Saturday, June 5, 2010

Return to Themes

Finally, it's here.  The Big One.  The post you've all been waiting for....all right, not really.  But I have been meaning to revisit themes for an awfully long time, and that time has finally come.

When last I discussed themes, wayyyyy back in February, I was very reluctant to have a theme at all.  It didn't take long for me to realize that my favorite weddings all have a distinct theme and that it is much easier to plan when you've narrowed down your options a bit.  I started small.  I figured since we were doing a wedding by the sea, we could work within an oceany color scheme.  That would give us some fluency without being too limiting.

But the more I thought about it, the more that didn't really sit well with me.  I really like pastels, and as much as I love blue, I didn't want to limit our palette to just blues and greens.

So then I started branching out and thinking about a real theme to tie things together that would allow for a varied color palette.  My brainstorming left me with some pretty...interesting ideas.  Among the more amusing were a wedding covered in fairies (including a "find the fairies" game) and a BookWorlds wedding (BookWorlds is a club that teaches college courses at Berkeley about fantasy and sci-fi novels like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.  It's how Daniel and I met).  However, I also managed to come up with a few ideas that might actually work for us.  I have narrowed it down to three.

And so I enter the world of inspiration boards.  Not so much for me, I have a pretty active imagination, but so people who are not me can get an idea of what the Hell I'm talking about.  Because when I came to Daniel with my theme ideas, he had no sense of what any of these weddings would look like despite my descriptions.

So without further ado, these are my top three:

1.  Natural Beauty




OK, I'm sorry people whose pictures these are, but I am not posting source info for all of them.  I know, I know, I'm being a bad blogger.  If you don't want your picture on here, just email me, and I will be happy to take it down.

Note:  For those of you who are used to Weddingbee inspiration boards, I'm just not into them.  I'm not posting pictures of stuff I intend to use or stuff that necessarily all goes together, just stuff that has the sort of feel I'm looking for.  And that means multiple kinds of one thing (notably, cakes).  Because this isn't perfect, it's just a visual brainstorm.

Alrighty, so the idea behind this look is elegant but natural beauty, probably with a foresty feel to it but still with lots of flowers.  Think dark, woodsy tones with lightly colored flowers.  This would probably involve a dress with beaded flowers, flower centerpieces mixed with lots of greens, twigs and branches incorporated in the scenery, a viney tiara, and wooden chairs among other things.  We could also easily transform this from woodsy to beachy plants if we wanted a natural CA coastline theme to better suit our venue.  But the main idea of this is bringing out the best that nature has to offer.

2.  Dripping with Flowers


Even if we got all of the flowers locally and in season, borrowed from people's gardens, used silk flowers, bought flowers wholesale, and did all of the arrangements ourselves, I still think this probably isn't going to be a real possibility for us budgetwise.  However, since I haven't really looked into all that yet, for now it is still possible.  The idea behind this one is flowers, flowers, everywhere.  The Secret Garden (Holland, USA, 1993) is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I would definitely be taking inspiration from it.  I would want a natural as opposed to manicured feel to the arrangements, and as such, there would probably be a lot of crossover opportunities between this theme and the natural one.  Major features would include a flower arch, majorly flowery centerpieces (potentially a different flower theme for every table), lots and lots of roses among many other types of flowers, pink bridesmaids dresses (and I can feel one of them cringing just at the possibility), and real flowers on the cake.

3.  Danicole

 
Ah, the fun one.  This idea is all about us, things we like and things that have been important in our relationship.  Not only would this be the easiest thing to plan, it would also be the cheapest by far.  I'd be taking a lot of inspiration from OffBeatBride.com, my very favorite wedding website, for this one.  The most visual aspect of this would be the centerpieces.  We would do a different one for each table, each reflecting a different thing that we like such as games, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Disneyland, the beach, dogs, etc.  We could have fun Nicole and Daniel trivia and people could play games from the game table if they didn't want to dance.  And everything would be tied together by pictures of us doing something related to each table and maybe just us being together elsewhere (like the food tables and such).  This would be very fun and very us.

Problem with that is, both of us really want an elegant wedding, not so much fun and quirky.  So as much as I would love a wedding based off of #3, I think we're going to stick with something more along the lines of #1 or #2 because it's more what we envision in a wedding.  That's what we want our day to be.

Poll:  Which option do you like best?

4 comments:

  1. I like the Natural Beauty one. It's more flexible than the purely floral, yet at the same time you _could_ have a ton of flowers. The game table isn't a bad idea (I think it could fit into a corner with any theme) if you have lots of friends that would be more interested in that than dancing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like the natural one - and I think you could still incorporate the quirky personalized stuff without straying from the overall look - for example, incude a table with board and card games to play and decorate it with a natural, wooded look. Or place them on stands made out of cut branches and such.

    ReplyDelete
  3. #3!!!

    20 years from now, you'll be very glad you did a wedding about you. Imagine you telling someone about your wedding, and you say 'our theme was natural beauty, so we had flowers and stuff' and they shrug and quickly forget it. Now imagine the same conversation, only you say that your theme was Danicole and how you had board games and other personal stuff, and they'll say 'wow, that sounds really cool. I wish I coulda been there.'

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unrelated sort of:
    I saw these and though they were absolutely cute, I can't use them, but thought of you:

    http://www.weddingfavorsunlimited.com/happily_ever_after_castle_candle_favors.html

    it would fit in with your love of disneyland/fairytales/enchantment etc.

    I might just buy one to amuse myself.

    ReplyDelete

Classy Wedding by the Sea