Silk & Shadows
About Silk & Shadows
Silk & Shadows started with two people who had absolutely no intention of building a typical wedding company.
We’re Ava and Sasha, a husband-and-wife team based in the Portland area, and together we plan, coordinate, style, decorate, troubleshoot and occasionally perform minor wedding-day miracles. Sasha is also an officiant, so depending on the wedding, you may find him running a rehearsal one minute and standing at the altar the next.
S&S offers Wedding Planning, Day-of Coordination, décor and styling, rentals, and officiating. Some couples bring us in from the beginning to help build the entire wedding. Others have happily planned everything themselves and just need someone to take the plans out of their hands when the wedding gets close, organize the moving pieces, manage the vendors and make sure they can actually enjoy the day they spent all that time planning.
We’ve coordinated weddings in ballrooms, gardens, historic buildings, restaurants, farms, private homes and empty fields where the entire venue had to arrive on trucks. We love the logistics just as much as the pretty things, and we’re very comfortable with weddings that have a lot of moving parts.
Visually, we have a soft spot for weddings with character. Dark and romantic, vintage, whimsical, colorful, gothic, elegant, wonderfully weird, or a mix that doesn’t fit neatly into any particular category. We don’t believe a wedding needs to look or feel a certain way just because it’s a wedding.
Mostly, we like getting to know our couples, figuring out what matters to them, and being the people they know they can hand things to when their wedding starts producing approximately 700 tiny decisions.
That’s Silk & Shadows. Two people, a lot of spreadsheets, a growing collection of beautiful things, and a genuine love for making weddings happen.
Services Offered
Silk & Shadows offers Wedding Planning, Day-of Coordination, officiating, décor and styling, and rentals. You can bring us in from the very beginning, hand us the reins when the wedding gets close, ask Sasha to marry you, let us make the place look beautiful, or combine a few of those things.
A Little About Our Pricing
We believe pricing shouldn’t be a mystery. Our services, what’s included, and current pricing are available right on our website, so you can take a look before ever contacting us. Since packages and pricing can change, please check the website for the most current information.
No “contact us for pricing,” no guessing whether we’re somewhere in your budget, and no awkward consultation just to find out what things cost.
Wedding Planning | $4,999
Our most hands-on package, for couples who want help from planning through wedding day. Includes budget creation and management, vendor sourcing and comparisons, contract review, deadlines and checklists, layouts and logistics, design and creative direction, key meetings and walkthroughs, ongoing planning support, and complete wedding-day coordination.
Day-of Coordination | $1,499
For couples who are planning the wedding themselves and want to hand everything over when the day gets close. We step in 4–6 weeks before the wedding to review your plans and vendor contracts, confirm vendors, create and refine the timeline, coordinate the rehearsal if requested, and manage the wedding day with two coordinators onsite, including setup oversight, vendor management, timeline execution, troubleshooting, and teardown supervision.
Wedding Officiating | $499
Includes a consultation, personalized ceremony script with up to two revisions, ceremony order and timeline planning, rehearsal support, performance of the ceremony, and filing the marriage license afterward.
Décor, Styling & Rentals | Custom Pricing
From individual rentals and finishing touches to full ceremony and reception styling. Depending on the project, this can include décor design, rental pieces, delivery, setup, styling, room transformations, and teardown. Pricing is based on the scope of each wedding.
Service Area
Portland is home, but we’re happy to travel. We serve couples throughout the Portland metro area, across Oregon and Washington, and beyond. If your wedding takes us somewhere new, even better. Travel fees may apply depending on location.
Additional Information
Ava and Sasha are very much a case of opposites making an excellent wedding team.
Sasha is the extrovert, the people person and the one who can make friends with pretty much anyone in five minutes. He coordinates, officiates, keeps people moving, solves problems on the fly and, quite literally, is a magician. Yes, an actual magician.
