ceremony decor

What Brides (and Event/Wedding Planners) can Learn from Extreme Cage Fighting

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Chuck Liddell facing off against Rich Franklin...
Image via Wikipedia

What’s the one thing everybody knows about cage fighting? No holds barred. No rules. Can that apply to the bridal design world? Read on. And if you got to this blog by googling “cage fighting bride?” you have got to email me. Because that’s awesome. Etiquette books contain mountains of good advice- and we owe the people who write them a great debt of gratitude. Receiving line order and invitation wording – couldn’t do it without them. People notice sometimes though, that we don’t keep a lot of wedding planning books around the store. Happy to share why: we believe in the “Ultimate Fighting” school of wedding design. We operate by nobody’s rules but our own, and as far as we’re concerned, there are no rules.  That works for us on a few levels.

1)  There are no rules for us in the way we design.  Nothing is off the table, and so all our pieces are developed as individual ideas. We don’t do the cookie-cutter follow the trend thing.

2)  There are no fashion or style rules.  If a bride loves and wants a baby blue and pale yellow theme for her December wedding, we aren’t going to talk her into more “seasonal” colors. Velvet in summer, rhinestones in the morning, snowflakes in July…we color outside the lines.

"out of the box" Prom entryway display - La Quinta prom 2011

3)  There are no rules for who our clientele will be. We would never turn away a wedding for being too small.  Everyone’s celebration is important, and deserves beautiful wedding flowers. We take a budget, work out what can be done, and make it beautiful.

4)  Since we allow our ideas to develop from the ground up, it passes on the “no rules” ethos to our brides and quinceaneras.  They can tell us what they truly dreamed- not just what they think we can do or what the girl next door had at her event. We really listen – we don’t impose a vision of how things “should” be.

So as you plan (your wedding, or your client’s), make sure you’re following your instincts, your dreams and your heart.  Don’t bother so much with rules.  And the only holding that matters, is that of hands, and hearts.

bride and groom in gazebo

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Keepin’ it Real with our homegrown Princess Brides

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You know what beats pictures of Royal Weddings?  Real Weddings.  Real Weddings in Palm Springs? Even better. My Little Flower Shop’s weddings, of course, rock the casbah. (oooh..Moroccan themed desert wedding…somebody write that down)!

Once again, thanks to Mellany Miller Photography for the amazing images.  Attention brides: notice how the placement and style of the flowers accents the location and vice-versa.  More on this in a later post.  But for now, enjoy these beautiful photos.

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Cuckoo clocks, Givenchy and other wedding style tips

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A blogger we love, Grace Bonney, editor at DesignSponge, tweeted recently that she still loves cuckoo clocks, even though the trend has passed. Trend, shmend, I say!  I tell my brides, trends don’t matter, use what you love.  It’ll cycle back, so you’re always ahead of the crowd.  Think about it – what goes around comes around. Then there are those styles that never leave- think about Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy wardrobe, or to be more down-to-earth, a great pair of black knee-high riding boots.  Riding boots were in style in 1875, 1975, and I promise women be sporting them when stepping out of their flying cars in 2075, looking as sharp as ever. They’re a classic.  It’s a good concept to keep in mind when you’re thinking about your wedding style. You don’t want to look back at your  pictures and groan about your choices.  Think timeless, and think of what you love, not what the editor of Brides’ magazine is so breathless over.  After all, it’s not her wedding.

a classic gown, for a timeless beauty.