Weddingbee Blog
I know, I know. You still haven’t seen an inspiration board from me. You’ve seen our colors, my dress, my ring, the man’s ring, our dogs, and tons and tons of other details, but still no inspiration board. My bad.
See, the thing is, I love inspiration boards. They’re my favorite part of wedding planning. But when it comes to making my very own inspiration board, things get a little fuzzy. It’s hard to choose a just few pictures to nail down what you want your wedding to look like and, most importantly, feel like. That’s a tall order, wouldn’t you say?
It’s funny, because I’ve made quite a few inspiration boards. I’ve created boards for my other weddings (a whopping 8 of them, to be exact) based on various designers’ Spring 2010 Ready to Wear collections (Makeup Artist/Fashionista here), and they all came out great. But sit me down and tell me to make an inspiration board for our wedding and you’ve got a mess. A big monster mess.
Every time I’ve attempted to make an inspiration board based on our (let’s be real, my) vision for the wedding, I end up with the huge 50 photo montage (no joke) that I can’t seem to trim down. So you know what I did? I limited myself. Gone are the days of scouring every.single.wedding.website.in.existence. looking for pink, purple, grey, and aqua inspiration. Oh no. I limited myself to the color swatches from 100 Layer Cake (they have the best swatches), photos from Snippet and Ink (they have the most hardcore amazing inspiration boards), and a single solitary signage photo that I found from Etsy vendor, The Back Porch Shoppe. Note to self: must.own.that.sign.
So… are you ready for some Marie Antoinette meets Alice in Wonderland goodness?
As I’ve mentioned before, Mr. Guinea Pig and I were with my parents over Christmas when he proposed. What I didn’t mention is that we were spending Christmas near Lake Tahoe! Mr. Guinea Pig had been hoping to propose at the beach on the lake, but the house is about a 10 minute drive up a mountain from the lake and he knew I would guess what was happening if he asked to take a stroll on the beach!
Anyway, the point of this post is that moments after we got engaged, my mom was saying, “Oh! Wouldn’t a destination wedding in Tahoe be fun?! It’s such a beautiful location!” We (ever-so-) briefly considered it, but Mr. Guinea Pig and I hadn’t really wanted a destination wedding. My parents are the only people we really know who live on the West Coast (and they actually live in the East Bay, not even Tahoe!), so everyone would need to fly in. Plus, as soon as I started thinking ’Tahoe destination wedding’, little dollar signs started flashing before my eyes and I slowly backed away from the day-dreaming (even if my parents are contributing the vast majority - thanks Mom & Dad Guinea Pig!).*
Being back in Tahoe for Thanksgiving, though, reminded me how beautiful a Tahoe wedding could have been. Miss Snow recently talked about her ’other wedding’, and it inspired me to map out my version of the Guinea Pig wedding that might have been, had Mama Guinea Pig gotten her way. 
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I love when a plan comes together! OK, maybe it isn’t just a smidge of color—remember, we’re planning a brightly colored bash. Previously I told you about:
Despite my ever changing mind and only being able to go shopping with one girl (the rest are all a plane ride away) the Pretzel ‘Maids came through! I got an email today—every one of my girls has picked out her dress, even my Jr. Bridesmaid.
Behold the Pretzel wedding party:
I promised a story a while back about our evolving color palette. Once we’d selected a date and venue, we settled on a palette of black, ivory and green.
Tablescape (source); bridesmaid dress (source); flowers (source, source); Manolos (source); cake (source)
Then we decided to go a little crazy—how about olive green and eggplant purple? It sounded yummy, at least!
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I probably could have benefited from a more clearly articulated vision for the wedding—I like everything I see, and I want to do all of it. As such, our wedding “theme” has been pretty ephemeral. Although I’m not sure I can briefly summarize what we’re going for, I can definitely show you!
(source)
A little darker; not quite so periwinkle; brighter; not that dark; more vibrant; too teal…
When I picked our wedding colors (I’ll be fair: no use of the royal we here unless ’we’ really did it) and Mr. Guinea Pig OKed them, I had no idea just how difficult a task I had embarked on. All I knew was that blue was both Mr. GP’s and my favorite color so it had to be in our wedding, and pale yellow seemed like a nice match.
(love the bouquet in the upper left as well as the cakes)
Create the honeymoon of your dreams.
I’ve been a little torn about our color scheme. Since we haven’t met with our florist, there’s still time to switch from our bright citrus scheme to something that would match our reception hall better. I love our colors (especially bright pink!) but burgundy, brown, and taupe would look perfect in our ballroom. Those colors aren’t “us”, but sometimes I wonder if it would be classier and more eyeball-friendly if our colors matched our venue.
Because of this little conundrum, it’s always a pleasure to see examples of cheery colors in dark spaces, as shown in the pictures below!
Though I will most likely go with a more traditional western/American style look on my wedding day in the end, I’ve found myself thinking more lately about how I might incorporate Pakistani elements and wondering if maybe a bridal lehenga might be the way to go, after all.
Dusty Gold Aurang shirt and lehenga, $2,000 from Bargello. Purple calla lilies, image from The Knot. Tejani bridal jewelry, image from Maharani. Bridal hair image from Maharani. Brian Atwood gold strappy leather ’Katie’ sandals, $636 from BlueFly.
