Southern Weddings

Poms are a huge trend in weddings right now, and we are more than happy to hop on the bandwagon!  We love the way Katrina + Ryan interpreted the look, though, with their fun and innovative ceremony decor and round balls of bridesmaid bouquets.  Katrina’s dress was made by her aunt, Malou Castro-Leonio, in the Philippines and her veil from Something Bold, and we just love her too-cute blue shoes — so chic! More lovely images of Katrina + Ryan’s reception from Kim Le Photograpy coming up soon!

How did the two of you meet?  Tell us your story.  I worked as a Tax Auditor for the State of CA based in New York City. When I moved to a different department based in Los Angeles, I reconnected with Ryan, who also was living in L.A.  We’ve known of each other since the 1^st grade but really didn’t start hanging out till a few years ago. One thing led to another, and here we are!
Describe the proposal.  I am a mother of a then five-year-old. The holidays are really busy for me so we started to put up our Christmas tree pretty late (December 20^th).  Ryan was handing ornaments to my son, Sebastian, who then would hand them to me to hang on the tree.  When we were on our last two or three ornaments, I opened my hand out for the next ornament with my back turned and my son dropped the ring into the palm of my hand. I thought that it was one of those silver balls or a tiny shoe ornament, but when I opened my hand and saw the ring I started crying!  Ryan went down on his knee and proposed!  The funny thing was the entire time my now-husband was trying to propose, my son was asking me if I was okay because I was crying!

Three adjectives that describe the day are: Happy, relaxing and fun!
What was the design inspiration for your wedding invitation?  The outdoors.  Our venue was outside where there were lots of trees and plants.  Our invitation had a vine and a few branches of leaves.  We wanted the invite to show the relaxed theme of our wedding and didn’t want to set the tone with something too formal since we’re not like that at all.
What was your favorite design element of your big day?  I loved how we incorporated a lot of pinks and gray throughout the whole wedding.  My mother brought in shawls/pashminas from New York in different shades of pink and gray.  It was prefect since it became pretty chilly by 6:30 pm.  In lieu of traditional ceremony decorations for the aisle, we used tissue balls in various sizes and in white and two shades of pink for contrast.  It turned out to be really pretty!
Our favorite detail of the wedding was: The dedication video that my sister had made for us!  It made us realize how far we’ve come and reminded us that our friends and family all took time out of their busy schedule to contribute a little bit of themselves to help create the video!