I have such a treat for you to kick start this week! If you have been a follower or visitor of Chic Vintage Brides for some time, you may have glimpsed this gorgeous couple’s super sweet Ice-cream Parlour engagement shoot, and today I couldn’t be any more over the moon to be sharing their beautiful big day!…..

Samantha & Steven carried through their vintage theme from their engagement shoot, adding plenty of personality, DIY decor, and vintage details to their Summer wedding to create a celebration that is everything a wedding should be – a true reflection of them and their love. Now Samantha has been so kind to fill us in on so many wonderful details of their day, you won’t want to miss a word of it I promise, that I am just going to hand you straight over to her……..

“I was a lucky bride.  Everything ran completely smoothly on the wedding day.  Even the weather held out for our semi-outdoor wedding (it rained all week before and the next two days after the wedding – granted, I had a great yellow umbrella with a duck head handle that I would have been more than happy to pull out if need be!).  My dad ran point on the drinks table and made sure everyone had what they needed.  The whole event was essentially a bit family reunion and I like to think everyone had a great time.”

Whilst the day itself went without a hiccup, finding the perfect outfits for this stylish couple was no mean feat….

“We had a heck of a time finding a suit for Steven.  When we had first started wedding planning, we had come across a picture of a groom wearing a green suit and we were both like, “Oh! ♥”  After that, a green suit was all we could think of. When we told family members that Steven was going to have a green suit for the wedding, some people thought it was a weird choice….but we knew better.  Right from the get go we knew that it was the best way to show our style.

We searched all the suit companies to see if anyone was carrying anything in the shade we were looking for, but we kept coming up blank.  The only colour we could find was a deep olive brown sort of colour. It wasn’t until Steven had gotten a recommendation for a tailor when he needed to get a different suit fitted that we discovered Tam Custom Tailor Shop.

Tam, considered one of the best tailors in Winnipeg, uses classic techniques and while much of what he and his crew do is alterations, they can make you almost anything you can imagine…including a green suit for a wedding! It was a great experience, from start to finish, getting that custom suit made. Every time we went in for a new fitting, we couldn’t help but marvel at the transformation from the roll of fabric to a perfectly fitted suit.

Following the trend of trying to sneak as many bees into our wedding as possible, I managed to find Steven a bee tie clip from a vintage shop in the city.  I hadn’t been sure if he was going to like it when I bought it, but it ended up working perfectly!  Instead of a boutonniere we added another touch of vintage to Steven’s outfit.  We found a vintage daisy pin while we were going through a market.  It was actually the very first thing we bought for the wedding.  We had the pin before we had even set a date, ha!”

“I have never been a big makeup girl.  I like my lipsticks, can use mascara, and if the eyeliner is liquid and has a thin enough of a tip I can get by.  I likely will never master eyeshadow or master this thing call contouring, and my eyebrows will in all probability remain untouched.  I wasn’t about to go and change my complete style for a day that was meant to be as fun and relaxing as possible.  So instead of hiring a makeup artist or having someone do my makeup, I chose to do my own, and that consisted of the style that I like and felt comfortable in.  A nice line of eyeliner, mascara, and deep red lips.” 

“I was very excited to find out that there was a hair stylist in Winnipeg who specialized in vintage style hair.  I was quick to book Kelly O at the Sapphire Hair Lounge, and I could not be more happy with her.  I went in for a consultation to make sure that my short hair (of which I had already been growing out for nine months at that point) would be long enough for finger waves. 

I knew I wanted a wax flower crown for the wedding and set out searching online for one.  I ended up finding a beautiful, deadstock wax flower crown made in the 1930s in Germany – It had the original tags still on it! And I wore a pair of my Grandmother’s crystal earrings.  Even though you really can’t really see them under my hair, I still loved having them on.”

“While I may not have known exactly what I wanted, but I knew  what I didn’t want.  I had a long list of ‘not wants’.  ‘not strapless, not poofy, not a ball gown, not a mermaid style’… The list went on.  I had really wanted a vintage dress, but couldn’t find any in my city.  It was in the end of January, I was 90% committed to making my own wedding dress, when I figured I would try one more wedding dress shop.  It was a good thing I did.  After over trying close to fifty dresses between two provinces and eight different bridal shops, I finally found the dress I was looking for. 

My dress was the Mael by Aire Barcelona. It was perfect.  It was filled with tiny seed beads over the entire thing and yet it didn’t have what my mother would affectionately call ‘bling’ (another thing on the ‘not’ list).  It was flowy, it didn’t have a ton of cleavage, fitted in the waist, and had a deep low back.

A month after finding my dress, I also got a treat!  I found a satin bias cut dress from the 1930s at my local vintage shop.  The owner does more men’s clothing then ladies.  When I asked around about if he had any 1930s dresses, he pulled out a trunk from the back and let me go through them.  I ended up finding one that fit perfectly and had so many wonderful features.  He ended up giving me the dress because it needed a bit of mending.  I changed into it for the dance and it flowed so nicely.”

