Bridal bouquets and table centerpieces are often the main focus when it comes to a wedding’s floral design.  Personal floral pieces for your loved ones can be another impactful design element at your event. Many couples choose to honor family members who aren’t in the bridal party with a wedding corsage or boutonniere. There of course aren’t any permanent rules or set in stone traditions, but it can be a thoughtful touch to recognize parents, grandparents, godparents, and immediate family members who have an important role in your life. It’s also nice to recognize ushers and ceremony readers with a small floral adornment as a token of appreciation for their part in your big day, especially if they are not in the same attire as your bridal party.

Image on Left by Blaine Seisser, Center Image via Harwell Photography, Image on Right via Jen Kroll Photography

Though boutonnieres are small, they can pack some serious style. These dapper accessories add personality, color and style to any gentleman’s wedding day attire. You can use beautiful floral, greenery, herbs or berries to the boutonnieres depending on the look you are trying to achieve. Keep in mind, boutonnieres may not be the right fit for your wedding day attire, as some suits (in our opinion) look better with a great pocket square!

Image on Left via Green Wedding Shoes; Image on Right via Style Me Pretty

Wrist corsages are often perceived as cheesy and old fashioned. In our eyes, a corsage is only old fashioned if the design is outdated. To give the piece a modern flair, try adding one large bloom and opting for beautiful ribbon or lace instead of plain elastic around the wrist. Other couples opt to gift the ladies they love with nosegays also known as a “tussie-mussie” or “posy.” These are small bouquets often gifted to the bride and groom’s mothers. We have also done purse adornments for ladies as another personal floral variation. My husband and I gave our grandmothers wrist corsages on our wedding day. Seeing their faces light up when they received them was so special. We loved that they had a personal floral piece that made them feel loved and cherished on that important day.

Image on Left via Ruffled, Image on Right via Jen Kroll Photography

Flower girls are always so precious when they enter the ceremony decorating the aisle with flower petals. We love creating a special piece for them to accessorize their pretty dresses. Floral halos, a petal basket made of twigs and moss, or even a gardenesque wand are options they will love! Don’t forget about for your darling ring bearer!

Image on Left via The Knot, Center Image via 100 Layer Cake, Image on Right Via Design Sponge

Some couples are opting to allow all of their guests to wear their own floral accessories. Floral stations can be a fun, interactive element at your wedding day. Create a beautiful display with boutonnieres, corsages and floral hair pins that your guests can select from upon their entry. Or better yet, have a build your own accessory station where guests can select from an assortment of fresh blooms and attach them to the pin or elastic of their choosing. What a joy to see your guest’s creations and how they choose to wear them!

A round of applause to all the incredible women in our lives- those who have come before us, those who lead us,
those who nurture us, support us, those we serve and those who will one day take our places. Our hat is off to you.
xoxo, the Ladies of A Day in May Events.

“There’s an inner beauty about a woman who believes in herself, who knows she is capable of anything she puts her mind to. There is a beauty in the strength and determination of a woman who follows her own path, who isn’t thrown off by obstacles along the way. There is a beauty about a woman whose confidence comes from experience- who knows she can fall, pick herself up, and go on.” (Borrowed from the Carlton Card’s greeting card that sits on Alicia’s desk given to her at her high school graduation.)

As we mentioned in last week’s “Stationery Spotlight,” your stationery is one of the first strong design elements for your wedding and special events. Fonts are a great place to start in the stationery design process. The typefaces you select, combined with your color palette, the paper weight, texture and any additional embellishments all work together to convey the style of your event. The resurgence of handlettering and calligraphy has all of us in love, but we’ll save those two beauties for another post!

Before you begin selecting fonts for your invitation suite and branding elements at your event, it is important that you have an understanding of the style and feeling you want to evoke at your wedding. Are you classic or contemporary? Rustic or coastal? Casual or whimsical? The wording on your invitation conveys information to your guests, but the style of that text communicates just as strongly. If you choose a traditional, calligraphic typeface, your guests can gather that your event will be quite formal. A looser, hand lettered style provides a more casual, intimate feeling.

An elegant, timeless typeface will convey a classic, formal style. If you are hosting a modern fete, a sleek, minimal font with clean lines will do the trick. Old world font styles that hint at a different era can capture your vintage style perfectly!

The fonts you select of course should be beautiful to the eye, but it is essential that they are readable. You wouldn’t want your guests struggling to read their program or dinner menu because the type was small or difficult to read. Think about your guests and the function of the pieces you are using the typeface for.

We usually recommend mixing 2-3 different fonts to add interest to your invitation suite and branding elements. There are 3 basic types of typefaces: serif, sans serif, and script. To create contrast, it is common to combine a script typeface style with a sans serif typeface. Use the beautiful script typeface for your names or larger headings so you can see the details and unique qualities of the letters, and designate a more simple, sans serif font for smaller text and body copy.

Selecting your wedding fonts can seem like a daunting task. Here are an assortment of our favorite resources to find fonts and lettering inspiration to get you started- Happy Font-ing!!

MyFonts
We love this tool to discover new fonts and typeface designers. You can easily search by style (ie: vintage, modern, rustic). The site provides a great overview about the typeface and a gallery that lets you view various applications where the typeface was used. Our favorite feature is that you can enter your own text to see how it will look in that particular typeface. WhatTheFont is another fun feature – you can upload in image of a font and they will provide you with the actual name of the typeface or other similar results!

FontSquirrel

This site is awesome. It provides an assortment of free fonts that you can easily download and incorporate in your designs. You can sort by what’s new, what’s popular, the type classification or the style tags. Plus if you are a graphic designer, the fonts are 100% free for commercial use.

The Daily Type

We love following this Instagram feed for daily type and hand lettering inspiration. Their colorful feed featuring themes talented designers is sure to excite! The Daily Type’s website has great tools for the aspiring designer – check our their lettering kit and online workshop!

“If you build it they will come.” Seven ordinary words with a profound promise. Although I never memorized the movie, the message the Iowa corn farmer, played by Kevin Costner, heard in ‘Field of Dreams’, has stuck with me since I first saw the film.

The words are reminders to us that we hold the power to attract greatness but that we also have the responsibility to take first action; action that will set ourselves up to be open to the greater unknown. It’s scary to take action, to build. The process of building entails a rather sizable undertaking with a specific strategy and process. Building also implies heavy lifting and a lot of hard work. Work that takes a particular order and direction resulting in something that wasn’t there before. That something that wasn’t there before, it was built by you and created in your eye.

I built A Day in May Events not from brick and mortar but from principals I honed from working in the private club industry, which are: no matter who you are (Alicia Caldecott or Bill Gates) everyone is equally important; serve others they way you would want to be served; always operate with integrity. It was these ideals that I wanted to shine and I hoped that if I built these ideas up, and shared them, that we would attract clients and have a book of business that would support our small company.

Putting oneself out there in any manner is a risk, and very vulnerable act. Are people going to find me? What will they think of me? Will I book enough business to keep the doors open? Will I be strong enough to stand by what I built and wait for the people the find me and see what I see? There’s a quote from the movie ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ that supports this big idea… “Between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.”

We don’t know what will happen when we build or take our first steps, but we do know that if we build what is representative of our wants, wishes, hopes and dreams others like us, who seek what we seek, will find us and being found is sometimes all that we need.

… proof that words are timeless and have impact no matter what age of their arrangement. As we embark on our new journey, Meister Eckhart’s words resonate with us just as they did with his disciples more than 700 years ago. Trust the magic of your own beginnings. We are.