New Feature: Polls
The Connecticut Wedding Blog has a new feature: user polls! We’ll be asking a variety of questions aimed at our brides and readers. Please feel free to chime in by voting on the featured poll, located in the right sidebar. A full list of currently running polls can be found on our poll archive page! If you’d like to suggest a poll, feel free to email me.
Chris Kattan & Sunshine Tutt: Chic and Eco-Friendly

Chris Kattan and model Sunshine Tutt were married on June 28th at Chateau Du Sureau. The couple added a lot of green elements to their daylong celebration, including driving to the ceremony in a hybrid car. “The entire menu was all grown organically and locally,” Sunshine said. “We tried to make sure that we did everything by the book to really make this wedding as eco-friendly and green as possible.” Success!
In addition to using local vendors and artisans (which I am a huge advocate of!), the couple gave each guest an environmentally friendly gift bag. The reusable totes were from My Bag Cares– a company that plants a tree in the United States for every bag purchased – and were filled with $1,505 worth of natural and organic health and beauty products. Now that is a wedding I’d love to be a guest at!
The wedding is featured in in Touch Magazine, but I wanted to share with you the beautiful pictures they’ve posted online. Everywhere you look there are beautiful hydrangeas in purple, blue and green. I love the chiffon green bridesmaid dresses with an empire waist and sash – they are so elegant, chic, timeless, and dare I say, you could wear them again! No word on the designer of the brides gown, but she exuded glamour in her mermaid style gown. Also enjoy the randomly gratuitous picture of Jimmy Fallon (who is, coincidentally, a married man himself now
)

Source
Brown & Green Bridal Shower: The Nitty Gritty
I love weddings and I equally love to plan smaller, more casual and intimate affairs. When our clients approached us with their décor ideas for a brown and green shower, we ran with it and really made every penny go as far as we could. With a little preparation, creativity, and persistence, you can come up with equally beautiful and affordable tablescapes for your next event. I wanted to share with you where we purchased all of our vases, crafting items & supplies. I also wanted to give you a step-by-step tutorial on how we pulled all these small details together which I’ll follow up with tomorrow.
But first, our shopping list:
8 chunky square votive candle holders
$1.97 ea, Wal-Mart
5 Tall, thin vases
$1 ea, The Dollar Store
3 Tall and chunky mosaic vases
$1 ea, The Dollar Store
4 round, traditional vases (not pictured)
1 ea, The Dollar Store
4 packages (two per pack) of 7 inch & 9 inch tissue “bells” (for the kitschy factor!)
$1 ea, The Dollar Store
6 packages of tissue paper in brown, green & hot pink (8 sheets per pack)
$2.29, Wal-Mart
3 packages of stick-on crystal embellishments
$2.29 ea, Martha Stewart Crafts
3 Rolls of ribbon (thick brown, brown/white polka dot, thin green)
$2.97 ea, Wal-Mart
1 Roll of cooking twine
Free, because we don’t cook!
80 stems of fresh assorted mini gerbera daisies
$79.80 (with overnight international shipping!) farmstogo.com
Grand Total: $135 (give or take some cents)
Items used but already owned by us:
Stampin’ Up! Engagement Stamp Set with rubber stamps and ink pads
Cardstock for tags
Hole puncher
Floral wire
Wire Cutter
Circular paper cutter
Fabric glue
Tealights
Not bad, right? The key to beautiful and affordable décor is to shop around for the best bargain. I recommend looking in the stores we’ve mentioned, plus places like Home Goods, The Christmas Tree Shops, Ocean State Job Lot, Big Lots, Marshalls, TJ Maxx, Target, Michaels, Joann Fabrics, and your local discount store. These are all wonderful resources and you can sometimes find the “find of a lifetime!”
Shopping for discounted flowers can also be really difficult. To be sure that you order the correct amount of flowers, do a trial run of your centerpiece beforehand. It’s always good to have some extra blooms on hand, as the shipping process tends to eliminate a few beauties from the bunch. Also, if you are ordering the flowers yourself, make sure they are delivered no more than two days before your event (unless otherwise specified by the floral company). You want to make sure that the flowers you’ve chosen are at the peak of their blooming cycle and are as fresh as can be (no one likes half-dead flowers!) If your floral budget is limited you can do what we did – tie the blooms together to mimic a bouquet. I think it’s just as elegant as a lush and full arrangement.
Tomorrow I’ll provide you with some tutorials on how to take all the ingredients we’ve purchased and turn them into our décor!
Part of the Brown & Green Shower series
- Brown & Green Bridal Shower
- Brown & Green Bridal Shower: The Nitty Gritty
Brown & Green Bridal Shower
This weekend I was super busy with an awesome event, where I got to really exercise my creativity and frugality for a relaxed and casual bridal shower. It was a lot of fun and we were able to do ALL the décor for under $200! Tomorrow I’ll give you the details on how we kept costs so low, and where you can get all these amazing items. Check out our pictures below, and be sure to click on the thumbnails for a larger version!
All the tables were adorned with a variety of chunky vases filled with white and yellow Gerbera Daisies that we hand wrapped in twine to give an elegant bouquet effect.
The yard was adorned with tissue paper “pom-poms” (or tissue flowers, if you prefer) that we hand made. They were all jeweled with small crystals for an added bit of bling, which ended up looking like dew on the petals! All the vessels were wrapped in ribbon in brown, brown & white polka dot, and green. We also made the brides monogram and incorperated it into the tablescapes with some twine and ribbon. I especially love the “mr. & mrs.” we created out of card stock and stamps from Stampin’ Up!
Part of the Brown & Green Shower series
- Brown & Green Bridal Shower
- Brown & Green Bridal Shower: The Nitty Gritty










