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12 years ago I met a boy in a library. Early on we discovered that outside of the stacks we loved to travel together. Over the years he’s uncomplainingly put up with my habit of squeezing in book inspired destinations into our travels and has become my helpful, if slightly suffering, “instagram boyfriend”. So it came as a surprise to nobody when we finally decided to get married that we wanted to have a destination wedding in a storybook setting. We were the ones surprised that friends and family enthusiastically said YES to joining us in Prince Edward Island, the home of Anne of Green Gables and her author L. M. Montgomery!
We visited the island first in 2016 so that I could visit all the Anne and L. M. Montgomery museums and see for myself if the island really is as pretty as Montgomery’s famous novel makes it sound. It is. Anne’s “Lake of Shining Waters” really does sparkle in the sun! And the red roads and cliffs are really as vibrantly copper-red as described.
Doing my best impression of Anne looking out over the red cliffs of her adopted island home.We spent two days visiting all the Montgomery museums available, but after that we spent the next three days just exploring the rest of the island together with no itinerary. And we just fell in love with the place. We drove red dirt roads, stopped in small backyard craft shops, picnicked on the beach, ate fresh seafood and PEI Potatoes every day, enjoyed meeting locals who were all as friendly as Canadians are stereotyped to be, and just felt the everyday weight on our shoulders lift for these few brief days. It truly felt like this island was straight out of a storybook. Montgomery had no need to embellish.
Plan your own Anne of Green Gables vacation with this post.
There was something about the red dirt roads, grassy bluffs overlooking red sand cliffs, and the views of farm fields rolling off into the distance towards shining blue waters that I couldn’t get out of my head. I wanted to take wedding photos with this backdrop, just like Anne and Gilbert. I wanted to bring my closest girlfriends here, just like Anne had Diana. So now years later, when we were struggling to come up with a wedding venue that excited us, I hesitantly suggested PEI as a wedding destination, knowing it sounded like I just wanted to live out an Anne of Green Gables fantasy. But it turns out my husband-to-be and all our friends and family are also Kindred Spirits and were equally as enthusiastic to celebrate our new life chapter in a place that’s just so meant for starting stories!
Ready for a lifetime of red dirt road rambles with you! [Photo by Caley Joy Photography]Our Community of Kindred Spirits
“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― Anne of Green Gables
[Photo by Caley Joy Photography, edited by me to obscure child faces.]With our parents, Rabbi, and a small group of guests on board, we hired Kristina of Elysian Wedding and Events, a local PEI wedding planner, to help us plan not just a wedding, but an unforgettable experience for us and our guests.
Book the Date
Our guests’ “experience” started before the actual trip with our Save the Date notices. Having less than 30 guests, we had already secured RSVPs by phone, so for each confirmed set of guests we wrote a hand-printed, personalized note inside a copy of a Bantam Books Special Collector’s Edition of Anne of Green Gables and placed a customized “You’re Booked” bookmark. To ensure the save-the-date bookmarks didn’t fall out, I wrapped each book in a ribbon and then we sent our unusually large save the date notices in boxes filled with paper confetti. Now our guests could read the book the island is famous for, or at the very least, bring the book to PEI to take photos with it in front of Green Gables, the house that looks exactly like the one on the book cover.
Click on the photos to view full size!
Purchase the Bantam Books Special Collector’s Edition Anne of Green Gables from Amazon.
Or, buy the entire Collectors Edition box set, books 1-8 from Bookshop.
Save-the-date bookmarks from Etsy shop RaspberryCreative.
Raspberry Cordial Welcome Gifts
Oh, raspberry cordial, right? Oh, that’s my favorite.
― Anne of Green Gables
My fiancé and I arrived a week early in PEI for a few reasons. One was to let ourselves adjust to the time change so we weren’t jetlagged while entertaining our guests. Another was to give ourselves time to do some sightseeing. I wanted, among other things, to visit yet another L. M. Montgomery museum. But the real reason for arriving early was to spend a couple days collecting goodies from some of our favorite shops to put together welcome bags for our guests.
Thanks to the famous scene in Anne of Green Gables in which Anne and Diana have a tea party and Anne thinks she’s served Diana Raspberry Cordial, raspberry cordial is a popular scent and flavor on PEI. We included
- Raspberry cordial smelling soap from South Shore Soaps
- Raspberry Cordial soda, Anne Chocolates, and Cow Chips from Cows
- Raspberry/blueberry/champagne flavored jam from the PEI Preserve Co
- And a small bottle of Ocean Pearl Vodka from Deep Roots Distillery (Tip: the soda might be better mixed…)
After collecting all the goodies, we put together our Raspberry Cordial smelling welcome gift bags (thanks to the soaps!) and had them waiting on beds for our guests to arrive.
