Love At The Ranch: Love at The Ranch: Reception Details

Our cocktail hour, after our ceremony, was supposed to be outside on the reception barn's beautiful deck. It was even dotted with heaters should it be cold. But there was nothing out there to protect from the howling winds and driving rain that started immediately after we said "I do." Instead, all of our guests made their way into our reception barn, margarita in-hand. Here are the details they saw.

Our centerpieces:

Each table had three jars of different heights with flowers in them. They also had three more jars with candles in them, plus one ceramic candleholder. I collected the jars and candleholders from garage sales in the year before our wedding.

Here are a couple of my favorite little vintage bottles I found:

Our table cards were purchased from Etsy seller Seasonal Delights. She was fabulous to work with and had really quick turnaround--which I needed, between getting our head count (to know how many tables we had) and our wedding. The wrought iron holders are from Pottery Barn and the wooden stumps were made by my dad from trees in his yard in California.

Instead of table numbers, we used 10 different pictures of horses--each table had one of the images.

As guests walked in, they found the table full of horseshoes, which also held their escort cards. The horseshoes were given to me by a co-worker (but didn't make it to the wedding without a good scrubbing as they were used!).

The escort cards were gift tags that had each guest's name on one side and the image of his or her table's horse on the other. They were tied to the horseshoes with organza ribbon. Seasonal Delights, from Etsy, made these for us as well.

Next to the horseshoes was our birdcage which was our card holder. It was also where guests were instructed to put their postcard--which we used in lieu of a guestbook--once they were done signing well wishes to us.

The birdcage was purchased at a garage sale. And the horse postcards were bought from ebay.

Each seat had a napkin made from vintage fabric. I bought the fabric at local thrift stores (the fabric actually came from bed sheets and pillow cases) and then washed it. After washing, I used pinking sheers to cut very rough rectangles. Believe me, these were no masterpieces but they added a cute amount of color to otherwise ivory table clothes (which came with our venue). You can see them laid out in the first picture. The napkins were actually set up opposite of the picture below, meaning colorful laid out on the bottom with a rolled up ivory napkin on top.

Here's one of my favorite things we decided to add to our reception at the last minute. A photo booth! I can't show you the actual booth yet (because it deserves its own post!), but here's a sign we made on a chalkboard (from Hobby Lobby) to accompany the booth. The chalkboard was actually pretty low quality and was hard to write on, so I would recommend going with one that's already broken in. That said, people got really creative with it and we could read all of their message so I guess it wasn't so bad.

And the chalk:

Drool worthy! Our pie bar was a huge hit! Such a huge hit that it also deserves its own post. But here's a preview:

Photo by Amanda Wilson

One of my bridesmaids happens to have adorable writing. She chalked our drink menu (below) and even got crafty recycling some fake flowers from an earlier gift. This sign sat on the bar.

The last project I pulled together was a clothesline of pictures. While most couples use pictures from their relationship, we decided to do something a little different. We put up pictures of us with our guests throughout the years. People loved looking at their little piece of history with us.

The cocktail hour was a great way to ease into dinner, with a few drinks in hand to celebrate. We spent half of it taking family pictures in the ceremony barn. When we were done, there was a funny effort to make a receiving line for us, but it didn't quite work. People had picked up a few of the scattered rose petals from the ceremony site but that totaled about 10 rose petals, so as you can imagine it was fairly anticlimactic. But still cute.