Our Travel-Themed Wedding

In July of 2017 we had a small wedding at a local inn.  In the months leading up to the wedding, I spent a lot of time on Etsy and Pinterest in order to create our travel-themed wedding.  At the time, we had only been on a few trips together; however, we knew that travel was going to be an essential part of our lives, and we wanted to incorporate into our big day! Below I've shared a few details that helped pull our travel-themed wedding together without spending a lot of money.For the cake, we found two pictures online and emailed to the chef at the inn.  From there, we trusted him to do what he wanted. We like that the cake is simple, but still ties into the the travel theme with the airplanes.  The Eiffel Tower topper was purchased online since we were visiting Paris for 3 days during our honeymoon. 

Postcard Table Settings

We used vintage postcards for the table settings.  I was able to find them from European cities we had visited as well as National Parks.  I ordered two copies of each card and taped them together to create a double-sided place card.  Then, I named the tables based on the postcards I found. In addition to the postcards, I made paper flowers out of maps (pictured above).  I spent many days sitting on the floor in our living room with a hot glue gun, gluing together the different layers of the atlases in order to create these flowers.  If you're doing to try this, watch a couple YouTube videos, read a couple blogs, and then start with paper you don't care about. 

Paper Flower Bouquet

Once I mastered the paper flowers, I decided to get a little ambitious and made my own bouquet out of atlases. It's not perfect, but it was affordable.  For this, I made many small flowers.  To make them more attractive, I bought a bag of white pearls from a craft store (Michael's), and then glued everything on to a foam ball. For the base of the bouquet, I used another piece of foam and then wrapped it in a white satin.  

Seating Chart and Card Box

For the cards, we purchased the map box above from Etsy.  Again, this is something we still use as decor in our home. For the seating chart "map" we printed out a poster and then mounted it on foam board. The names of the poster match the postcards that we found online.  (For this step, it helps to marry a graphic designer who knows what he's doing with file sizes. :)) For each person's seating card, we had these paper airplanes customized on Etsy. These were the only things that we "tossed" or had people take with them.  Everything else from the wedding has been repurposed in our home. 

Ring Box

Another Etsy find, but you could easily make this ring box with $10-$15 with items from your local craft shop. (The phrase "the adventure begins" was also on our save the dates.)  We included a "warming of the rings" during the ceremony, and since our rings were handed down from Justin's great grandparents, we included photos of them in this box. Thanks for reading! We hope you found a little inspiration here if you're hoping to include the travel theme into an event.  There are many more details we did not include, but it's easy to find shower invitations and wedding invitations with travel themes as well.  In the end, we used Etsy, Vistaprint, and our own skills to complete the majority of our wedding details, which saved us a substantial amount of money! If you'd like more information about the Etsy shops we used or other sites that helped us, drop us a comment below!