Pinwheels? For a Wedding? Seriously?

When I first started flipping through my big stack of bridal magazines, I developed a more sophisticated view for what I wanted for our outdoor mountain wedding. I hadn't thought of weddings before I wanted a modern fondant covered cake in a chic color. No baby's breath, or green filler anywhere, just low square vases packed full of irises or tulips. Fine.

Then I saw my first wedding blog while researching Do It Yourself weddings. We had a tiny $5000 budget, which wouldn't even book some venues in western North Carolina. I had to get creative if I wanted a magazine-esque wedding on that budget! But I still wanted a super cool, beautiful wedding.

And then I found my first wedding blogs and they introduced me to a whole new world of creativity and options. Instead of ceremony flowers, I found handmade pinwheels. Instead of a ceremony canopy, I would string fabric bunting across a couple of trees. Instead of a guest book full of signatures, I would use a framed chalkboard that guests could write on and have their pictures taken.

Needless to say my family, who had not been to a wedding in 20 or so years, couldn't wrap their heads around the colorful, handmade, souther picnic wedding that had become my vision. This led to high emotions (especially on my part) and a few fights. I don;t know if I could be classified as a bridezilla, but I was paying for the wedding myself (Hindsight Groom had lost his job) and if I wanted pinwheels instead of roses, it was going to be pinwheels. But the fact remained that my feelings were hurt when I couldn't get family and friends to see my vision. They had just never heard of such a thing as pinwheels at a wedding.

In Hindsight…

In hindsight, I wish I had a solid system for sharing my ideas. I made inspiration boards and pasted them into an artists notebook, and I had a small blog on our wedding website, but neither format allowed me to effectively share all of the ideas and inspiration I found each day.

Enter the Style Circle…

In August of 2009, Style Me Pretty announced the Style Circle, a social network for easily building and sharing the same inspiration boards that bloggers make using more powerful (and expensive) software like Photoshop. The best part is the Style Circle allows you to embed your inspiration board anywhere.

For example, this board illustrates my rustic outdoorsy sensibilities and incorporates specific examples of using tea tins as vases, hanging paper and mason jar lanterns, and a chalk bard gust book, all of which my family had a hard time wrapping their heads around.

To sign up for a Style Circle account, go to http://circle.stylemepretty.com/

And Pinterest…

I love me some Pinterest! Pinterest is also a social network for sharing images. With Pinterest, you can "pin images" on the fly while you're surfing the net. Just install the "pin this" bookmarklet in your bookmarks toolbar and your set. Your friends and family just go to pinterest.com/yourusername to see your pins. My pins are at pinterest.com/hindsightbride

If you're reading this blog then you're like me in that most of your inspiration comes from online resources. Not only do you not want to waste paper printing out things you like, but we bloggers tend to set images at a low resolution to prevent you from printing photographers copyrighted work. In my case, I was left trying to describe my vision, and it didn't work well. I so wish I had the Style Circle and Pinterest to help me share my ideas with friends, family, and vendors! Lucky you dear brides!