The color scheme was something I really wanted to nail down early on so that I could start envisioning all the little elements of our big day. Part of that accomplishment came from purchasing samples of DIY goodies like paper, ribbon, and fabric!
After reading a lot about other brides’ DIY adventures, I hit up some of the major paper players first: PaperSource, Envelopments, and Cards and Pockets. I ordered samples online from some and ventured out into the ’burbs to pick up some of the others in person. What did I end up with? A crap ton of paper. BUT, I also finalized the color scheme AND got some great ideas for save the dates and invitations! Here’s an idea of how things went down:
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This summer, Mr. Pudding and I went to Poland to attend two weddings. About a week before we left, I telephoned our decorator because I wanted to pick out the linens before the vacation. Despite the very short notice, she was wonderful and agreed to meet with Mama Pudding and me. I thought that this would be a breeze; I knew exactly what I wanted, so we would be in and out in a matter of minutes. Boy, was I wrong!
When I got to her studio and sat down, I realized that I actually had no idea what our event is supposed to look like. I explained to her that the main colour was going to be navy, at which point she made a bit of a face and explained that navy is “a very difficult colour to work with”. I told her that I wanted the decor to be mostly navy and white, with yellow accents. She asked me if I had any pictures. Of course, since navy seems to be such a popular accent colour on the internet, I thought that the decorator would for sure know what I was talking about. I mean, she has definitely seen all of those beautiful navy and yellow inspiration boards on Snippet and Ink or checked out the several Weddingbee weddings that were heavy on the navy blue, right? Man, am I a bonehead! It turns out that what works in the virtual wedding world and what works in the real world are two totally different things.
Take, for example, this beautiful inspiration board from Snippet and Ink:
If I’m remembering correctly, we decided on the colors of our wedding first. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe it was because it seemed like an easy thing to cross off the to-do list. It started with a simple concept: his favorite color is green and my favorite color is purple (basically, just like Miss Poodle!). Easy enough, right? Ha. I soon found out that there are about 50 million different shades of purple and green, and I got really caught up in the nitty gritty of the exact shades to fit the vision of our day.
Doing some research (the knot, an unending supply of wedding magazines), I realized that purple was quickly becoming the shade for weddings (as evidenced by the many, many purple bees in the hive!). I felt a little bit unoriginal at first, but then I realized that I had pictured a purple wedding since I was a child (my favorite flowers are lilacs), and I felt better.
A lot of what I was seeing at first was eggplant and apple green, and I thought - this is it! Modern, elegant, not too girly… perfect.
Mr. Burger and I have had so many beginnings. Do I start when we met, began dating, moved to the same city, moved in together, got engaged? Every part of our relationship has been amazing, and, just to sound totally cliche, I am so, so lucky to be marrying my best friend (and I apparently love using commas).
For our purposes, I’d like to start at the beginning of wedding planning… and if we’re being totally honest, that would have to start years before I even met him. Really. I have had this tendency to say “I am totally having this at my wedding” about anything and everything fun that I have experienced since about senior year of high school.
Burger and I had talked about getting married from fairly early on in our relationship - we just knew that we were meant to be together. When I started medical school three years ago, I found myself daydreaming about our wedding to be an excellent distraction! The first two years of school were tough on me - both intellectually and psychologically - and “wedding planning” was an escape to a different world. It started out innocently enough, researching my dream venues and vendors, reading wedding blogs, visiting the knot.com. Eventually though, I had a knot account, read Weddingbee religiously, and made a folder to bookmark wedding inspiration. Embarrassing, but true.
Once the question was finally popped and the gorgeous ring was on my finger (that story is for another day :), I was ready and raring to go!
So, after that lengthy introduction, I give you the inspiration board for what I hope will be our timeless, romantic, classy, and super-fun wedding.
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Selecting our color palette has been an evolutionary process. I’ve really wanted to use shades of green (Mr. Spaniel’s favorite color!), and I think I have finally figured out what I mean by that.
I think I’m going with mostly black and white/ivory (damask? paisley?), with flowers and accents in shades of green.
I’ve been really drawn to these bridesmaids’ dresses since I first saw them. I have five girls, who are all different shapes and sizes, and I want to give them options that each will be comfortable in, but that still go well together. I like the tea length, I like the lace. I am not sure about the white/ivory underlay; I might go with black on black.
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When I first shared our colour scheme of navy, white and yellow with Mama Pudding, she went on a little rant about how in Poland yellow flowers symbolize unfaithfulness. Even though I am not very superstitious, I don’t really know how I feel about our wedding making all of our Polish guests think of cheating. Mama P then suggested that I change the yellow to bright pink. So, I (quickly) made two inspiration boards to get a visual as to what a navy and white wedding with yellow or pink accents would look like.
The way I see it, damask is the undisputed champion of weddings these days. Wedding blogs are full of inspiration for the “damask bride”. I have to admit, I love the idea of damask. It’s romantic, it provides a theme and central focus to the wedding, and gives texture to the decor. However, I had a problem with jumping on this bandwagon. I really wanted to find a theme that had a similar feel, but was a little bit more unique.
After deciding on the ivory and navy blue colour scheme, I began searching for inspiration. I had this idea in my head to find striped table cloths. I didn’t manage to find any, but I did find this:
(source)
This is Toile de Jouy, and according to wikipedia:
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