Haiku Mill Wedding by Tamiz Photography

"I grew up on Maui and Andrew loved the island when he came to visit (he loved being able to go to the beach and go bodysurfing everyday, but who wouldn't) so deciding to get married on Maui was easy. From there, I knew I really wanted to show our guests who came from the mainland a side of Hawaii that most visitors don't get to see so we choose to get married at Haiku Mill, which is in the wet, jungle rainforest part of the island, rather than on the beach. It's an former sugar mill with an open roof that is overgrown with local greenery and flowers, you hardly have to do anything to make it a beautiful space. Our theme was vintage Hawaii, which to me meant the 50s, when Hawaii was on the cusp of statehood and tourists were just starting to think about it as a vacation destination. For our escort cards, we used luggage tags with 50s airline ads for Hawaii on them and for our guest book, we asked people to sign vintage postcards and mail them to us, which was really great because we were still receiving notes about our wedding months later. Andrew wore a maile lei, which is a traditional lei for guys for special occasions. We kept our wedding really small, just over 50 people, and we loved that we got a chance to talk and dance with everyone who came. Andrew and I were a bit nervous about our first dance so we invited everyone to join us on the dance floor after a minute or two. One of my favorite parts was getting everybody up on the dance floor, including my 93-year-old grandma. Another favorite moment was cutting our cake, a few weeks before the wedding, my mom convinced my dad, who has been baking delicious cakes for our family for years but had never attempted anything on the scale of a wedding cake, to make our wedding cake using all our favorite flavors, including lilikoi (passion fruit in Hawaiian)." -Bride and Groom

Photo credit: Tamiz Photography