Locally Grown Weddings Goes from SF Division Champs to BEST OF THE BAY!

Last night the Locally Grown Weddings (LGW) team competed against the top event planners in the Bay Area and came out on TOP! The competition was fierce with several beautiful designs. However, our personal take of an intimate union among family and friends captured the attention of the celebrity judge Diann Valentine.

When asked what she thought of the victory, Aurora Meneghello - official photographer for LGW, said, "The best part is that the judge chose our table for all the right reasons: she really got it. Before awarding us the prize, she said that a woman in love would want to see family and her own unique story represented at her wedding. Later she told us that our table really stood out. She liked the green, the personal, the family and the story elements of our table. We did it! We won because we followed our mission statement, stayed true to our values and made it about the client and not ourselves."

Photographs were taken on the red carpet where LGW's event planner Sadie Waddington was able to chat briefly with Valentine and gleaned a few words of advice from this well known and hugely successful event planner. "Don't go with the latest trend," Valentine said, "make sure to listen to your clients and your design will reflect their unique style each time."

Click here to view images of our winning table!

Look for the LGW team in Mocha Bride and Bride Nine throughout 2011! 

(Click here to find your copy)

Locally Grown Weddings Wins SF Division for Bay Bella Best of the Bay 2010!

Our Locally Grown Weddings team took on the challenge to design a unique, elegant meets rustic, table top display for the Bay Bella Best of the Bay 2010 contest. Being that we are all really hip on protecting our environment and focus on eco-friendly events, we put our creative brains together to come up with a design that was both personal and kind to our planet.

We started off by developing a theme for the table; we wanted to be able to tell a story through our décor. Two families coming together through the union of a wedding; this led us to the idea of a family tree. We worked with Bloomies flowers to design a textured center piece to represent our family tree, and hung photographs of captured moments in our couple’s lives from its curly willow branches. Locally Grown Wedding’s photographer Aurora Meneghello included some of her own photography from an engagement shoot to bring the couple’s history to the present.

Now it was time to really get to know our guests. The design team of Cherish SF, Locally Grown Wedding’s Invitation and printing team, took on the place cards, favor tags, and menu design. They added details about each family member seated at the head table, from allergies to the number of pets they own. Little details that are passed down from generation to generation.

We wanted to bring in an organic, almost rustic feel to the design, so when Chef Stephanie turned up with two beautiful sustainable wooden boards to display specially selected local cheeses and breads, the tone was set. Cherish then found the perfect design for our menus. They printed Chef Stephanie’s carefully selected local and seasonal feast onto a finely cut piece of refurbished wood.

The organic feel was starting to meld with the elegance of the design, but we were missing certain warmth that fall colors often bring. We captured this in by neatly folding rusty-red colored napkins at each of the six place settings and placing a few fallen leaves in the fold of the cloth to connect the “tree” to the table. Chef Stephanie added chestnut to the base of the centerpiece and Cherish used ribbon formed from recycled aluminum cans to hang the word “OAK” as the table name. 

Our group’s makeup artists and clothing designer, Angela LaFlamme, added a touch of flare by creating a clasp of feathers to draw the top layer of table linens up revealing a carefully selected sage green under layer. She also designed a vintage style veil for the bride, also including feathers all of which were reused from discarded New Orleans Mardi Grad masks.

Sadie Waddington, our event planner, headed up the project. She managed all our design meetings, recruiting partners who helped by supplying resources for our design, researched and sourced products we were missing and integrated the team’s ideas to form our final display.

Locally Grown Weddings would like to give a special thanks to Blue Water Party Rentals for supplying us with all our rental needs, from linens to chairs. We would also like to thank Bloomies for designing and supplying us with our table’s amazing center piece. Finally we would like to thank Three Bees Nursery, for providing us with the bulbs for our favors and Goodlight for the sustainable tea lights.

Click here to view more images of our winning table!
All photos by Aurora Meneghello, official photographer of Locally Grown Weddings

Learn more about Locally Grown Weddings here.