While it may have taken us a while to pick a date and choose a venue, there was one thing that Scott and I knew from the start about our nuptials: we wanted it to be a travel themed wedding.
Travel has played such a big part in our relationship that it simply had to be a major part of our special day. Heck, I even considered an Around the World in 80 Days hen party. So in the months leading up to the wedding, we spent hours scanning the internet and finally settled on a few travel themed wedding ideas to incorporate, and while we didn’t go with every single idea we saw, here are some of the ones we did use.
Postcard Perfect
We make it a point to pick up postcards when we travel, mailing some off to family and friends and keeping others as souvenirs, so we wanted to incorporate them in the wedding somehow. We didn’t want to just use any old postcards though, we wanted some with a retro romantic flair. We ended up finding dozens of vintage postcards on Zazzle, many of which were reproductions of old travel posters. We purchased around two dozen from places we had visited together, most in soft pastel colours (which matched our theme), and then after acquiring some great vintage wedding tables for rent, spread the postcards out all over them.
In addition, we used postcards from the country pub and inn we got married at as our wedding invitations, which were dirt cheap and on-theme.
Worldly Confetti
We knew we wanted to cover our dinner table in confetti, and so I made my own using tissue paper in colours of pastel pink and purple. To add a travel element to the confetti, I found a vendor on Etsy who makes heart-shaped confetti out of old maps. The sea green colour of many of the hearts added a wonderful hue to the table, and we even encouraged guests to take handful of the confetti home with them.
Photo credit: Stacie/Flickr
Global Glow
We have both always had a special affection for globes, and wanted at least a couple of them dotted around the room to hammer home the travel wedding theme. We searched high and low in local vintage shops and called companies that specialize in antique party rentals until we found a few cool globes and vintage tables to display them on. And to have a little fun with things, we even picked up a couple cheap light-up globes that we flicked on when the lights went down at night.
Multinational Bunting
Even though we got married in February, we wanted to take our guests away to a summer garden party. We accomplished this by hanging both bulbous ‘Italian-style’ outdoor lights inside the venue and strands of traditional British summer garden party bunting – with a twist. Our special bunting alternated between triangles with the Union Jack and those with the Stars & Stripes, to truly reflect both our nationalities.
Suit-Cake
When we lived in Amsterdam, we managed to amass a collection of vintage suitcases, and two of the smaller ones made the move to the UK with us. Since one is covered on all sides with cool retro travel stickers, we knew we had to use it at the wedding, but it didn’t occur to us how until the last minute. Being that our cake was covered in hundreds of sugar crystal beads (and reminiscent of the Jazz Age pearl necklaces), we decided to present the cake inside the opened suitcase, and it turned out fantastic!
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