Wedding Decorations

Wedding Theme Ideas

You know you want your wedding reception to be truly unique, personal, and memorable, but you just don’t know where to start. You have so many ideas running around your head, but none of them seem to work together. Finding a starting point for your wedding decorations is often all you need to do for all your ideas to fall neatly into place.

Here are some of the places you could begin when choosing decorations for your wedding:

Your wedding season

The time of year you have chosen for your wedding can have a big impact on your decorations, especially the colour. Spring weddings tend to feature pastel colours and light unstructured flower arrangements, while summer weddings work well with brighter, more tropical colours and a fruity theme. Autumn wedding are a perfect time for rich oranges, yellows and bronzes, as well as velvety fabrics and harvest styles, while winter weddings are a great time for gold, silver, and deep red, and heavier, cosier decorations.

Your wedding venue

Basing your wedding decorations around the style of your venue is guaranteed to create a seamless effect. An outdoor garden wedding requires minimal decoration, but unstructured flower arrangements and rustic objects such as metal watering cans can work a treat. A historic house will require classical or vintage decorations, while a minimalist modern hotel or gallery provides a blank canvas for a funky contemporary scheme.

Check out the interior of your wedding venue before you decide on your colour scheme. If there are elements you can’t change such as paint, wallpaper, or carpet, you will have to work with these and find wedding colours that complement them. If you are getting married outside, find out which plants and flowers will be in bloom on your wedding date and build your colour scheme around those.

The formality of your wedding

Before you determine your wedding decorations, think about how formal you want your wedding to be. For a very formal event, only floral table centres will do. If you are having a casual affair, on the other hand, a mini cup cake tower or a bowl of floating candles can make a perfect centrepiece.

The same goes for your table stationery. If you are having a formal wedding, traditional escort cards, a printed seating plan, and neat place names are all necessary, but if you are having an informal wedding you can peg escort cards to a clothes line, telling your guests which table they are on, and let them decide for themselves where to sit.

A single wedding object

Often it only takes one object to inspire your entire wedding decoration theme. Try shopping for your bridal gown and then using its colour, decorative features, and style to determine your wedding decorations. Alternatively have a look at wedding cakes, wedding flowers, or even wedding rings, and take inspiration from one of these.

Your personal style

Nothing makes a wedding memorable like adding your own personality to it, so sit down and brainstorm the things you like to see if they could be used in your wedding decorations. Do you love a certain country, or a type of animal? Do you have an obsession the music, fashion, or movies of a particular decade? Even a favourite colour can be the inspiration you need for your wedding decorations.

Once you have found a starting point for your wedding decorations, make a scrapbook or a mood board and collect anything you come across that reflects that theme. Wedding magazines are a good place to start, but home and fashion magazines can be just as effective. Look for fabric samples and types of flowers that work well with the idea you have chosen.