The Artist Bride

If you have been following along you may have noticed that I haven't written a blog post since 2019! Yikes!

It has been a very busy, beautiful, frustrating year for me but don't worry I never stopped creating even for a second. I did however switch my focus from ceramics and painting to planning my wedding and designing the many elements in it. We changed a lot of elements to our special day to be able to still have it this year but I believe our creativity was what helped make it happen.

This post will be all about the many decorations and details that I created for our special day! I hope you enjoy it and get inspired to create something special yourself.

The Dress

I knew I wanted two things:

Color
Inexpensive

This was proving to be a challenge to find so I found the perfect simple white dress and had it shipped to me for $50! It was time to start painting.

Painting the Dress

After careful planning, color fast testing and fabric testing I started creating my dream dress. If you are interested in the step by step process and materials I used check out my tutorial videos here.

I placed my dress on my easel over a pre stretched canvas and used my color swatch as reference. I worked in layers like I normally do and tried to treat it as a normal painting. Background then foreground. It was a lot of fun working with a new material like fabric paint and learning how to work with the material in different ways.

The Brides Accessories

Once I started painting it was hard to stop! I decided to do a few smaller projects to bring the entire vision to life.

I created and painted my own hair bow, sash with sew on applique and decided to make my own veil.

I also wanted to gift my husband something unique to wear too. So up next is all about the Groom!

The Grooms Accessories

I focused on small extras that I could add to his outfit to make sure that we matched and looked the part on our special day. I bought a simple satin tie and matching pocket square first and painted those in the same style as my dress.

My husband loves antique Vaseline glass but I wasn't able to find cuff links made from the material. My sister and I went to an antique store and found a bunch of old tie clips and cuff links for about $2 a set. We decided to hunt through the rest of the jewelry to see if we could find old necklaces made of Vaseline glass. We happend to get lucky and found a bracelet and necklace set in poor condition. I removed the rhinestones from those sets and combined them with the tie clip and cuff links. A little gold leaf later and voila!

The Invitations

We wanted something that showcased my artistry as that was quickly becoming our theme. I hand painted a floral border, this was then uploaded into my computer, cleaned up and then used for all of our invitations.

We kept it simple and inexpensive by designing our own and printing postcard style in Vistaprint. We created stickers, made our return address stamp and bought envelopes to go with them. The same border was printed our our address labels, we used 3M Products.

The Decorations

When possible I used a lot of materials that I had in my studio already and I pulled the design of my dress into the rest of our decor. The fresh flowers we got from Cooke's were the same type and similar colors. I hand painted as much as possible to get the same style throughout.

The Cake

Being gluten free I first had to find a baker that could simply make me a delicious wedding cake. Thankfully By The Way Bakery was able to provide us not only a delicious cake but they encouraged me to create the floral design that our cake was wrapped in! It was another creative challenge for me to create a wrap that could be seamless enough to go around the bottom tier of our cake. I started by free handing in watercolor but found I was altering it too much in Photoshop. I then went out and bought some stencils and tried my hand in mapping out the design with stencils and rulers.

My Favorite Part

Seeing everything come together for one special day was a really amazing feeling. It is a similar feeling to curating your first solo show. You have been working on the pieces individually and it is the first time you see it all together, professionally hung, framed and lighted. There were so many times that I was afraid that we not only wouldn't be able to get married this year, but that we wouldn't be able to use anything that I had put so much time and love into. Thankfully we found a way and I could not imagine having my wedding any other day, in any other year or place to any other man. In a word it was a perfect day spent celebrating our love for each other and for creativity.

Our Vendors

A special thank you to all of our amazing vendors who worked tirelessly to help us have our wedding this year in a truly difficult time. We would highly recommend all of them and would encourage anyone to reach our to them for their own wedding or special event.

Officiant: Pastor Bryan Allen

Photographer: Brian Vangor

Limo Service: PMV Limo

Florist: Cooke's Little Shop of Flowers

Ceremony Venue: The Chapel Restoration

Reception Venue and Lodging: Bethany Arts Community

Catering: Kurzhals Coffee

Want to see More?

I have more photos and videos in my bridal Instagram account here or @theartistbride