The above photo from Martha Stewart Weddings served as my colour scheme inspiration from the second I saw it. This photo may have heavily influence my decision to choose an "Emerald and Jade" colour palette.
Now, I have always liked a little more shimmer, so I knew we would choose a shinier fabric like satin. I also love the idea of the dresses being different, but I think we'll stick with a standard length... perhaps just above the knee for our late summer wedding.
Here's a recap of some of our inspiration photos as well as some of the wedding accessories that we've already collected. If you'd like to catch up on our planning, click the "Wedding" tab at the top of this blog.
I think I found the picture below on Pinterest. It is so blurry, but I think it reflects the colour scheme we want quite well.
Now back to the point of this post... bridesmaid dress shopping. Okay, let's first discuss how the entire concept of choosing bridesmaids makes me nervous. I just get grossed out at the thought of ranking my friends. It's awful, isn't it? Corey and I both have several close friends, but we didn't want our wedding party to over power our small wedding. Instead of choosing all the people we wanted, we decided to ask people we couldn't imagine not being in the wedding party. We were both lucky to have very obvious choices and I ended up with four bridesmaids: a "bff", a partner in crime, a surrogate sister and a future sister-in-law.
Two of my bridesmaids are going to be out of town this year and I thought it might be easiest to just buy fabric for each gal and let them have their own dress made in any style they want.
Corey and I hadn't thought much about it until we were at Fabricland looking for fabric to make a Christmas Tree skirt. We spotted some lovely green fabric and learned about an upcoming sale... so we made plans to go back.
We returned this week to scope out the perfect colours. Since I didn't have the girls with me, Corey and I had to choose colours that we thought would look good on all four. I had never considered it before, but it's really challenging to choose things that work with the style of your wedding but will also not be brutal for your wedding party to wear. Our goal was to choose four pretty colours that worked well together.
There were so many choices, but some of the greens were too yellow or too blue. We also wanted to keep the colours fresh for our summer wedding.
We ended up with four that we loved. They ranged from a light minty sage to a very dark forest green.
We kept swatches to help us shop for accessories.
And bought enough of each fabric for the girls to go crazy with embellishments!