“My shoes called Gaby and were by Patricia Blanchet.  I had seen a picture of the shoes online and knew I had to find them.  After a bit of internet detectiving I managed to find out the brand and was quick to scope out if the French company would ship to Canada or not (long story short, they did!).  The shoes that I fell in love with were actually out of stock when I first went to the website.  I put myself on the ‘email me when back in stock’ list, but didn’t think that they would actually come in.  I was so excited when I got an email saying I could order them!  They were sparkly, unique, and I’ve loved wearing them both at the wedding, and any chance I get after.”

“My bridesmaids were all my sisters.  They are my favourite people and I couldn’t imagine sharing the day with anyone else.  All younger than me, ranging from three years to ten years younger than myself, I knew that one style of dress wasn’t going to work for everyone.  My suggestion for them…something yellow.  Much like the groomsmen, we very much wanted a sort of mix-match collection of people.  They all have different personalities and different styles and I wanted to showcase that.  Style wise I suggested that everyone trying to think of a soft vintagey feel.  

Our flower girl was my god daughter (whose grandmother is my godmother).  I made her dress by hand.  Cutting out the flower hem took forever!  She also had a little bouquet of matching baby daisies and had bee hair pins as well. When I was out getting groceries a month or so before the wedding I found gold sparkly shoes and was so excited!  They matched the colour of my shoes perfectly.”

“We got married at a lovely venue called Cielo’s Garden.  Steven and I were brand new to Winnipeg when we started wedding planning, so the initial searching was all done on the internet since we knew no one to give us recommendations.  We first picked out about five venues in/around the city that we thought might be nice and took one day to drive around and see them all.  Once we stepped foot onto Cielo’s Garden though, we could have probably stopped looking.  It was all we could talk about as we looked at the other places.  We wanted a place where all of our families could stay and hang out all day.  Since 90% of our guests had come in from out of province we didn’t want everyone leaving in between the wedding and the reception, and Cielo’s was a fantastic venue to spend all day in.”

“I made my own veil out of English silk netting that I had ordered online and thrifted lace off of an old 1980s wedding dress I found at a Goodwill.  It involved almost twenty hours of hand sewing to get the lace stitched onto the drop veil.”

“My dad walked me down the aisle.    I am the first one out of my siblings to get married. Like everything else with our wedding, it was filled with lots of laughs and smiles.  I remember the year before, when I turned 27, my mother had told me ‘Your father was married at your age’, to which my dad turned to me, grinned and said ‘27 isn’t that old’ with a wink.”

“We had two readings, one done by my aunt and the other done by Steven’s.  We wanted to involve as much family as we could.  We had a hard time finding readings that we like, but when we found them, well, they fit the mood of the wedding perfectly.

We also did a traditional Ukrainian hand fasting in our ceremony.  I was lucky enough to be able to an embroidered cloth (a rushnyk) that was my great grandmother’s.  My Aunty Rita found it while going through some things at my Grandma’s house and gifted it to us at the bridal shower.”

“Flowers were one of the things that we did on our own.  I had gotten friendly with a lady at my local farmer’s market who ran a fresh cut flower stall called Sweet Peas & Q’s  and had inquired if she would sell me bulk buckets of baby daisies and baby’s breath for the following year.  She was more than happy to oblige. 

In the end, we got three buckets of double white daisy, three buckets of double light yellow daisy, seven buckets of single white daisy, plus five buckets of Covent Garden baby’s breath and one bucket with a smattering of random yellow flowers such as marigold and billy balls to fit our colour palette.

We picked up the flowers the day before the wedding and drove them out to the venue.  My mum and sisters were real champs.  While I was running around getting everything sorted and organized, they created all of the lovely center pieces and bouquets.”

“The two groomsmen, friends of Steven’s from school must have thought we were a touch crazy.  We had one simple request for the two of them regarding their suits…to use one of their own that fitted well.  One had been messaging Steven asking what colour suit and shoes he should wear and Steven simply said to wear his best ones.  The groomsmen asked to speak to me, thinking that I would have a more clear idea as to what he should wear….I told him pretty much the same! We weren’t going to have a matching wedding party, that’s for sure.”

“One of the things we really loved about Cielo’s was how little we had to mess with it.  It is such a beautiful venue that there was little need for decorating.  Since we were getting married on a Friday, we were able to come the day before to start setting up.  My mum and sisters were complete rock stars with the step up.  We hauled box upon box of vintage china plates and tea cups all the way from Winnipeg.  My mum had a friend of hers show up and she did a lot of work doing the flowers for the tables.”

“Every single decoration at the wedding had been made or scavenged from thrift shops over the year by me.  I made hand embroidered table numbers (even though we didn’t have a seating plan, I thought it would help people remember which table they were at).