Ava is the planner behind the planner. She lives happily in the land of timelines, logistics, spreadsheets, systems and figuring out how 47 moving pieces are going to fit together before anyone else realizes there are 47 moving pieces. Around S&S, she has earned the title of Systems Queen.
Together, one of us is usually talking to people while the other is quietly making sure everything actually works.
And yes, we voluntarily work weddings together every weekend and are still married.
What Couples Are Saying
I hired Ava and Sasha on a whim after a Facebook flash sale post. All I knew at the time was that I wanted a day-of-coordinator to ensure that my bridal party could just show up and not worry about anything.What I realized on the rehearsal day is that they offer SO MUCH MORE than just coordinating. If I could go back and hire them again I would hire them for the full planning and design. They even do officiating!I was thoroughly impressed with Ava and Sasha and would recommend without any hesitation to help with your wedding. HIRE THEM!
Silk & Shadows were the day-of coordinators for my wedding and they absolutely crushed it. They nailed the decor setup, they coordinated with my vendors, queued up the important moments, and kept the whole procession of events on track. They were also so friendly and communicative along the way. The biggest gift you can give yourself for your wedding day is not having to think about the event logistics for a single second. S&S made that possible for me, I was able to simply celebrate and enjoy the day with no stress. I highly recommend them!
Working with Silk & Shadows was one of the best decisions we made for our wedding day. From our first conversation, we knew we were in good hands because they communicated with us constantly and answered every question we had along the way. They handled all of our music and vendor coordination so smoothly that we barely had to think about it, and on the day of the wedding, everything ran like clockwork. What really stood out was how kind and hardworking the team is—they genuinely cared about making sure we and our guests felt happy and taken care of. They went above and beyond in ways we didn’t even expect, and the whole experience felt effortless thanks to their dedication. We can’t recommend Silk & Shadows enough to any couple planning their wedding.
If you’re debating whether to hire a day-of coordinator, do it—and if you’re lucky enough to book these two, even better.
We hired them super last minute, only about a month before our wedding, because we originally weren’t planning on having a coordinator. Looking back, I honestly think our day would have been so much more hectic without them.
From the very beginning, they were incredible. They rearranged their schedule so they could be at our rehearsal, led everything with confidence, and made the whole process feel so much less overwhelming. During our venue walkthrough, they spent so much time talking through our vision, bouncing around ideas, and offering suggestions we never would have thought of. It was obvious they had so much experience and genuinely cared about making our day exactly what we wanted.
One thing that really stood out was how well they listened. They hung on to every detail we shared, wrote everything down, and made us feel heard. They never pushed their own vision—instead, they offered thoughtful advice while always keeping our priorities at the center of every conversation. It felt like such a breath of fresh air.
They’re also just wonderful people. As a husband-and-wife team, they worked so well together and were incredibly patient, supportive, calm, and kind throughout the entire process. Weddings are unpredictable, and of course a few things didn’t go perfectly, but none of that was because of them. They handled everything they could with professionalism and genuinely gave it their all.
Out of all of our vendors, they were honestly one of our favorites. If I could do it all over again, I would hire them again in a heartbeat—just much sooner. We can’t thank them enough for everything they did to help make our wedding day so special.
My wife Tabby and I are the kind of people who feel like we’re capable of doing just about anything so having a wedding planner didn’t even cross our mind at first. And we were smugly enjoying our choice until about six months out…when the wedding suddenly felt uncomfortably close, so we stowed our pride and started looking for help.
I can’t describe how lucky we were to find Silk & Shadows: not only did Ava and Sasha execute flawlessly, they understood that we wanted something a little weird and a little subversive, and they were right there with us.
They were funny, kind, efficient, and seemed to really care that this once-in-a-lifetime experience played out exactly how we envisioned. It almost felt like our wedding was being handled with assurance by our best friends. They rolled with all of our twisted ideas and sick jokes, and never made things weird or uncomfortable.
And let me tell you: they got things *done*. There’s a lot that goes into a wedding, and they had all the details on lock. They never left us hanging or confused, and they treated everyone with courtesy and respect.
