My Beautiful, Budget-Friendly, Book (and Movie) Themed Wedding

Books have always been the perfect escape for me. Not only do I love the way you can travel to another world with just the turn of the page, but I consider the books themselves to be pieces of art. I’ve told my husband many times that I don’t need a giant house someday, just one room that has wall to wall bookshelves and a comfy chair. Heaven, right?!

When we started to plan our dream budget wedding, we both knew that books needed to be included for me and movies for the film school graduate I was marrying. Our amazing wedding planner Amanda took that idea and truly ran with it.

First things first was the venue. My husband, Charlie, and I are not traditional and knew we wanted a unique space. We found that with SmogShoppe (a smog testing center converted into an event space) in Culver City, CA. It had this stunning “living wall” AND a huge bookshelf!

Next up was the decor. Since the SmogShoppe was covered in cute little accents and succulents we didn’t want to have huge centerpieces. We weren’t doing a seating chart and place settings weren’t needed so we focused on little touches for the long tables. Amanda found lots of cute used books that worked with our colors and film reels.

For our guestbook we decided to get a blank leather-bound book, with a stamp on the cover that represented us (The ASU logo and the Harry Potter Deathly Hallows symbol combined). The first page read ‘Help us write the first book in our new library together.’ Our guests took polaroids of themselves, pasted them into the book and wrote us a note.

Finally, my husband surprised me with his Harry Potter inspired pin in place of a boutonniere. I grew up alongside the Harry Potter books and they mean the world to me. He even wrote ‘Always’ into his vows.

We wanted to keep things clean, simple and on a budget and I truly think we succeeded in doing just that (thanks Amanda!). I’ll leave you with a few photos of our non-book/movie touches.