Category: Engagement

Last week, we were at the Preferred Vintage Bridal Show at the vintage-trendy West End Architecture Salvage in downtown Des Moines, IA.

We currently watch a lot of HGTV shows about house remodeling. The kids’ favorite is Property Brothers, but the one we all love is Fixer Upper. We’ve watched enough that we can usually guess which house the people will be buying and what updates Chip and Joanna will be making. (If you’ve seen the show, you know she loves to open up walls and to use shiplap and subway tiles, among other things!)

Now, we have a new show to watch. West End Architecture Salvage
is home of the West End Salvage show on HGTV. We didn’t even know this show existed before becoming a part of the bridal show, but it looks like it will be making it onto our favorites list!

The store looks like a cross between an antique store and a garage sale. There are four floors of cool, random, old things, many of which will make you say, “Oh, I remember this!!” or “I have no idea what this even was!” For this show, they will transform a room of someone’s house, using old, interesting pieces from their store and ones their “pickers” find for them. You can check out show information here.

The bridal show had the wedding vendors spaced out among the first two floors, using the furniture as backdrops for the booth spaces. With “vintage” being a chic style for today’s brides, the vibe was perfect for the show.

We had a lot of fun doing the bridal show, and we loved combing through the four floors of salvaged finds. We can’t wait to go back!

In the beginning, it was just a cake.

As most brides do, Bre started her wedding planning online. She found an image of a cake that she fell in love with. That cake design became the inspiration for her whole wedding, both is color and style. She shared this image with me so I could see her vision. I love wedding cake and I love when someone can take an idea and see how that would work for the bigger picture. Bre did a beautiful job with that.

For Bre and Steve’s wedding, I was able to create their entire wedding stationery suite, from their save-the-dates to their thank-you cards. I enjoy working on designs for clients and Bre loved sharing the process with me. It was fun to have Bre’s image of the cake and to know her ideas. This gave me a great starting point when working on designs.

Typically, I mock up several custom designs for a project. With Bre’s save-the-dates, we decided on using both a magnet and a flat card that would be inserted into an envelope. We went this route to have both a magnet people could hang on their refrigerator as well as a card that would provide more information about hotel reservations for out-of-town guests.

Bre and I worked through a couple rounds of options to create the two pieces so they would fit together in style. One of Bre’s favorite details was the pearl paper stock that I used for the flat card. The pearl sheen matched the pearl of her wedding palette and helped solidify her theme. This is a feature I continued through her suite.

With the save-the-dates created, I was able to carry the design elements forward to Bre’s other stationery pieces. The formal wedding invitations and response cards used coordinating colors, fonts and designs.

After the wedding, we decided to do the thank-you cards as a postcard. While keeping some of the same design elements for consistency, I also made sure to change some to work with the image and to keep the design fresh.

Having a coordinated wedding stationery suite elevates each of the individual pieces. When guests see the custom details, they know care and thought went into planning the whole event. And Bre certainly planned an incredible event!

Corridor Wedding Guide is launching a new interview series, Local Wedding Professionals: Expert Tips and Advice. And I’m excited to be the person writing it!

I’ll be talking with area wedding professionals about the latest trends, as they share valuable advice and interesting suggestions for weddings. And this is all done with the bride and groom in mind. Far from a typical, boring “profile” about a business, this series will focus on information that is important to couples planning their wedding. The first interview launched today, as I chatted with Jen from Prince Albert’s Tuxedos about trends in men’s wear.

As a local small business owner, I’m passionate about helping other business owners in the community. Planning a wedding can take a lot of time and effort, and without the right resources, can feel a little overwhelming. I think it’s so important for brides and grooms to know about the amazing amount of talent and knowledge that these area wedding professionals possess and want to share.

Together, the Corridor Wedding Guide and I hope readers enjoy meeting local wedding professionals and love their great advice that they have to offer.

Why would you go to the trouble of picking the perfect portrait session location, choosing just the right outfit to wear and then fussing over how you look on the day of the session if you were planning to never show anyone your photographs?

The whole reason you hire a photographer is to be able to show off the photographs to everyone!

After the engagement session, when couples see their images, there are usually a ton of different poses that they love. They are excited and want to share those great images with all their friends and family.

But how do they do that?

They could throw big parties so people visit their home to see portraits hung on the walls. They could post some images online and hope their friends are not too busy to check Facebook. Or they could set up a large portrait gallery at your wedding reception. While all of these might be good options, there really is a better one.

One of the easiest ways to let all the wedding guests see those fabulous images is with a wedding guest book.

Laura and Nicolas had twenty-some images from their session (see more images here) that they really loved and wanted to share with their family and friends. They decided a guest book would be a fun way to do just that.

Having their engagement session photographs in their guest book allowed their wedding guests to flip through the pages and see Laura and Nicolas’ personality as they really are: fun, natural, relaxed, and totally in love.

And having space in the book for guests to write allowed them to leave a sweet note of congratulations for Laura and Nicolas to keep and treasure.

When the Corridor Wedding Guide asked us about featuring one of our brides and grooms on their Real Weddings section, I knew exactly who I would pick!

Bre and Steve were married on August 1st in Iowa City, at a gorgeous Catholic church with a reception at the popular Bella Sala. I have had the pleasure of working with them since we met last November. We had done a bridal show at the Old Capital Museum that Bre attended. We clicked from the start.

We quickly found lots to bond over, from our love of Wisconsin (Steve) to a shared obsession of wedding details (Bre), like the cake that was Bre’s whole inspiration for her color scheme and theme.

Steve is a Green Bay Packers fan, so we even tweaked the time of their engagement session so he wouldn’t miss all of the Super Bowl playoff game. (That was the game the Packers lost, so we won’t speak of this again….)

The genuine and compassionate emotions that Bre shares become contagious. You can’t help but be drawn in by her, whether she is talking about her wedding, her family or the people at work who she treats like family.

When she cried when she first saw her wedding photographs, I was both touched and delighted! I knew the photographs were very important to her, so when she saw them and loved them, that meant so much to me.

So, it made me happy and excited that we were able to share these images with everyone else.

I already knew the story of how they met and fell in love, but it was still so much fun to read it again on the Corridor Wedding Guide website. Hop on over to read the story and see more images from Bre & Steve’s wedding. I hope you enjoy it, too!