Our sports wedding feature for this week comes from Melissa in Kentville, Nova Scotia. Melissa and her husband, Mike, planned and executed an incredible hockey themed wedding at their local ice rink, Kentville Centennial Arena. Their wedding was photographed by Dustin Hall of Dustin Hall Photography.
Let’s hear from the bride …
“Mike is a very laid back person and I knew he would leave most of the decisions up to me. It was important to me to have a wedding that represented the both of us and something we would both be excited about. It was then I knew that we had to get married at a hockey rink (it was after all how we met).”
Melissa included a number of DIY accents in their special day to help with their overall wedding budget.
“I knew in order to have the wedding we wanted for the budget we wanted that it would require at lot of DIYs on my part and a lot of help from family and friends. I consider myself to be pretty girly. I love anything frilly and flowery. I made a lot of decorations that consisted of a lot of flowers both made out of ribbon and paper. At first I wasn’t sure how I would combine the flowers with the hockey theme. Luckily, my mother-in-law has a friend who is a decorating genius. We brained stormed ideas and she helped make decorations and decorate our venues. The end result was something beyond what we were hoping for.”
“Some of my favorite details from the wedding were the bouquets I handmade. We didn’t use a single real flower in our wedding to help decrease cost. Mike and the groomsmen wore brooches for boutonnieres. We had two paper flower walls: One at the rink and one at our reception hall. We even decorated the penalty box door with paper flowers. This is where we signed our Marriage License. The rink featured a row of flower petals and pucks on each side of the aisle runner. The aisle runner stopped at center ice where we exchanged vows.”
“Our favorite part of the ceremony was when we walked down the aisle together at the end. We hid hockey sticks at the end of each row. Before we proceeded down the aisle, our guest held the sticks up in the air as if the y were swords. Our photographer (who is a hockey fanatic) suggested the idea and we had to make it happen.”
“At our reception, we had a guest book drop box. I saw this idea on Pinterest that had the guests signing wooden hearts and dropping them into a shadow box. I decided instead of hearts, we can spray paint wooden circles black and they could be hockey pucks. Other hockey details at our reception included our center pieces that consisted of handmade ribbon roses, a hockey puck under a wine glass, and tea lights in glitter painted baby jars on top of a mirror. Our cake had a groom hockey player with a bride cheering him on; something very accurate to our real lives. The flower wall at our ceremony was used as a photo booth and was a big hit with our guests. All the time and effort put into all the details were well worth it.”
