Purple Vision

How gorgeous is this inspiration board!

That dress! Stun-n-ing!

My wedding colour is purple and my plan is to have it as the main colour, with others colours playing a supporting role as accents. However I have quickly discovered that purple has such a shade range and one person's purple is another person's lilac!

Any other purple brides?

picture credit - {Simply Dazzling Events}

First DIY Project: Monograms

I consider myself rather IT literate and I'm hoping to embark on a lot of DIY projects myself (certainly know my Word from my Excel, my Publisher from my Powerpoint). So last weekend I attempted to design my own monograms. Monograms are great - they can jazz up your invites, personalise your aisle runners or just be a decorative feature as part of your wedding. 

Normally when designing things I use Publisher, (which most printers hate!), particularly since I am yet to master Photoshop or InDesign. This time round however I decided to use PowerPoint - yes you heard correctly! Powerpoint is a design software in disguise. Albeit it's not as all-singing-and-dancing as Photoshop, but it does what you need it to do. In this case, putting together a monogram. Below is my first effort with step-by-step instructions of how I did it.

Step 1.

I drew a text box which would have my name and FI name. I chose a standard font - Book Antiqua and change the colour to my wedding colour and increased the size to 36.

Step 2.

I drew another text box for the initial, which in our case is 'E' and I chose a script font (Edwardian Script) and increase the point to around 200. As this was going to sit in the background, I changed the colour to a light grey.

Step 3.

I moved the text boxes so that the 'E' would sit in the middle.

Step 4.

I drew another text box and position that under my name, which I used for the date. Again same purple colour, but smaller font size (18).

Step 5. 

Highlight all the text boxes and paste into Microsoft Office Picture Manager. This then saves the file as png (picture file) and voila!

The great thing about a png file as I learnt today is that all the white area is transparent so you can put the image on any background and the colour will come through.

In the words of Blue Peter...here's a couple I made earlier.

 

In my quest for monograms I originally contacted Nicole from Pink Event Designs as I had seen her work on Project Wedding. She was fantastic and came back with 6 designs:

Think I'm preferring hers!

The Colour Purple

So our wedding colour is purple.  I've always liked it as colour and there are so many variations on the shades that it comes in. My wedding is one of four I will be attending this year (that I currently know about) and as far as I'm aware, purple is not being used by any of the other brides. I did consider including orange into the colour scheme, not as a major colour but as an accent, but my mum and sis (who is also my MOH) were not feeling it at all, so that's out of the window.

I have already found my dress (top secret until the big day) and now I'm focusing on the dresses for our bridal party. We have seven bridesmaid and six groomsmen, all ranging from family to close friends. For the bridesmaids in particular, its about every girl looking and feeling her best on the day, whilst still letting her individual style come through. I'm not about to put them in ugly dresses or enforce particular hair styles for example, as that won't work for everyone. Ultimately I want them to look stylish and be comfortable. 

I visited three stores with my sister, chief bridesmaid and one of my bridesmaids. There were a few style of dresses that we liked but when we asked about colours and fabrics, they didn't come in the ones we needed. After looking at the dresses in store, we have decided to get them made by a tailor as it will work out more cost effective and we can have more influence on the style and fabric. I'm going to start to looking at fabrics with my mum in the coming weeks and in the meantime get my maids to choose the styles that they like. 

Here are some of my favourites...

Dessy

Dessy

Dessy

Monsoon

Alfred Angelo

Dessy - love love love this one - it's my fave!