) and the Italian Cookie Cake, Lisa Carrier-Titti (Aunt)
The Century House Inc.,
I worked at The Century House for 7 years (first job in high school, and my steady job all through college). It was the only place I have ever wanted to have my wedding. It is a family run business with a staff that has been together since I worked there. The food is to die for! I had served as wait staff and other capacities ... As a hostess, it was my job to orchestrate the evening for brides--make sure the room is set up as they envisioned, make sure the guests are happy, make sure the bride, groom and their families are happy, and that everything runs smoothly and on time. It was great to know exactly how my night was going to go. They were very accommodating with my requests as well. The staff did a ton of set up for me! We were even allowed to have a tent out on the front lawn. They set up tables outside and served our cocktail hour under the tent. They customized the buffet for me as well. I made many changes so that we served all of my favorite foods. They made our night so perfect. Everyone was very impressed and thoroughly enjoyed themselves!
Something Different Cake Couture, North Providence, RI
Two words: delicious and beautiful. I had my heart set on having a cake with a fountain. Many cake places told me they would not or could not do the fountain. She said she would. All I had to do was order the fountain materials from Wilton.
Cupcaked by Kevin, New York, NY
I have a cousin who has some pretty severe peanut allergies so I had to make sure there were no nuts in the room anywhere. I also had a couple of other guests with nut allergies, too. I needed something small that would accommodate my cousins dietary needs. Kevin makes all of his goodies completely from scratch. All I needed to do was give him a list of all of the soy/nut products that he could not eat and Kevin made the cake! He even made it chocolate with chocolate mousse and white with raspberry so it would be just like our wedding cake only safe! My cousin loved that there was a dessert that he could actually eat.
Candid Photo Booth
I only had one opportunity to use the photo booth, but our guests absolutely loved it. We got a beautiful photo album and video montage of pictures and videos our guests made for us at the end of the night. There was a line of people waiting to get in almost the entire night. We went with a mobster theme. I made some props (perhaps I went a bit overboard) and they came prepared with a number of other signs and props for our guests to use. It was great!
Music
Miss Wensday. My husband has played with her group before. Since we are both musicians, music was very important to us. She is known for her jazz style music, which fit our personalities and “classic” theme.
Gene Daniels. It was also great to have a DJ that could switch off with the band as they only played 45 minutes at a time. Gene played music for our cocktail hour under the tent, soft dinner music, and then switched off with Miss Wensday for the dance music the remainder of the night. Gene is another person I have known a while. He would be contracted to play at the Century House nearly every weekend so I knew his style, personality and music from hearing him so frequently for 7 years. He was a great choice and his price is right!
Chocolate Fountain, Dorothy Cox Chocolate, Fairhaven, MA.
We supplied all of the items that were dipped in the chocolate, but the chocolate itself was delicious. Again, our guests loved it, and it was a beautiful, flowing decoration next to our ice sculpture.
{Ice sculpture} Art in Ice
When we first met with the sculptor, he sketched out this design based on what we told him about our music careers. There was nothing like this in their sample book, so he just designed one custom for us. It also featured a heart with our names in it. It was quite impressive!
Delightful Designs
I’m a slight control freak. I had sketched out floor plans, made colorized table descriptions, and even had drawn the way I wanted the drapery hung around the chandeliers and the lanterns hung in the tent. Their staff worked all day and made inside and outside look exactly as I had drawn it and imagined it. It all looked amazing.
{Uplighting} Joe Lima Entertainment
Joe set up alternating blue and purple lights around the entire ballroom and made sure the light gels matched our linens. The whole room was glowing!
{Tent and Napkin Rentals} ABC Tent.
Our tent and purple napkins came from ABC Tent. I was very grateful to them for the purple napkins because I could not find the correct color anywhere else. The napkins were the real reason we decided on them for our tent!
{Limos} Christopher Limo and A Formal Affair
We ended up needing to book limos with two different companies to have enough seats for our bridal party. A Formal Affair had one antique that seated 6. Christopher Limo had 2 antiques that each seated 6 as well. The antique cars were a very important part of our day.
