Here Comes the Blog

Archive for December, 2009

Having a green wedding or want to break from the traditional guest book? Consider a wishing tree…one of the hottest alternatives to guest books. Wishing trees a great way to add a unique touch to your wedding. The basic principle is for guests to leave their well-wishes for the couple on small hang tags that they fill out and then hang on the “tree”. The hang tags can be square or shaped (e.g. leaf-shaped for fall weddings). Normally the tree itself consists of some branches that are adorned with flowers, crystal garlands or whatever embellishments you want to use to tie in with your theme. If you are fortunate enough to get married in the Spring, you could simply buy magnolia branches with beautiful pink or white saucer cup flowers or branches covered in cherry blossoms. Other times of the year, simply use glass vases filled with colored marbles to hold branches in place (paint them any color you would like) and then attach silk or real flowers that coordinate with your color scheme.

This Wishing Tree photo (from the Wedding Star catalog) shows willow branches that are adorned with orchid flowers. The couple bought square floral place card tags and added simple pink ribbons and a crystal heart dazzler to add some sparkle. They placed the hang tags along with a pen on a lovely tray and then set up a tent card asking their guests to “Please Leave Your Wishes on the Tree”….the tent card also thanked the guests for sharing in their special day. Placing a gorgeous decorated wishing tree near the entrance of the reception will get oohs and aahs from your guests. After the wedding, you can create a lovely scrapbook using the cards that guests left on the tree.

TIP – Be sure to do all of the wishing tag assembly prior to the big day. It can take a bit of time to punch gift tags, add ribbon, and add other embellishments. Also at the reception, be sure to have a good place to set-up the wishing tree because once it is set-up and the guests start hanging on their wish tags, the tree can not be moved easily.

Well I had so much fun creating the blue and brown dress collage at polyvore that I decided to go ahead and create a black and white inspiration board of my own.  Seriously girls…if you are looking for a super easy way to make your own inspiration board, give Polyvore a try.  The drag and drop technology makes it so fun.  Here is the board I created along with some of the resources for the beautiful dresses and reception accessories that I found.

Black White Wedding Inspiration Board by WeddingBlogger on Polyvore.com

Using a black and white color scheme gives a bride great flexibility when it comes to choosing accessories and accents for the wedding.  Some brides choose to use black and white only. While other brides choose to use colors such as red, lime green and even pink as accents on items such as the bridal jewelry, bridesmaid shoes, dress sashes, reception chair sashes and more.   Using red roses in the bridal bouquet and reception centerpieces is one of the most popular ways to add a splash of additional color to a black and white color scheme.  Whether you choose to stick with black and white only or to tie in another color, this color scheme is classic and elegant.

The staff at Here Comes The Blog put together this black and white inspiration board that we hope you can use to get your creative juices flowing.

Items in this board:
Save The Date – Tying Back of Dress – Black & White Wedding Cake
Black & White Flowers – Black & White Accessory Collection – Black & Ivory Flourish Favor Boxes
Reception Area – Black & White Damask Wedding Invitations – Washington D.C. Couple
Black & White Favor Tag – Black Bridesmaid Dresses – Black Embroidered Wedding Gown

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 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 4×4 (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.

On December 1st 2009, Here Comes The Blog was relaunched with a new design and new blog contributors.  Although our blog had been around since 2006, we thought it was time for a facelift so after several months of evaluating our mission, we are excited to be back online sharing all of our ideas with you.

We know that planning a wedding can be stressful so we’ve teamed up with some of the best industry experts to bring you tips on how to create the wedding that you’ve always dreamed of.  Our contributors will help you save money, find great vendors, avoid etiquette faux-pauxs, select a wedding venue, choose a color scheme and theme that reflect your style and personality, and so much more!

So if you are recently engaged, we hope that you join us on our quest to become the best wedding blog ever.  The ring is just the beginning of the dream…