All of the professionals that made our wedding great — the DJ, the caterers, the photographer, the venue staff — did a fine job. But Ava and Sasha felt like part of the wedding party, and I think that made all the difference.
Ten out of ten, no notes.
Get to Know Silk & Shadows
Born just 28 days apart on opposite sides of the planet, Ava above the Arctic Circle in the former USSR and Sasha within walking distance of a Southern California beach, it somehow took us about 40 years to find each other.
Ava grew up to be an analytical introvert, obsessive organizer and, eventually, the resident Systems Queen. Sasha took a slightly different route and became a performer, musician, actor and professional magician. He’s the extrovert and people person who can strike up a conversation with absolutely anyone. Ava is much happier behind the scenes figuring out the logistics, building the systems and making sure all the pieces actually fit together.
After about 25 years of independently wandering around the world, we finally crossed paths in the Pacific Northwest. A chance meeting turned into a love story, a marriage and, eventually, Silk & Shadows.
It turns out a magician and a systems-obsessed planner make a surprisingly effective wedding team.
Q&A
We’d both worked events for various companies over the years, and eventually realized that between Ava’s love of planning, systems and logistics and Sasha’s background in entertainment and working with people, we already had a pretty great foundation for doing this ourselves. The timing felt right, so we decided to branch out and build something of our own.
What’s kept us here is realizing just how well the business fits the two of us. We’re almost comically different in what we’re good at. Ava would happily spend an afternoon building a better system for something that already has a perfectly functional system. Sasha would happily spend that same afternoon talking to 47 strangers and leave knowing all of their life stories. Weddings need both. Somewhere between the spreadsheets, creative work, logistics, people management, problem solving and occasional chaos, we found an industry where being complete opposites is actually a business advantage.
Almost everything will take longer than you think, and that the little decisions are what eventually become overwhelming. Booking a venue and photographer is the easy part. It’s figuring out who is bringing the ice, when the florist can get into the building, whether the DJ needs a table, who is moving the ceremony chairs, where the leftover cake goes at 10 PM, and approximately 400 other tiny things nobody puts on the Pinterest checklist.
You don’t need to have all the answers when you start planning. You just need a good system for keeping track of the questions as they appear. And preferably someone other than the person getting married should be responsible for those questions on the actual wedding day.
Sasha is a professional magician. And not in the “he can magically make wedding problems disappear” way, although that happens too. An actual, performing magician. It’s usually not what people expect to discover about their wedding coordinator/officiant.
A great day at work is when the plan works, the couple is actually enjoying themselves, the vendors are happy, and we have just enough unexpected chaos to keep things interesting.
If Ava gets to solve a complicated logistical problem and Sasha gets to spend the day surrounded by people, we’re both pretty much in our natural habitat. And if we get home exhausted, laughing about something ridiculous that happened, and saying, “That was a really good wedding,” that’s a great day.
Don’t try to plan the entire wedding at once. Planning gets overwhelming when every unfinished decision starts feeling equally urgent, and suddenly choosing napkin colors somehow feels as important as booking a caterer.
Figure out what actually needs your attention now, make those decisions, and give yourself permission to ignore the rest until it’s their turn. A wedding is a long list of small decisions, not one enormous decision you have to make all at once.
We tend to click best with couples who are drawn to non-traditional, whimsical and interesting weddings. The ones with unusual venues, unexpected details, dramatic colors, vintage treasures, unconventional traditions, or ideas we haven’t seen before.
Perfectly traditional can be beautiful. We just get especially excited when a wedding has a little weirdness, a little magic, and a lot of personality.
At one of our weddings, the couple had llamas. Actual llamas, casually attending cocktail hour and mingling with the guests like this was a completely normal wedding activity.
We work a lot of non-traditional weddings, so we’ve learned not to be particularly surprised by anything anymore. Still, it’s hard to beat looking across a reception and seeing a llama in the middle of it.