Going to the Chapel…

Happy Thursday, beauties! I’m SO excited for tonight’s post because I finally get to share more wedding planning details with you. Truth be told, this whole planning process has been fun but STRESSFUL. We have an amazing  planner in Toia from Beyond the Veil but adding a wedding to the mix of mom life, a promotion at work (read: extra travel) and the blog has been a little wild. I was at Happy Hour with my co-workers a couple weeks ago before I cracked down on the planning and they were a getting stressed for me because Ridge and I hadn’t done a whole lot yet. I actually ended up giving myself a panic attack for the first time in several years…my co-workers felt so bad, but I felt bad because I know the reason wasn’t them or the wedding planning- it was the total package of everything going that that was getting to me.

The good thing – I channeled that happy hour stress the next weekend and cracked down, y’all.

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My first step was to put on paper (ok Pinterest) our wedding vision. For me this meant a vision board,words to describe the look and feel of our wedding, and our wedding colors. Doing this SO helpful because it created a framework for what I did next- coming up with cake ideas, making decor decisions, choosing my bridesmaids’ dresses…and my own dress!

Here’s the words and colors we landed on:

Look and feel of the day:

Beautiful, romantic, airy, welcoming, memorable, joy-filled

Colors:

Blush, peach, mauve, beige, gold, greenery (add rose gold?)

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Ridge and I want our wedding to have a light, airy but romantic feel and I knew I wanted my dress to feel super romantic too. When I started looking at dresses I knew I wanted something with a low back. lots of lace and a slightly vintage feel. When I saw this dress I knew I wanted something just like it and found my dream dress pretty quickly after. It’s funny because I’m always asking Ridge for his opinion on clothes and it was SO HARD not asking him what he thought of this dress…LOL!

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Once I found my dress I chose my bridesmaids’ dresses. This was such a fun, special task because my bridesmaids are four amazing girls I feel incredibly honored to know and honestly amazed to have by my side September 9th. My sister-in-law Elizabeth who is going to be one of my bridesmaids introduced me to Azazie for dresses. She used Azazie for her bridesmaid dresses last year and I couldn’t get over my dress or the look and fit (Azazie lets you order completely custom sizes at no additional charge) so I opted for them too. I chose the ‘Zapheira’ style in the color ‘dusty rose’. Y’all…I’m SO excited!

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For the bouquet, I want something like this and we’re going to do a mini version for Juliana. She’s going to be one of the flower girls but I want to do a slightly different dress for her with a floral crown. I’m going to wear my hair down and do hers down too. She’ll be getting ready with us that day, so yes- pretty much my mini. 😉

Since we’ve had The Ballantyne lined up as our venur for a while, I went ahead and created a board just for the it. It’s a pretty popular one for weddings sothere are a lot of wedding photos already circulating. Pinning my favorites all on one board was a really helpful starting point for everything from decor to photography style, since it helped us conceptualize the space.

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I’ve been talking a lot about Pinterest but I can’t tell you what a life saver it’s been, especially keeping multiple boards for different elements (dresses, cake, venue, photography, etc.) When we met with our our planner yesterday to talk through vendors, having the boards really helped with those choices too.

Whew, that was a lot! I’m off to bed but I’d absolutely love to know from your brides that have been through the process…what tips were a game changer for you?

LYLAS,

Terra