Just when I was starting to stress...

a google search saved the day.

One of the reasons I really liked our venue is that it was pretty and natural on its own and needed little to no decoration. For some stupid reason, I was starting to think that our lack of ceremony decorations and use of standard run-of-the-mill banquet chairs sans chair-covers (a thing that both Ralph and I dislike out of the discomfort of them slipping from under our bums), would look boring.

Well a simple google search, which I did for reasons I will discuss later, yielded a wonderful video from Fandango Video Solutions, that alleviated these fears. It is of a cute young(!!!) couple getting married in the same location (but different setup) that Ralph and I are in sealing the deal in. They had no chair covers, no ceremony decor, nada... and I like it that way. Whew, I need to stick to my gut. I don't have time to be rethinking this stuff. Anyway, I have other things to worry about.

So please enjoy the show.

Invitation Inspiration Nation

I found these the beautiful invitations the other day and thought they were just about the most perfect invites for us. They are letterpress invitations from Milkmaid Press. I love the tropical foliage and waterlilies, as I am a sucker for botanical prints and tropical plants. Perhaps, if I could change anything to them, it might be to lose the dragonflies, and hey, while I am at it, add a frog to one of the lilypads. Of course that would be a nod to our chosen career paths, as I study aquatic plants and the fiance studies frogs.

They are good inspirations for sure, but there is no way we could get the detailed line drawing to print well on the Gocco, my trusty tabletop screenprinter. But that is one of the benefits of letterpress, in addition to that lovely texture on the paper. Alas, you pay for awesomeness of letterpress - and I mean a lot. But talk about great inspiration for designing your own. Are you designing your invitations? If not, who is?

Destination wedding inspiration

Now that I have my dress and all, I have stopped looking at the ridiculously priced bridal magazines. Instead, my bridal porn of choice are bridal blogs. I can casually peruse them while doing things like pretending to watch college football with the fiance.

I visited the ritzybee blog the other day, and saw a beautiful wedding that I instantly connected with. I loved to see the natural beauty of the couples venue, which was in Negril, Jamaica. Their location was just gorgeous and was on beachfront property. They purposely didn't want to compete with the natural surroundings and didn't decorate excessively. They didn't go overboard with the tropical theme, having only a "subtle starfish" motiff on some of their wedding goods. They also incorporated some of the Carribean colors of the landscape into their decor, but only as accents, leaving white as their main color. The result was a thoroughly modern and serene tropical wedding. See here for the all beautiful pictures and details.

It isn't exactly what we will be going for in our wedding, but it is nice to see that someone else was able to pull off a relatively scaled back modern tropical wedding without looking unadorned or bare. With weddings being such personal events, have you ever just 'meshed' or 'got' someone's wedding? What is the source of your greatest wedding inspiration?

Inspiration without the perspiration

So as I alluded to earlier, I finally made an inspiration board for our "Modern Tropical" wedding.

It actually was really easy to do with polyvore.com. These inspiration boards, which, to me, were more akin to design shows (HGTV and TLC how I love thee), have become quite common in the wedding world. I will admit, I was a little hesitant to make one. I don't know, sometimes I am the reluctant bride. But that, in itself, is another post or more.

The whole process was so easy and fun, that I decided to make another one for my alter ego wedding. This is my my more feminine and vintage inspired "Garden Party" wedding. If I found the right venue this would have been my theme, much to my fiance's modern style chagrin.

Actually, I sometimes find myself eyeballing little vintage wedding details, like invitations. I have to reign myself from time to time. So I have found this whole theme business, which I slightly mocked before I was engaged, has actually been very helpful.