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Matthew’s Horse-Drawn Tractor Carriage Ride
In lieu of a bachelorette party, I planned a girls carriage ride. The Anne of Green Gables Museum runs four-person horse-drawn carriage rides which they call “Matthew’s Carriage Rides.” Matthew of course being a nod to the book character who picks Anne up from the station upon her arrival and convinces his sister to keep the little orphan girl. While I had pictured my girlfriends and I in summer dresses and holding large floppy brimmed hats on our heads as we clip-clopped along a red country road… Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. The road conditions weren’t good for the horse, so instead we ended up being pulled by a tractor. And instead of summer dresses, we were bundled up in our Alaska layers with blankets covering our legs. Despite the cold, we still had an entertaining ride that took us by Anne’s Lake of Shining Waters, past farm fields, and to a beach where we quickly snapped a few photos then hurried back to the warmth of the blankets.
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Our Blue Castle
“[…] she knew perfectly well that no spot or palace or home in the world could ever possess the sorcery of her Blue Castle.”
― The Blue Castle
L. M. Montgomery’s “Blue Castle” (not from Anne of Green Gables, but The Blue Castle) is a metaphor for one’s happy place, and our “happy place” is Riverbend Airbnb, a four-bedroom, two-story little house that was the perfect place to stay with our wedding party. The house has a lovely backyard with a lawn, a firepit, and a lazy river running by. It’s also right across the street from the Farmhouse Inn, the first B&B we stayed in when we first visited the island. Between the house and the Inn we managed to house all our guests. It was a lovely spot, as the buildings in the area are few and far between and our party’s voices were only carrying towards surrounding farm fields. As the house looks so unassuming, I asked our wedding planner to help me print a banner that would help guests recognize they had found the right house. The banner read:
“Welcome Kindred Spirits to Our Blue Castle”
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Hand-Crafted Book Page Flowers
Although our planner was doing most of the wedding coordination work for us, I still wanted our wedding to feel personal to us, so I enlisted the aid of the more crafty guests to help me with hand-made details that we could cherish long after the wedding. One of my bridesmaids offered to knit the chuppah (canopy) cover for us! My Dad painted the art around our ketubah wording (Jewish marriage contract), and my Mom sewed the bag we would use to smash a glass. I and a few other guests made paper flowers out of book pages for the wedding reception decor.
Using a pattern I’d acquired years ago in order to make Alice in Wonderland tea party decor, I had cut out flower petals from an extra Anne of Green Gables copy that hadn’t been sent out as a save-the-date. (I’m pretty sure I whispered “I’m sorry!” to the book when I ripped out the first page to cut it up…) I packed the still-flat petals in my suitcase and then borrowed several glue guns from our wedding planner when I arrived in PEI. Thankfully Kristina is even more crafty than I am and had a set of glue guns I could borrow! Then the day before the wedding I asked those guests who felt inclined to get crafty to help me glue all the flowers together.
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A Photo Scavenger Hunt and a Hat with Braids
Of course not everyone wanted to craft flowers, so to encourage our guests to get out and explore the island on their own, I prepared a photo scavenger hunt. Our guests were given 10 items to find and take photos with and a link to a shared Google Photos album where they could share photos of the wedding week. One of the items on the list was an Anne hat with braids, something that can be found in many tourist shops on the island, but the guests that came by our Airbnb found our photo booth…
Click on the photos to view full size!
The Venue: The Montgomery’s Former Carriage House
While Kristina did tell us that some couples select their wedding venue based on photos online and never see the place in person before the big day, we were able to visit the island for an in-person three-venue tour the summer before.
The first location we toured was a beautifully renovated and whitewashed barn with an outdoor ceremony space. It was near where we would be staying, and it was nearly across the street from the birth house of L. M. Montgomery. After touring the other two locations, we ultimately decided that the New London Carriage House was our favorite and absolutely perfect for our needs. And it didn’t hurt that it was also the place where the Montgomery family at one point stored their carriage!
Also, I’d like to note that between the time that we toured the venue and our wedding, Hurricane Fiona struck the island and all the trees surrounding the outdoor ceremony space came down. So the Carriage House had to entirely renovate the space! Thus I had no idea what it looked like until I got there, and I could NOT have asked for a more beautiful space!
Click on the photos to view full size!
