It’s All About The Cards

Choosing Your Color

First things first: location. When deciding on a scheme, you must consider the reception space or choose a space without decor or color. If you’ve chosen a country club with navy and maroon Oriental carpets, a color scheme of lime green and hot pink won’t work.

Next, become aware of color combinations that you like, whether browsing art galleries or flipping through a stack of fashion magazines. You might be able to narrow down your color choices to a half a dozen. To help you choose the exact hue for your wedding details, visit a local fabric store or paint shop and collect swatches or chips of colors you might want to use. This will help you get specific, so that when you decide on green you’ll know if it’s lime green, kelly green, sage green, or forest green. If you have access to a Pantone book, use this collection of colors to select your shade the same way graphic designers do. Many invitation designers mix ink to match the colors in this book, and many cake bakers use Pantone numbers as a reference when creating dye for frosting. Can’t decide on just one or two colors? Don’t worry. In fact, many extraordinary weddings feature a variety of colors, sometimes up to five, that work together to create a specific sensibility — like an “English garden” with green, yellow, pink, red, and brown, or “Fall in New England” with orange, red, brown, and gold.

Where & How to Execute Color

Where and how you use color really depends on the mood you are trying to create. The best way to get started is to figure out what emotions you want your celebration to evoke. A peaceful, Zen-like retreat? A regal, romantic affair? A jumping, high-energy party?

For instance, a vibrant summer yellow mixed with chocolate brown (think sunflowers and bees) is perfect for a country-chic wedding style; add gold to the mix, and the combination becomes more reminiscent of Northern Italy. As another example, leaf green paired with cantaloupe is pretty for a waterside wedding; but pair this green with copper, and you have a color scheme that’s formal enough for a ballroom or an estate setting. If your wedding takes place in multiple spaces, each room can have its own color scheme.

The Elements of Style

Attire Your gown doesn’t have to be solid white, especially since color accents are increasingly more available. A blue or red sash around the waist is striking and still very bridal. The groom and his guys can also sport color in their ties or on their cuff links. But color will be most prominently displayed throughout the day in the bridesmaid dresses. Some fervent folks might want to match the dresses to the invitation ribbons, the favor tags, and the bouquets but this isn’t the only way to define a style. Mixing and matching dresses in varying shades — pink and orange, or pale green and yellow — can sometimes make a statement stronger than uniformity.

Invitations- Your invitations set the stage for the event, so remember that mood you want to evoke? This is your time to show it off. Coordinating the invitation colors with those of the wedding can be as easy as choosing a color font, ribbon, or monogram or as elaborate as layering colorful cards.

Flowers & Decor No matter what color you’ve chosen, chances are you’ll be able to find flowers in that shade — but that, of course, does not mean the blooms will be available or affordable. If your dream flowers aren’t an option, use neutral white flowers with centerpiece containers or other decor elements in your color.

Wedding Cake The cake is one of the easiest places to add color — all it takes is the right mixing. The color should reflect the other style elements used throughout the wedding. But when it comes to cake, your color options are the most flexible. White icing makes a marvelous background for colorful sugar flowers, sugar-paste stripes or polka dots, or other effects. Fondant can also be created in any number of shades. For instance, a yellow and brown country-chic wedding might have a wedding cake iced in a light brown basket weave and topped with fresh sunflowers.

Favors Ultimately, it’s more important to give something meaningful rather than something that matches, but it can be a nice touch to your favors package in your color scheme. Use gift tags and ribbons to incorporate your colors into your favors. If favors will be left at each place setting, consider how they will look with your wedding linens and flowers.

New Ways to Use Color

We should point out that overdoing it with a matchy-match look is entirely possible. (You don’t want your guests thinking, Um, yeah, lavender…we get it.) Begin with the five essential wedding elements (attire, invitations, flowers, cake, and favors) and see where you can — or should — add more color. Then consider details, such as napkins, candles, signature drinks, your ring pillow, or your guest book, made from the same fabric and in the same color as the bridesmaid dresses.

1 Be Generous. With your time, your money, your heart. If, on my best day, there was a single lesson I could hope to impart to you, this would be it.

2 Root for other people. We all tend to envy other people’s successes. It’s not intentional; somewhere in our DNA it seems to be programmed that for every success for someone else, there is one less success for us. For every book published, there is one less book we will publish; for every baby had, there is one less baby for us to have. Of course, that is illogical. Fight off those thoughts; there is an unlimited amount of potential for everyone in this universe. Championing others is kind, and even more, it’s a display of optimism that will seep into you and color your view of this life.

3 You don’t have to pretend you know something if you don’t. It’s okay to just say, “I don’t know.” You can’t know everything!

4 You are the wellspring of your own hope. No one (besides your mother) will be more invested in your emotional well-being than they are in their own. Joy is not something gifted to you by other people; it’s an outlook on the world that you have to cultivate independent of friends and lovers. Daughter, if I could give it to you, I would, a million times over, but the truth is that you are singularly responsible for your own happiness.

