With the passing and celebration of our first anniversary recently, I wanted to wrap up the blog series of our wedding day with a final post detailing our reception. For lack of a better term, we envisioned a fancy house party for our reception. We wanted our guests to feel as though they had been welcomed in our home. An intimate gathering of friends and family - Formal but not stuffy. The house itself has a very traditional layout. Though it’s not small in its own right, th

Our first anniversary is this weekend which has me thinking back a lot to last year. Each day I find myself stopping to remember... "This time last year we were doing _____" (insert each day's pre-wedding activity) In continuation of blogging about our wedding, I wanted to share a bit about the ceremony. I should warn you, the ceremony is my absolute favorite part of a wedding. It's the whole reason for the day and was certainly something we put a lot of thought and preparati

I've been sharing stories from our wedding hoping to help walk those planning their own wedding through some of my processes and how we went about piecing our day together. Today's post addresses one of my favorite elements: Details. They are the small pieces of a couple's story, they share insights to the family heritage, and often, details can be the elements that took the most thought and time to choose. Our details told the story of our engagement in Paris, our formal set

I often tell my brides to keep their minds open when it comes to their wedding dress. You can be drawn to a certain style (pinning dozens of similar images on Pinterest) only to find that the silhouette isn't flattering on your body type. Alternately, the style you liked may look nice, but another, unforeseen style looks amazing on you. To all my clients present and future, Please do as I say, not as I do. I too had a certain dress in mind. I had pinned dozens upon dozens of

When Matt and I got engaged, I had just begun to work in the wedding industry. Although I love, LOVE weddings, I purposely hadn't dreamt up (i.e. pre-planned) our wedding before he popped the question. I’m not sure if it was to avoid jinxing myself or if I just wanted to save the actual process for the real deal. Either way, aside from a few “wouldn’t that be fun” ideas, we were starting from scratch once we were engaged. One such idea in particular was a wedding in Europe. W

Our wedding is exactly one month away. Eek! This year has flown by like a whirlwind. From what seemed like an eternity, now feels like it’s approaching at warp speed. Through the craziness of last minute wedding preparations, I’ve been allowing myself some time of reflection. I came to realize that there have been a few things I am so glad we did this past year. Here are the top five things I am happy we did during our engagement: 1. Have an Engagement Party As soon as we got

Well actually we're well underway. A lot has happened on this end. The notable short list including my own wedding is now less than 3 months away (this means I've needed to dedicate some time planning for it, something that has been tough to balance with a full time job and launching a company), which leads me to my second update, that I am now focused full time on Carina Van Son Weddings! It's been an incredibly exciting step, mixed in with some stress. Mainly, I feel a sens