We used the same flowers as we did for the bouquets for the reception.  Lots of baby daisies and baby’s breath everywhere!  I love the look of all the dainty little flowers.

I also found a guy through kijiji who was selling a sheath of wheat a week before the wedding (I had been searching all year and had been unable to find anything).  I grew up in a rural farming community and wanted to add a little of that to our wedding as well.”

“For the favours I ordered a huge tub of honey from one of the local Mennonite farm. After that I separated the honey into different jars and started to infuse it.  In the end I made five different batches: rose, chamomile, chili, cardomon+ginger, plus one set of non-infused local wildflower honey. 

After they had been setting for over a week, I put all of the honey into the little jars I had ordered nearly six months before.  I had my friends Meiyan and Jessica come over one day to help finish off the jars.  Meiyan helped me put on the little yellow fabric squares on top and tie them on with twine, while Jessica (who had infinitely nicer handwriting than I could ever manage) was nice enough to write the type of honey it was on a tag. I also stamped all of the little paper tags with a custom stamp I made that read: ‘So happy you could bee here’.”

“We technically had three cakes, but one of them was a traditional Ukrainian braided bread (Korovai) – that you don’t actually eat. The other two cakes were made by myself and my family.  My mum and I made the Carrot Cake (which is the favourite of myself, my husband, and my dad) and my sister decorated it the day of the wedding with the icing and walnuts. The second cake (in case people didn’t want carrot cake) was a buttermilk cake with rhubarb buttercream.  Both cakes were three layers and we decorated them pretty minimally.”

“The wedding topper (which we love…and everyone else was kind of like ‘why?’ ha!), is a set of felted animals by Facci Designs: a fox for him and an otter for me.  I spotted them on Etsy by chance when I was looking for vintage wax flower crowns and knew we needed to have a set.  Thankfully, Steven and I both love things like this and he thought it was a great idea.  They, colloquial called ‘Hubby and Wifey’, now sit out on our bookcase – hopefully out of reach of our cat!”

Pearls of wedding wisdom from the bride…

“Do some of the creating by hand!  I love that I had so many hand made or things that were 100% unique to our wedding.  Sure, it was a lot more work, but I wouldn’t have traded the many, many (many) hours it took to do things by myself.  I now have an heirloom veil that I toiled over, embroidered numbers that I have hanging off of my wall with my collection of framed needlepoint, and tea cups that say ‘bride’, and every time I see those things I worked so hard on it brings me back to our wedding and that always brings a smile to my face.”

Tell us a little bit about your photographer…

“We could not have asked for nicer photographers! Madalena and Marcelo of Sambajoy made the whole experience so personal and the pictures are all so unique – we could not be happier.

We had been going through tons of photographers websites trying to pick out someone, and then I stumbled upon the Sambajoy website.  After a quick meeting, with them and their CEO (the cutest pug ever), we knew that we wanted them for out wedding.  Luck was on our side, because they were available that day.  We didn’t know at the time, but luck had definitely been on our side.  A few months after our engagement pictures were taken, Mada and Marcelo moved from Winnipeg to Vancouver!  I still can’t believe that if we had tried to book our photographers at a later date we might have missed them entirely!  They flew back for our wedding, and I can’t stop raving about how beautiful the pictures are.

We were a little nervous (both Steven and I are notoriously bad at having our pictures taken), but they produced such amazing pictures I still can’t believe them!  I am so happy that they did our engagement shoot as well.  It was the first time either of us had had professional pictures taken.  I still can’t help but smile at our cute shoot at the ice cream parlor. The wedding was no different.  They took great care in every picture that they took and created some beautiful unique shots for us.”

Don’t you just love it? Especially their felt wedding cake toppers!!! Many congratulations to the happy couple Samantha & Steven, and special thanks to their lovely photographers Madalena and Marcelo of Sambajoy who did the most wonderful job of capturing their unique style, beautiful smiles, and DIY details of their day. If you would like to see more of their wonderful work, do head over to their website sambajoy.com and you can find and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.

Amy

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Contributors & Credits

Photography ~ Sambajoy // Venue ~ Cielo’s Garden // Wedding Dress ~ Mael by Aire Barcelona // Bridal Shoes ~ Gaby by Patricia Blanchet // Veil ~ DIY by the Bride // Hair ~ Kelly O at the Sapphire Hair Lounge // Makeup ~ DIY by the Bride // Flowers ~ Sweet Peas & Q’s  // Floral Design ~ DIY by the Bride & her Family // Groom’s Suit ~ Tam Custom Tailor Shop // Groomsmen’s Attire ~ Their Own // Flower Girl Dress ~ DIY by the Bride // Wedding Cake ~ DIY by the Bride // Felted Wedding Cake Toppers ~ Facci Designs on Etsy // Favours  ~ DIY by the Bride