Wedding Blog

… or how I made my inspiration board.

I wish I owned Photoshop or something like that. I don’t even own anything more than a trial version of PowerPoint, which I’m sure you could use make an inspiration board, as well. So, because I don’t own these fancy programs, I used the two I do have: Microsoft Word and IrfanView.*

IrfanView is a free and easy-to-use graphic viewer and editor I downloaded years ago to easily edit my photos for MySpace. I use it almost daily to email Mr. Frenchie or friends pictures I’ve seen on websites, because most of their work emails block images that I just copy and paste.

Step 1 - Collecting the photos - If you’re anything like me, you’ve collected a ton of inspiration photos. The hardest part of this step for me was deciding which photos to use, which forced me to decide on a set theme.

*Note: for this step I HIGHLY recommend bookmarking websites instead of just saving the pictures to a file. This makes sourcing your photos MUCH easier.

Step 2 - Editing photos - I’ve found the easiest way for me to edit my photos was to “Print Screen” and paste into IrfanView. The “Print Screen” button basically copies whatever is in view on your screen to your clipboard. In order to see what you’ve “copied”, you have to “paste” it into a new document, or in our case, program.

What my screen looks like in IrfanView…

Now I want to just have a pic of the cookbook. To do that, I’ll click and drag a box over the desired area:

and select the Crop feature under Edit (ctrl + Y).

Now, just save the file, and repeat.

Step 3 - Inserting files - In Microsoft Word, you’ll go to Insert > Picture > From File…

and select a photo, and it will appear on your paper. It may show up bigger than you want it to be, so just scale it down.

Next, right click on the photo and choose “Format Picture”.

Under the Layout tab, select “Tight”.

This will allow you to move and manipulate the photos easier. When an image is set on the Tight layout, it will look like this:

Repeat this step for all your photos and arrange them how you’d like.

Here is a quick one I did with items from our registry:

When you are finished, you can do another screen print…

… and crop out your board.

Ta da!

Top: Kate Spade Larabee Dot, Spode Baking Days Deep Dish, Crate and Barrel Duo Salad Servers
Middle: KitchenAid Mixer, Crate and Barrel The Newlywed’s Cookbook, Crate and Barrel Madison Dinnerware
Bottom: XOX Crock with tools, Target Canary Print Armless Chair, Target Preps Mixing Bowls

*For some odd reason, Polyvore doesn’t work for me, but if that works for you, I imagine this could be even easier.

Have you created an inspiration board? Upload them to the gallery; I’d love to see them!