The Photoshoot with Quintessential PEI Scenery
“I’ve always heard that Prince Edward Island was the prettiest place in the world[…]”
― Anne of Green Gables
I have a confession… it wasn’t the book, but the 1985 Anne of Green Gables film adaptation that convinced me I had to visit PEI to see the scenery for myself. And of course, once there, I just fell in love with it. The red dirt roads, the red sand cliffs, the picturesque lighthouses, and the charming barns… just all of it. So here’s the obligatory photo shoot with my favorite scenery in the world.
Click on the photos to view full size!
The Dresses
“It would give me such a thrill, Marilla, just to wear a dress with puffed sleeves.”
― Anne of Green Gables
My dress did not have puffed sleeves. But my backup dress did! My dress was a saga, let me tell you. Juneau doesn’t have a dress shop with a pedestal and all that, so while visiting family in Maryland I decided to visit a dress shop, mostly for the experience of it. I found a dress, but the catch was that the shop took my measurements and would order a dress sized to the biggest measurement. The dress would then take 6 months to arrive and then I needed to find a seamstress. So six months later my dress arrived, but it was wayyy too big for me! Unfortunately the seamstress options in Juneau are limited, as in there’s only one wedding dress seamstress. And she told me the dress was too big to be fixed for less than it would cost to get a new dress!! At this point I had three months left, which was not enough time to find a new dress and hope I could get it fitted! So I contacted the original dress shop and they said that if I returned to Maryland their seamstress could fix the dress no problem! Somewhat doubtful, I flew back to Maryland to meet the seamstress. She fit me in on a Monday and by some magic, by Friday the dress was perfectly fitted to me!
Meanwhile, my doubtfulness had led me to order a simple white linen dress from a company on Etsy that makes dresses to your custom measurements. I wanted to make sure I had a backup dress just in case, and this has puffed sleeves! Luckily I did not end up needing the replacement dress, however, in a funny twist, my bridesmaids ended up both ordering their own custom fit dresses from the same company and in the same-puffed sleeve cut but different fabrics! So we were not without puffed sleeves for the wedding!
Puffed Sleeves! [Photo by Caley Joy Photography]
Us in our matching dresses after the wedding.The bridesmaid dresses come from Hearts and Found on Etsy, we chose the Loretta Dress with the Custom Sizing Add-On.
The Bouquet
This is kind of a funny story… One of the first things I ordered after getting engaged was my bouquet. It’s a customized paper flower arrangement made from the pages of Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams [Spoiler: the book in which Anne finally marries Gilbert!]. It was this bouquet that gave me the idea to make the rest of the paper flowers for the wedding.
I packed my bouquet very carefully inside a box in a suitcase, which I unfortunately had to check, so I prayed the flowers wouldn’t get squished in transit. Luckily the bouquet was quite alright when I unpacked it in PEI! I also managed to ensure it survived our wedding photoshoot before the ceremony, however it was when I arrived at the altar and turned to hand my bouquet to a bridesmaid, I realized it was not in my hand! I must have put it down somewhere sometime between the photoshoot and the ceremony! After all that care, it didn’t make it down the aisle with me! It was, however, waiting for me at the reception table after the ceremony, so our wedding planner must have found it and it has now safely returned home with me to my bookshelf.
The well-traveled paper-flower bouquet. [Photo by Caley Joy Photography]The bouquet comes from My Cotton Branch on Etsy.
Book Turned Ring Box
I wanted a book box instead of a pillow for our ceremony ring-bearer, so once again I turned to Etsy and once again found the perfect item! It’s an Anne of Green Gables book converted to a box! The pages have a heart shape cut through the middle. And I had no worries about our little ring bearer dropping the box and losing the rings because it has a ribbon bookmark which we used to tie the rings in and magnets that keep the cover clamped down.
[Cute photo of child omitted on purpose for privacy reasons, sorry.]
Click on the photos to view full size!
The book ring box comes from Book Rooks on Etsy.
The Reception: Raspberry Cordial & Book Page Flowers
“That’s awfully nice raspberry cordial, Anne,” she said. “I didn’t know raspberry cordial was so nice.”
― Anne of Green Gables
Although we put Raspberry Cordial sodas in our welcome bags, the truth is that neither my husband nor I actually like the sodas very much! You should definitely give them a try if you’re in PEI, but for our wedding reception we wanted to step it up. We asked our wedding planner if she could get the venue bar staff to come up with a raspberry cordial cocktail/mocktail that was better than the Cows soda. And boy did they deliver! Not only that, but they actually thanked us for not using the soda because they too thought what they came up with was better than the bottled soda!
