Brick is the new backyard. Seriously, there have been so many industrial meets incredible weddings around here lately! This New York City urban lovefest from Allan Zepeda blends the romantic and metropolitan with chic, black linens, come hither romantic florals and all set against a phenomenal, architectural wonderland. The chic brick mania continues in the full wedding gallery. Just remember you heard it here first!
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Jeff is a writer and I’m a writer/editor, and we run an off-off-Broadway theater company here in NYC, so we are both very expressive, and we have a ton of amazing close friends who we were able to involve in the wedding. We wrote our own vows, used off-the-beaten-track readings with a lot of meaning to us (Hemmingway and Tom Robbins), hired a guitarist-cellist combo who played instrumental versions of our favorite songs and even arranged “our song” for me to walk down the aisle to, and used design elements that included typeface to reflect our love of the written word. My friend and bridesmaid Catherine (an award-winning book cover designer) created our invitations, my “maid” of honor Dave (who is a fantastic photographer) set up his camera and created an amazing time-lapse film of the wedding, and our wedding party and friends showed up early to decorate the venue. All of our guests (there were only 70) told us that we created an intimate, personal, beautiful day — which is exactly what we wanted.
We are producers, so we didn’t hire a wedding planner; we did it start to finish. My DIY projects included hand-sewing my veil (some of the material I used was from my mother’s wedding gown), making paper flowers for the hors d’oeuvres trays, creating combination favor boxes and escort cards, creating our “guest book” consisting of a big vase and cards along with a shadowbox sign asking guests to sign a card and drop it in, putting together displays of childhood photos for me and Jeff (replacing a slideshow), and making paper cut-out streamers to out of papers of different colors and typeface patterns (a play Jeff wrote, a book we love, etc.) to hang in the photo booth. (I can quickly create step-by-step instructions for these if you guys want them.) I also used Etsy a lot for projects I couldn’t do — from Etsy we got our bird boutonnieres, adorable cake topper, paper numbers which I glued onto cardstock for the table numbers, wooden typewriter keys I used for the escort cards, and Jeff’s custom-made cufflinks.
We used independent local vendors from Brooklyn, Queens and elsewhere around NYC who we fell in love with, and tried to stay far away from cookie-cutter wedding shops. My favorites were our florist (who created green, white, and black arrangements for us) and our DJ (who perfectly mixed indie rock in with pop favorites), but everyone else was incredible as well. I’m listing them all at the end of this email.
Wedding Photography: Allan Zepeda / Wedding Photography (Second Shooter): Judith Rae / Wedding Venue: The Foundry / Catering: Seasons Distinctive Catering / Florals: Rebecca Shepherd Floral Design / Musicians: NY Ceremony Music / DJ: Andy Anderson / Cake: Nine Cakes / Photobooth: Shootbooth / Bride’s hair: Jennifer Lusardi