Jacob and I really wanted to have a wedding that was very personal, intimate and all about the joining of two families. The idea of a destination wedding where we could spend quality time with our friends and family for a whole weekend seemed just about perfect.  With both our families from Oregon, and the fact that I own a wedding shop in Portland (which would have made choosing vendors nearly impossible), we decided to head south to Ojai, California and bring our friends and family with us.

Once we decided to have a destination wedding, Ojai, became the obvious choice. The town has special meaning to my family as my Great-grandma lived there for most of her life, and currently my Grandma lives in Ojai.  The Ojai Valley Inn was the perfect backdrop for the ceremony, reception and the wedding weekend.  We could not have been more excited to spend this amazing weekend in such a gorgeous location.

I am named after a bird and my brothers and sisters all have bird names as well, so it was no surprise that we went with a “love birds” theme.  We wanted our wedding to be very “us”.  We wanted our guests to think, that is so Petrel and Jacob! After deciding the look would be a love affair between Anthropologie and J.crew, where romance meets vintage, the colors became shades of gray, peach, pinks and ivory. I actually saw a blog post of a photo shoot on SMP and it all clicked – the photos were exactly what I was envisioning but had been having a hard time describing it! Once I realized that the florist, Lauryl Lane, from the photo shoot was from California (how lucky is that!?), I decided it was a match made in heaven and hoped she would be able to do the flowers for my wedding. Lucky for us, she was available, and the flowers and colors fell into place.

Making our wedding personal was really important to us so we decided to tackle quite a few projects. My mom decided to sew the flower girl dresses, the runners, the welcome bags, and pillows for the reception (my mom was amazing and probably went to the fabric store 25 times during our engagement to make all these projects).  For the reception, we decided on one long family style table to make it more intimate, and we brought our family’s china to use at the reception for the chargers.  Even though I think many people thought I was crazy to pack up and bring the china from Oregon to CA,  it was an idea that just seemed too wonderful to pass up.   We made the sign above the cake,  our friends made the pottery cake stand, my bridesmaids (my sisters and girlfriends since first grade) helped put together the favors, and Jacob and I created our own playlists for the cocktail hour, dinner and dancing.

The stationery part was easy because I own a boutique in Portland called The Wedding Cottage, and we specialize in invitations and accessories! We were able to get our invitations, menus, placecards, napkins, and gifts from my store which made it even more special and personal.  We designed a love birds themed letterpress invitation and a postcard RSVP, which was in mad-libs style! It was so much fun to read what everyone had written that we decided to frame everyone’s rsvp cards at our reception on a refurbished window frame.

For the ceremony we had Jacob’s brother officiate and we incorporated a poem that my dad had written to us into the ceremony.  Jacob and I wrote our own vows, and then included the guests into the ceremony by giving them two hershey kisses inside of a paper maiched egg (my mom actually paper maiched each individual egg, she really was amazing!) One hershey kiss we all ate together right there at the ceremony to enjoy “the sweetness of the day”, the other kiss was actually made out of pewter (made by my parents who are pewtersmiths).  We told our guests to hold onto the pewter kiss, and if there is ever a time in the future where Jacob and I started to forget how happy we were on this day, they should give us this kiss and it will remind us how in love we are.

With an amazing ceremony filled with laughter and tears, yummy cocktails and appetizers,  a plated dinner under the stars, fantastic toasts by our sisters, and lots of dancing and cake,  we couldn’t have asked for a more magical evening. We definitely had the love and energy of family and friends behind us, and couldn’t have done it without them.  The best part of it all though, was that I got to marry Jacob!