Weddingbee Blog

I love babies - a lot. I love pictures of babies almost as much as the real deal. I also love when people do slide shows of their baby pictures at weddings - something about it makes me all mushy and happy-like.

For us, I wanted all the ’baby’ but none of the ’slide show’. I knew we didn’t have the space or time to run a slide show on a screen, and I didn’t want to leave one of our laptops unattended for any period of time (they’re sort of essential to our everyday lives). So, I started looking for alternative ideas.

That’s when I came across an amazing picture (that I cannot find for the life of me, though I feel like it was from MSW or Modern Bride - if any of you know what I’m talking about after hearing this, let me know!). It was basically a wedding cake/dessert table in front of an entire wall of matted black and white pictures of places and people. When I saw it, I knew I had found my slide show alternative.

I wanted to play on the idea of a picture collage “wall”, but I wanted there to be a little more movement and flexibility, which is when I came up with the idea of doing picture mobiles.

First, we had to select pictures.

Burger and I went through countless photo albums and chose 35 pictures of each of us, from birth until college, heavy on the 5 and under years (come on, that’s when everyone is cutest!). I scanned them and then ordered 4″x6″ double prints, and got to work cutting 5″x7″ matting “frames” out of black card stock (note: I normally would have gone for black and white photos, but some of these pictures you just had to see in color - they were great! So, I went against my norm and got them in full color, and I think it was the right move, although black and white is always stunning to me!).

I cut out fourteen 6 foot strands of 1.5″ ribbon in sage so that I would be ready for the assembly process. Next, I adhered a print to one side of the black matting with some glue dots (I just eyeballed it to get the center), then flipped the entire thing over. Then I taped the picture + card stock to the piece of ribbon (with Scotch Tape, because I was low on glue dots and lazy, as always :)):

And then I attached the other print of the same picture to the back side of the matting which was now taped to the ribbon! Does that make sense? Basically it just ensures that the same picture is visible on both sides, so that your ribbon can hang and the picture is visible from any angle.

(aww, baby Burger and his Pop Pop)

A few hours later, all of my mobiles were assembled, and I rigged them up to show you how cool they look when they’re hanging from somewhere high:

Some close-ups (can you guess who is who?):

(yes I did purposefully skip all of my awkward years)

All of the mobiles together in our apartment!

Where are we going to hang these, you ask? Well, our reception venue conveniently has an indoor gazebo and garden, with lots of wrought iron fencing and such. I plan to suspend them around the gazebo, so that people can approach the pictures from all angles and won’t get stuck in one place for too long. I hope it turns out the way I envision in my head!

Is anyone else doing an alternative to a growing up slide show?