Capitol Inspiration: Shel Silverstein Inspired Wedding Shoot ~ Clouds, Lightbulbs, Glittery Gold & More

Another Friday is upon us. Not only that, but another month too! Tomorrow is September and I couldn’t be happier. Now if only the weather would play along.

I love fall more than anything – the sites, the sounds, the smell of fall all put me in the best mood. So while I sit around waiting for the weather to get cooler, I’ll give you today’s Capitol Inspiration post ~ pictures and details from our Shel Silverstein Wedding Shoot!

This one started like most of my collaborative styled shoots do ~ with random emails between Abby Grace Photography & I. A quick “hey we should do this!!!” always ignites a firestorm of imagination inside me as I start visualizing color schemes, details, and of course all the awesome vendors we want on board.

Pictures & Details from a Shel Silverstein Inspired Wedding Shoot ~ “The Dreamer”

Abby and I both love Shel. I grew up reading “Where the Sidewalk Ends” “A Missing Piece” and more. For this we tried to stay mainly focused on his poem “An Invitation” from “Where the Sidewalk Ends”

If you are a dreamer, come in.
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer . . .
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire,
For we have some flax golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

From there we used words like: dreamy, whimsical, ethereal and mixed them with a hint of industrial. We focused on motifs like the lightbulbs and clouds and decided our color palette would be pale pink, white, charcoal, and glittery gold!

When it came time to find our stationery/graphic designer – well it was a no brainer. Off to Weswen Design we went a-callin’. Wendy hit it out of the Quidditch pitch with our Harry Potter Wedding designs, so we knew she would be the perfect person to interpret Abby and my’s oftentimes slightly elusive and overly hyper description of what we want.

Weswen Design nailed it – designing the wedding invitation like a window, literally inviting the reader to “come in” and reader more.

Abby had some fun with our RSVP wording, and we wanted to use a mix of fonts to evoke that childlike wonder that Shel so beautifully did with his poetry.

Next we brought on Anthomanic to design the florals. Again, we described a shoot based on clouds, dreams, and lightbulbs. Anthomanic brought us the wonderful centerpiece here, that actually had lightlbubs IN the floral design. So cool.

Abby and I were worried the sweetheart tablescape might have appeared a bit too bland, so we found some ways to incorporate our color palette, without overwhelming. Abby scored these light pink tinged glasses and the beautiful venue, The Black Horse Inn, had perfect gold chargers on hand.

We had Wendy design up a cute little menu, and I DIYed the flatware gold. We thought the gold wire would be a nice little hint again at the “industrial” side of the wedding inspiration and I sprinkled some glitter on the table to glam up the white table cloth a bit.

Another look at the styled ceremony space we crafted ~ including those DIY clouds I talked about on Wednesday. The “bride and groom” are actually an actual bride and groom to be ~ the stunning Alex [of Alexandra Nicole Design] & her fiance Seamus.

I had been dying to work with Julie of Jewel Hair Design, ever since she did my hair for my own wedding! Her work is unparallelled, and again I knew she would be able to translate what we wanted [Dreamy-Cloudy-Puffy-Romantic-Soft-Artistic] into the perfect hair styles. We had her style the hair down for the “ceremony” pictures and then later you can see how she changed the style into a beautiful updo.

The hairstyles were perfectly accentuated by awesomely unique & offbeat hair accessories from Two Back Flats. Check out the details on her two pieces that we used [this stunning offbeat veil and the top hat later in the post, here]

Makeup was executed flawlessly by the super talented, Dainty Artistry. Rachel, again, captured everything we wanted for Alex’s makeup. Pale pink lips, soft but gorgeous lashes and a touch of gold on her lids.

The signature drink was something I had found online. I loved it because of the perfect color match to our shoot and the cool whip topping, again, evoked the cloud motif.

Click inside for the rest of the details & pictures from our Shel Silverstein “Dreamer” Inspired Wedding Shoot!

Abby and I are always searching for ways to incorporate new ideas into our styled shoots. With the dessert spread, we decided to fore go the traditional cake or cupcakes and find desserts that matched our whimsical, cloud motif. We thought up pound cake, cream puffs, and meringues as the perfect desserts. And then we thought – well you cannot have cloud desserts without cotton candy! So we completed the spread with little cones of cotton candy for our “Sweet Dreams” dessert table.

My mom’s recipe was used for the cream puffs I made ~ and omg yes, to answer your question, they were as good as they looked.

And now I leave you with the rest of the stunning images, captured of course by Abby Grace Photography. So insanely stunning.

The dress was borrowed from Fabulous Frocks of Alexandria ~ an upscale bridal consignment shop. This dress was the perfect fit for our “dreamer” theme, don’t you think?

The “bride” wore glittery gold flats ~ from Payless!!

 And that about sums it up! A final thanks again to ALL the amazing vendors that worked with Abby & me on this shoot. Hope everyone enjoyed this one last look at how we put our Shel Silverstein wedding shoot together!