5 Live alone for a period of time. I love living with you and your father; I also cherish the years I spent living alone. You shouldn’t go from being someone’s daughter to someone’s wife to someone’s mother without first being someone yourself. Living alone will allow you to discover who you are when no one is watching, what you need to get through a day, and ultimately that you are a capable, independent woman.

6 If you marry your first love you will miss out on the exquisite pain of a broken heart.

7 Talk to strangers. Teaching you to fear strangers would be cynical. The generosity of unknown people will ease your burden on many occasions. Instead, I want you to learn to gauge people’s intentions by listening to your gut instincts and recognizing subtle cues. Confidence in this skill will allow you to avoid the aberrant persons you encounter and embrace something much more common — the kindness of strangers.

8 Be where you are. Try not to think about where you need to go next or wherever you just came from. This is more difficult than it sounds, but work at it. It’s important for your head to be present in the place where your body is.

9 Unless you’re playing a game, there’s no point in keeping score. Running a tally of who gets what in life will only frustrate you and annoy everyone else. It serves no purpose; the way life’s benefits and hindrances are doled out will never make any sense.

10 Ensure that the “bad” things you do are the result of your own choices. You are doubtlessly going to engage in some unhealthy, unwise or otherwise questionable behavior somewhere along the line; this is part of learning your limits and establishing your comfort zone. Please have enough self-awareness to at least make the choice to participate, rather than floating through life getting swept up in whatever trouble comes your way.

11 If you test people, they may fail. Friendship, love, and family don’t hinge on any single success or failure; you would do yourself a disservice to administer litmus tests to things as labyrinthine as love and affection.

12 Acknowledge inequity. Thomas Jefferson wrote in The Declaration of Independence “All men are created equal.” Today, we interpret “men” to mean “people,” but at that time “men” was not intended to be inclusive of women, or even of men who were not white. Inequity existed 200 years ago, and it still exists today. Don’t let anyone tell you that everyone gets a fair shot. Be sympathetic to the disadvantaged and work hard to include them.

13 Create a sense of family wherever you are. Find people to love and love them unconditionally.

14 Try not to wait eagerly for people to finish their stories just so you can tell your own versions that more directly involve you.

15 Pursue more than just the things you are good at. You will be told at a young age what your talents are. Enjoy the compliments, but don’t accept them at face value. You don’t want to walk a narrow path; attempt things you aren’t comfortable with and uncover skills or proclivities you didn’t know you possessed.

16 Everyone is a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is not the blanket failure it’s made out to be; we all act in ways that conflict with the image we want to reflect or the values we want to embody. Try not to pigeonhole people with expectations; be forgiving of this inconsistency, both in yourself and in others.

17 You will get good at anything you practice. Everything gets easier the more you do it, good or bad, so choose your habits wisely.

18 If you don’t have the money to buy an extravagant gift for someone special, bake!

19 Discipline in your mind; extravagance in your heart.

20 It is possible to be both pretty and smart. They don’t always go together, certainly, but one thing does not preclude the other. This goes for you and also for people you meet.

21 There’s a science to everything.

22 Every time you rescue someone else, you rescue yourself a little bit. You will have occasion to save people: to throw a life preserver, to present an opportunity, to alter a destiny for the better. Seize these chances. Reflect your best, most giving characteristics. Rescue yourself from tedious inward focus: These are your opportunities, too.

23 The measure of your goodness is not the amount of love you receive. It is the quality of the love you give to others. It takes a long time to learn this lesson, maybe more time than most of us have.

The Holidays are the most joyful time of the year…however for many they are also the most stressful. Shopping, cooking, traveling and parties can begin to take their toll on your sanity. Take the headache out of your holiday with these organizational and time-saving tips:

• Shop Early & Shop Smart – Asking friends and family what they want for Christmas will make shopping easier and less stressful. Shop on the internet to save time, gas and often money. Call ahead to make sure stores have your item in stock. Team up with friends or family to share shopping duties – they can purchase your items while at one store and you can pick up items for them while at another store, saving you each a trip.

• Purchase and prepare your Christmas photo cards in October or November – you can mail them out whenever you wish, but this is one holiday task that’s easy to do ahead of time. ItsAllAboutTheCards.com already has over 100 new holiday designs!

• Enlist your Family’s help in keeping the house clean – Take advantage of the extra good will during the holidays and enlist your spouse and children’s help. Assign daily or weekly chores that normally you would do. Chances are your family will be willing to help out if they’re gently reminded of the extra baking, shopping, decorating and planning you’re doing to make their holiday special!

• Make a list – Santa has a list, why shouldn’t you? If you’re not already a list-maker, there’s no better time to start than at the holidays. You’ll be able to efficiently plan your day, and there’s a calming effect to jotting down your duties…no matter how big your list is, it seems more manageable on paper than when it’s floating around in your head. The holidays need not be the most stressful time of the year – getting an early start, staying organized and asking for help when you need it can all help put the “Happy” back into your Holiday.

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