Inspiration

As the wedding date draws closer, I'm trying to organize all of my scattered "great ideas" into a cohesive look. I don't want the whole event to feel thrown together or too busy, so I need to start looking at every decision critically with an eye to "does it fit?". Something I noticed a lot of brides on Wedding Planner doing is an "Inspiration Board". This is sort of a digital representation of what many wedding planning books advise to help brides create an overall feeling. The idea is to assemble images of ideas you would like to incorporate into the wedding. This can be pictures of flowers, scraps of cloth, motifs, anything that strikes your fancy. I haven't done this at home yet, although it would be a good place to store all of those fabric swatches I've begun to accumulate. If you're a little bit computer savvy, you can get the same effect in a neat little computer image file.

The starting point for an inspiration board will vary. I started with color, because I already had a pretty good idea of what colors I wanted to use for my wedding décor. Since my wedding is early October, I wanted autumn colors, and went with green, orange and brown. If color isn't that important, but you have a theme, you may begin by looking for images related to your theme. Wedding websites like Wedding Planner or The Knot are great sources for images because you can search by color and other criteria, but don't limit yourself to wedding-specific sites. Home, garden and fashion websites or blogs will also have great images that may spark your imagination.

Once you've assembled a number of images, you can use any image-editing software to resize and arrange your pictures into a nice grouping. I did the inspiration board shown here using just MS Word. I suggest starting with any pictures you absolutely love and want to keep. As you begin to add images to the board, you may notice that some don't quite "fit" with the look of the other pictures. That's how you start to narrow your wedding day "look"!

So, without further ado, here is my inspiration board:

I'm going for a very "natural" look because I'm getting married in an early-20^th century garden. The fireplace image is more rustic than I want, but there is a fireplace in our reception room and I liked the idea of using candles to decorate it. I still have a lot of details to work out, but I think this is a good jumping-off point and I expect that looking at this arrangement every so often will help me to focus.