Cheers! We did it! (I’m holding a delicious Raspberry Cordial mocktail.) [Photo by Caley Joy Photography]The Raspberry Cordial cocktail/mocktail was of course not the only raspberry flavored item on the reception menu! We requested raspberry filled cake and cupcakes for dessert. KGJ Bakeshop made us the best cupcakes I think I’ve ever had!
[Photo by Caley Joy Photography]Finally, whatever happened to those book page flowers? After gluing all the paper flowers together, and possibly a few of our fingers together too, I had handed the flowers off to Kristina and trusted that she would work them into her decor scheme. We had settled on having paper flowers, Lego flowers (for those that didn’t feel like paper crafting, but wanted to help make flowers), and a smattering of wild PEI lupin flowers hand-picked by Kristina the morning of the wedding. While I wasn’t sure how this odd-sounding combination would work in reality, in the end it was not only beautiful, but I loved that our decor was personally handcrafted by our Kindred Spirits. And all our guests were excited to take home paper flowers as souvenirs after the wedding!
Click on the photos to view full size!
A group trip to Orwell Corner Historic Village
We had our wedding on a Wednesday so we spent the rest of the week taking our guests on group day trips so we could spend time with them. Our first group trip was to Orwell Corner Historic Village, a historic village turned museum with a church, general store, school house, community hall, barn, and blacksmith shop. The employees dress in period clothing and talk to you in character. Orwell is also one of the filming locations for certain Anne of Green Gables, Road to Avonlea, and Emily of New Moon adaptations of Montgomery’s books. Our group participated in Orwell’s Farm, Forge, Fiddle Experience. We learned how to drive a draft horse, helped a blacksmith make an iron hook, and had a square dance in the village hall.
Click on the photos to view full size!
A Visit to Green Gables
Any visit to PEI would not be complete without a visit to Green Gables Heritage Place, so one of the days our guests had the option to visit Green Gables with the bride, or go deep sea fishing with the groom instead. I finally got to take my “Bosom Buddies,” as Anne would say, to Green Gables!
Click on the photos to view full size!
[Photo by Caley Joy Photography]Thank You, Kindred Spirits!
Absolutely none of this amazing experience would have happened if my VERY understanding husband hadn’t first said yes to the idea, along with my parents, his mom, our Rabbi (and his family!), our bridesmaids and groomsmen, all the rest of our Kindred Spirts, and last, but certainly not least of all, our wedding planner, Kristina, our photographers, Caley and her husband, and the rest of the PEI vendors we worked with! Kristina squeezed us into her already booked up summer, and Caley took us on as her last gig before she puts down the camera to focus on her other businesses! We were incredibly lucky everything just fell into place, and that the sun finally came out the morning of our wedding!
And finally, thank you L. M. Montgomery for sharing your special island with the world!
Abby says
This was delightful!
Annie Boochever says
Congratulations Sara!! So happy for you. Absolutely loved the pictures and your narration. Always enjoy your posts but this one was extra special. I think I recognized Sam in the family photo. Haven’t seen or heard from him in a very long time. Where is he now? How is he?
All the best to you and your new husband.
Annie (Ms. Boochever)
Linda says
Wow! A late congratulations to you both. You really put your heart & soul into having the wedding of your dreams. So happy you have a wonderful husband / friend to share those dreams. Congrats. And thank you for sharing.
Juliana says
Literally everything about your wedding looks like an absolute dream! Where did you get the miniature Green Gables sitting on top of your stack of Montgomery books in the picture of your Save the Date? I would love to have something like that!
A Suitcase Full of Books says
It really was a dream! The Green Gables miniature house came from one of the house museum gift shops on PEI. I love having little trinkets on my shelves that give me a visual hint as to what books are on that particular shelf without having to look at the titles.
Juliana says
Congratulations! 🙂 Thanks so much for the quick reply and for letting me know! I will have to keep an eye out for it on my next trip there. Me too! I have custom-made Anne and Gilbert Funko Pops on my Montgomery shelf 🙂 I’m looking for something to put in the middle of them, and the Green Gables mini house looks like exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for!
A Suitcase Full of Books says
You have custom made Anne and Gilbert Funko Pops?! I need some of those!
Juliana says
Yes! I found them on Etsy. I got my Gilbert one from FigurineItOutWithLes. I can’t seem to find the Anne one I got, so I’m not sure if that shop is still active. But it looks like there are some other ones on there!