Purple wedding details

While I was at home, just before Mom and I left on our road trip out to New York, I was able to grab a few pictures of wedding details I won't be seeing again for several months.

First...the shoes!

They are ridiculously shiny. And a real bargain - I got them off of eBay for something like $16. They were a pair of shoes that I knew I had to have, and at that price, even if I change my mind it's not like I'll be out a fortune in shoes. (Should I decide these aren't right for the wedding, I will totally wear them anyway. Look at how cute they are on my feet!)


Hello little toes!

And...my bouquet!!!

Since all of our flowers are silk flowers, Mom decided to get to work on my bouquet super early. Like, I think this was the first wedding project she tackled back in February. This particular version was made in...June, I think. Mom came to visit me and I showed her a picture of a bouquet in Bride and Bloom that I just loved (unfortunately their website has been updating since March or something, and the original picture from the magazine is back at my mom's house, so I can't show it to you here). Mom went home and re-created it pretty faithfully, with some of our own design improvements:



Since no one else was home when I went on my photography binge, this was the best picture I could get, holding the bouquet up in front of the bathroom mirror!

I love this because it's not your traditional cascade bouquet - for this entire wedding I am all about taking traditional elements and giving them a twist to make them unique to us. Most cascade bouquets I've seen look very structured, whereas this one, since the blossoms are spread out on wire (both plain fishing-type wire and the decorative wire garland we also got off of eBay), has a very organic appearance. There's enough weight to the flowers to keep everything from flying away like crazy, but enough give in the wire to make it very flow-y.

We're going to be taking out the white flowers, though, and moving all of the greenery to the edge of the bouquet (fun fact: you can't tell in this horrible picture, but all of the leaves are actually made out of seed beads! And there's some dashes of lighter purple in there that are made of beads as well. If I'm remembering correctly, the green on the back of the hanging blooms is beaded, too. My mom is a beading genius). When Mom first started working on these I didn't really have an idea of what I wanted my bouquet to look like, but since then I've figured out I really like the monochromatic bouquets, so out with the white and green, in with more purple!

Out of the items we have for the wedding so far, I really think my bouquet is my favorite. When Mom pulled it out of her wedding-stuff drawer for me to see I started jumping up and down and ran around the house holding the bouquet like a mad woman. Lots of women talk about their dress shopping experience as the first time they felt like a bride, what with the long white dress and the pretty veil. For me, it was holding my bouquet!

When was the first time you felt like a bride?