Weddingbee Blog

One benefit of having a 22 month engagement is that there is plenty of time to brainstorm and to change your mind. For me, I still haven’t decided whether this has been more of a drawback or an advantage. I definitely have a specific style. Whether in fashion, interior design, or art, there is a certain look that draws me in.

Since I am such a visual person, the wedding planning tool that has been most effective for me is style inspiration boards. Inspiration boards are very popular right now in the world of wedding blogs, but because of my art education, I have been making collages, essentially inspiration boards, for years! This is the first inspiration board I made for our wedding after Mr. Turtle proposed:

(Photo credits left to right: Cooper Carras via Snippet and Ink, personal photo, Style Me Pretty, Style Me Pretty, SLO Cakery, Style Me Pretty, Style Me Pretty, Style Me Pretty, Chelsea and Tec’s Wedding via Once Wed, Stock Photo via Corbis, Style Me Pretty)

I called it “Neapolitan” because I based my colors off of Neapolitan ice cream! The colors make perfect sense for us because my favorite color is pink and Mr. Turtle’s favorite color is brown. My first vision was mainly chocolate brown with girly pink accents. As much as I adore pink, I tried to avoid using too much of it so it didn’t seem like I was forcing my girly style over the wedding and not thinking about Mr. Turtle.

Looking back on it, I still like the first inspiration board that I made. However, a few months after creating it, I started to realize that I didn’t love it. Something about it felt too rustic. (Maybe all of the dark brown?) And although I originally thought our chocolate brown and pink color scheme was super creative, over the past couple years, I feel like it’s become really popular, and I really didn’t want our wedding to seem cliche.

(^ An example of the cookie cutter wedding style I did NOT want our wedding style to turn into. No offense, PartyWedding.com!)

I decided that I still love brown and pink together, but I wanted to find a fresher, more sophisticated way of approaching the combination, rather than just chocolate and bubblegum. When I looked back at my first inspiration board, I was sad about the lack of pink. In my opinion, the more pink the better! So imagine my surprise when I showed the collage to Mr. Turtle and this conversation followed:

Mr. Turtle: “That seems like way too much brown for a wedding.”

Me: “Really?” *surprise* “Then what color would you rather use?”

Mr. Turtle: “Well, I like brown, but for a wedding, it just seems like we should use more of the pink and white.”

Me: “So you don’t care if our wedding is too pink? You won’t think it’s too girly?”

Mr. Turtle: “Of course not, I don’t care what color it is as long as it looks nice.”

Yaaay!! I’m so thankful for a fiance who isn’t obsessed with gender/color stereotypes. It made me feel great to be reminded that he trusts me to plan a wedding that represents both of us. It was time to take some advice from one of my all-time favorite movies, Funny Face, and think pink!!

I’m assuming that there are other girls out there who are always happy to “think pink” like me! Those of you planning pink weddings: what does your fiance think of the “girly” color and what other colors are you combining it with it to make it your own?