Weddingbee Blog

Once upon a time, I did a brief visual-design stint with my favorite store. And how perfect for a bibliophile like me that at the time I started, the medium for their art was books. Glorious arches of books.

Piles of books, leveled and layered:

(The book on the chair was too precious to use in the construction: a 1930 edition of an Abraham Lincoln biography, in which its owner had handwritten Whitman’s “Oh Captain! My Captain!” It tugged at my literary heart that some reader would carefully connect the poem with the man it was written for. Just lovely.)

But I digress.

Incroyable, non? What a few hundred books, gallons of hot glue, some wooden reinforcements, and a lot of (wo)man hours can do.

This is one of the most important things I learned from my time at Anthropologie: nearly anything you can dream up can be done. It might be expensive or difficult or time consuming…but it can be done. The wedding example that springs to mind is this:

(image by Elizabeth Messina)

Not only is this ingeniously creative, but it’s complicated and beautiful in execution. And, dare I say, Anthropologie-esque. I would love to ask Sasha Souza how she thought up the now-infamous photobooth wall—and how she knew it could be done.

Or this paper moon from an amazing art-deco wedding:

(source)

The thing is, if you can find The Vision…if you can see in your mind how it will be…it can be.

Two other important lessons from my Anthropologie days?

1. “Make it less perfect.” - Imagine if the above photobooth had all matching frames. It would really lose something from the overall effect. Matchy-matchy is a crutch, but you don’t have to lean on it.

2. “Measure twice, cut once.” - I doubt I have to explain this. Let’s just say several of these houses wound up being so small because of my own hurried measurements. It takes ten times longer to fix a mistake than it does to take your time beforehand.

I’ve got a few little projects cooking for the wedding that are a little outside the box. Do you have any crazy, borderline-art-installation ideas for your wedding?