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?

Wedding Planning Binder and the color choice debut!

Well, "debut" might be misleading. An eagle-eyed reader might actually have already caught my final color choice. After all, there are really only two colors on my Save the Date cards.

Purple & Gray color palette.

Complete with my old-school inspiration board...


Which is wear my wedding planning binder comes into play.

Earlier this summer it was oppressively hot. And my computer sits in a poorly ventilated corner of our apartment (seriously. I'll be sitting in my corner, sweating and complaining, while Billy is in the opposite corner on his computer cool as a cucumber. It's really not fair). So while I really, really wanted to put together some inspiration boards for all the various aspects of our wedding...it wasn't happening at the computer. So instead I printed out allllllllllllll of the various photos I've collected and sat down to make a series of inspiration boards to act as "covers" for all the different sections of my wedding planning binder.

A note on planning binders: at this point, I consider my binder to be an absolute necessity! While there are roughly 5,000 pre-made wedding binders out there, I highly recommend just making your own for a fraction of the cost of those other binders. All of the helpful hints and tricks and checklists in those pre-made binders can be found for free online, and setting up your own can be another fun mini-project to do while waiting to dig into the big ones!

Materials:
Three ring binder. This can be as fancy or cheap as you want. I bought a two inch purple binder with the plastic cover that let's you slip in your own paper, for ultimate customization.
Tabbed dividers. Mine even have pockets where I can keep copies of vendor contracts or various notes and have them organized by what part of the wedding they apply to!
Plastic envelope. This is where you keep track of receipts (just in case).

I also bought plastic page protectors so I could have my personalized inspiration board for each section.

My binder currently has five sections, and an inspiration board for each. There's a "general" section, which is headed by the above general inspiration board and keeps track of random wedding notes and the receipts, then attire with an inspiration board dedicated entirely to my dress (more about that soon!), flowers, photography (the inspiration board is for collecting various pictures that I want to recreate on the wedding day) and the reception (where I'm keeping the DJ contract, and the inspiration board is cake pictures and other random pictures that I didn't know what else to do with!).

Since so much of my wedding is being designed by scratch and by people (my mom and I) who aren't wedding professionals, my binder has been a lifesaver when trying to communicate what it is that I want with decorations/flowers/the dress etc. It's keeping everything in one, easy to locate place and is ultra portable. I bring it with me whenever I go hang out with girly-friends who like to talk weddings so I can show them bits and pieces and every single time I go home so I can make sure Mom is staying on track with the designs.

How are you organizing everything?

The colors, Duke! The colors!

I'm colorblind kid

But if your guests aren't colorblind dogs who don't appreciate popsicles, what colors should the wedding be?

This is something I began thinking about right away. I was thinking about colors before I was thinking about dresses.

My very, very first idea, which was quickly thrown out, was black and white, with either red or pink as an accent color.


(Source)

It's an absolutely chic color palette. Having a black-tinged wedding has actually been one of the few "wedding" thoughts I've had growing up. However...one of my friends got to it first. Last summer, when two friends of Billy and I got married (and we were in the wedding), their colors were black and white and red. It was elegant and great and memorable. There was no way I was going to ride on their coattails a year and a half later. (Not to mention such a stark palette just wouldn't work with the jewel toned decorations of our hotel)

So next I began thinking of other colors I/we like. I'm a huge fan of red...and the Oscars are gold...what about a red and gold palette?

(Source)

Except I'm not a fan of gold. And it seemed just a little too themed for my taste. I want to incorporate our love of film into the big day, but I also don't want it to come across as reliving senior prom, either.

Other colors we both like: blue and purple! But I quickly found that I absolutely COULD NOT find images of the two together. In my head it was fabulous, but I could never quite find anything that matched the two shades (rich and deep) I had in mind.

How did you choose your color palette? Why did you choose/reject a given combination?