DIY Bride

So, you have, what?, 3, maybe 4 gazillion ideas for your wedding. You’ve got oodles of magazine clippings, reams of printed goodies from sites, and hundreds of bookmarks from things that may have caught your fancy at some point along the way. How do you put all of those ideas and inspiration together? Let me introduce you to the mood board.

Mood boards are nifty tools used by designers to present a collection of ideas and inspiration. Graphic designers, landscape architects, interior designers and event
coordinators all use mood boards as a way to gather their ideas together for a project without commiting to any one thing. (Don’t like that flower arrangement with the room color? No problem! Swap it out with another picture.) Mood boards are traditionally foamcore or posterboard presentations but lots of designers have gone digital, using Photoshop instead of a real board.

The uber-wonderful design blog, Decor8, recently announced a mood board contest (win Amy Butler patterns!) and that’s set off a ripple through the Internets. There’s lot of mood board buzz this week (even though they’ve been around forever). Flickr has some awesome non-wedding mood board inspiration to get you started on the MB concept. (Search mood board + inspiration board .)

Now, for wedding-specific boards, check out Weddingbee! They’re posting user-submitted mood boards and I can’t wait to see what they share. My friend, and ultra-cool wedding diva, Terrica, from Once Upon Your Wedding will be showcasing a new mood board on her blog every week. Net-A-Porter has some wedding board goodness. And, of course, I’ll be creating some mood boards with a DIY point of view coming up soon. (For the impatient among you, check out our Themes & Styles board in the forums for some inspiration.)

If any of you, my dear DIYers, would like to share your mood boards, I’d love it! Send ‘em over!

[ Editing to add that Style Me Pretty has amazingly beautiful wedding mood boards,]