Wedding Advice – Here Comes the Blog

Many women have been dreaming about their wedding day since they were little girls.  They have folders filled with images and drawings as well as bride magazines with folded-over corners pointing them to beautiful photos of things they want to incorporate on their wedding day.  Well a wedding inspiration board is simply a modern, technology-based way to put all those magazine clippings and images together to make one big collage that is beautiful and well-organized.   And the great thing about such a pretty board is that you can print it out and add it to your wedding keepsakes or to your digital wedding photo album (if you used high res pictures).

If you hire a professional wedding planner or designer, chances are that they will help you develop a mood or inspiration board that captures the essence of all the things that you want on your wedding day.  The problem is that not every bride can afford to hire a high-end planner that will take the time to create a board with them.   In addition, even if you do hire a planner, it is a good idea to show up at the meeting with a vision of your wedding day.  Looking at the inspiration boards of other brides or designers on the internet is a great way to get ideas.

That said, during our research, we often found that many ready-made boards didn’t necessarily coincide with our bride’s vision or budgetary constraints.  Therefore, we think that it is a good idea for brides to create their own inspiration boards by hand-choosing specific elements that they find during their research on the internet or in bridal magazines.  Over the years, we’ve found that the best sources for inspiration are the photographs from real weddings.  Today, many online sites like MyBridalStory and The Knot enable brides to upload their wedding day photos and stories to share with the world so we suggest stopping by these sites to peruse and get wedding accessories ideas for your own wedding.

Ready To Create Your Own Wedding Inspiration Board?

Our staff members generally use Paint Shop or Photo Shop to create in-house inspiration boards.  However, these programs are expensive and not very intuitive to use.  One tool that we’ve seen some brides use on their home computer is Microsoft’s Power Point program.  It is fairly intuitive and many computers come with it pre-loaded in the software package.  In addition, we’ve found  some other easy options for creating your very own inspiration board directly online.

Our favorite easy-to-use online tool for creating your own inspiration board is the Mosaic Maker tool from Big Huge Labs.  The tool enables you to choose the number of tiles (square photos) that you want in each column/row, the mosaic background and border color, and the distance between the photos.  You can choose photos from Flickr, upload your own photos, or use images that you’ve found on the web by providing the image URL.  You select your photos and then hit the create button... the application then displays your mosaic.  Just right click on the image and choose “save as” to save the image to your machine.  The application also gives you the html code with links to all of the photos that you’ve used in your mosaic.  It's simple, fast, fun and best of all, FREE!

This morning I created the following 4x4 (16 square) Tiffany Blue Inspiration Board using photos that I found on Flickr.  Because I hand-selected each of the images, I had to put in the image URLs so it took about 15 minutes to create.  The only drawback is that if you make a mistake, it doesn’t seem to keep the URL information (using the back button) so be sure everything is correct before you hit the Create button.

1. Tiffany Blue Wedding Cake with Gems and Magnolias, 2. Chocolate Brown and Tiffany Blue Wedding Flower Girl Basket and Ring Bearer Pillow, 3. Tiffany Blue wedding, 4. Our Wedding Favors: Tiffany Boxes, 5. Tiffany Blue Silk Clutch with Teal Chrysanthemum Blossom - Lined in Silk, 6. tiffany blue, 7. #C37 tiffany blue brown circle swirl, 8. Tiffany Blue Bridesmaids, 9. tiffanyblue-sakbag-partyfavor, 10. Tiffany Blue Pillars down the Aisle at the Palmer House, 11. Tiffany and Co. Cupcakes!, 12. Nothing Better Than Blue!, 13. tiffany blue card table, 14. Aqua Bengaline, 15. Wedding Shower Cake, 16. Tiffany Blue Damask Wedding Favor Tags

Another one of our favorite tools is the web-based collage creator from Polyvore.  This application enables you to pick and choose images from their database to create your own fashion and style collage.  The program is super easy to use and fairly intuitive since it uses drop and drag technology.  While testing it a few days ago, I created this set (what they call the collage) of blue and brown dresses. You can get the details about where to buy any of these dresses by simply clicking on the image.

Blue and Brown Bridesmaids Dresses by WeddingBlogger featuring Amsale dresses

Sometimes the real struggle is finding the same or a similar item that you liked in a real wedding or on someone else’s inspiration board because often their resources are not shared. Over the next month or so, we’ll share some of our wedding inspiration boards for various color schemes and wedding themes. We’ll do our best to share the resources for the photographs and items that we show on the boards, but if you see something that you like and have a question about it, don’t hesitate to shoot us an e-mail or leave a comment.

View some wonderful inspiration boards:

• Wedding Inspiration: Pink and White Color Scheme
• Wedding Inspiration: Lemon Yellow Color Scheme
• Winter Wedding Inspiration
• Wedding Inspiration for a Purple Passion Color Scheme
• Teal & Brown - Fall Wedding Inspiration Board
• Indian Wedding Inspiration Board
• Rustic Country Wedding Inspiration
• Polka Dot Red & Teal Blue Inspiration Board
• A Passion For Purple - Inspiration Boards
• Fuchsia & Orange Beach Wedding Inspiration

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