My Inspiration Board

The logic behind the inspiration board is this: If you gather several random pictures that inspire you, make you smile, or catch your attention and lie them next to one another you will discover that the pictures are in fact, not random at all. Rather, there is a common thread throughout all the things to which you find yourself mysteriously drawn. For instance, I have a friend that has decorated her entire house solely with things that simply appealed to her. She intentionally never considered whether things matched, but somehow in the end, everything in her house fits beautifully, as if she knew all along what the final result should be.

So this is my inspiration board. I went to flickr.com and shuffled through tons of pictures picking out things that made me feel....right. As you can tell, there seems to be a color theme, I also had several pictures of night lighting, the water, piers, oak trees, cotton, and cajun food. In the end, I found that all the pictures made sense, and the inspiration board actually does its job! 

There are some other great boards by other brides on stylemepretty. Check it out - Its amazing how the groups of pictures manifest a common theme. I bet you could make a board for just about anything you choose; you could go through a magazine and tear out pictures of furniture, or kitchens, or cakes that strike you, and ask yourself what they all have in common. There will be something. I used this great info sheet to help me figure out how to make mine on photoshop. 

This may be stretching it, and I know that I may have taken this blog on a turn towards "all about me" town, but having a general "feel" that you are going for is a much safer, less stressful, much friendlier way to plan for something. i.e. Look at your inspiration board, what feeling do those pictures generate for you? How do you want your guests to feel at the end of the night, or when they first see your reception site? I have found that there are several ways to get your guests feeling excited, exhausted, and celebrated (if that's what you're going for) that don't have a thing to do with the amount of flowers on the table (or whether those flowers are the correct shade of "blush and bashful"). If I can just keep that in mind, I will come much more quickly to a healthy, balance between "getting the things every girl wants," and appropriately accommodating the needs, wisdom, and experience of others. Thereby keeping the amount of worrying I do to a minimum. 

If the mantra of a friendly affair is something like Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, then reducing stress should be no less important than reducing paper waste.