Our wedding inspiration board

Early on in my wedding magazine reading, I noticed that weddings these days need to have a theme or unifying vision. Personally, I think that marriage is a good wedding theme. Working off of my desire to have a Hokie-colored wedding and a June wedding date, I headed over to every bride’s (or wannabe bride’s) resident wedding planner: Pinterest. I jumped on board the Pinterest train last spring and signed up in the summer. I then spent a good deal of time clicking through wedding boards. Striped straws? Vintage china? Old books? What exactly did we want at our wedding? Since we didn’t have a venue, I wasn’t too sure what to look for.

I pulled together a wedding inspiration board and found my vision was coming together: a formal look with a laid-back feel (like that makes any sense at all) and quaint without being too quaint (what am I smoking?). Eventually, decor details popped out again and again. Shepherd’s hooks, lanterns, votive candles, silver or tin containers, ribbon. Some of these are trendy, some aren’t. Honestly, having a “trendy” wedding or an “anti-trendy” has never been a concern of mine. Anti-trendy is a term I just made up to define an effort to not have popular wedding trends (paper straws, certain color schemes, photo booths, etc). Hipster could even work here.

I soon set my heart on shepherd’s hooks with lanterns for ceremony decor. Around this time, Mac and I booked the Botanical Garden, and I added flowers to the decor inspiration. Roses are my favorite flower, so I planned to use roses to accent the natural landscaping in the gardens. We opted to hold our ceremony on the main lawn in front of the gazebo. I also began looking for decor in the gazebo and decided on paper lanterns. After narrowing down what decor I wanted, I began the process of finding those items.

Did you use a wedding inspiration board?