One of the most difficult parts of designing a wedding is so often taking the ideas in your head and translating them into something cohesive, tangible and visible. Not everyone visualizes the same thing - one person may see coral where another sees peach, a blue and white wedding to one can translate into velvet blue linens with all white floral and another could see all white linens with blue napkins, goblets and pops of blue floral, and I can’t even tell you how many times people have referenced the color turquoise, when they really meant teal. Even when showing inspiration images of something like bouquets it can be easily misinterpreted, one may see textures and shape, where another focuses on specific blooms and colors.

Investing in a design mock-up is great way to give your design team a trial run on that dreamy colorful bouquet with an asymmetrical shape you’ve been visualizing and course-correct where things don’t 100% line-up. I feel this is extremely important when you are designing with an array of colors or various patterns. Maybe that color napkin doesn’t look quite as beautiful when paired with the florals, or perhaps the centerpiece is too wide when you add all the tabletop pieces and need to revise the shape or vase. If the visual part of the wedding day is important to you, design mock-ups give you the peace of mind that everything your money is going towards, will translate exactly how you visualized for your dream wedding day!

ROUGH PRE-LIM INSPO BOARD

We started the design process with our rough preliminary mood board which helped us start to draft the visual details of the day. The bride really wanted an emphasis on some blue tones, but blue florals, without using dyes, are hard to come by. We opted to bring in the blue hues with two different velvet linens along with mismatched colorful goblets. We also brought in plenty of candle elements, which were ordered in a variety of colors, including blue pillars. When creating the mood board, we do our best to avoid wedding images because we aim to create something that is unique to our clients and not a replica of someone else’s big day.

The bouquets pictured could be interpreted in multiple ways, from the colors to the textures, vibe and shape - so when creating these boards and emailing them to our vendors, it is important that we help our vendors note what about these images are pulling on our clients heart strings.

Once we wrap up our mock-ups, we take our preliminary designs, and draft them into a multi-page wedding day blueprint that outlines how the wedding day visually unfolds.

TABLETOP MOCK-UP

First round was the tablescapes with 3 different table designs, we wanted to make sure the bride and her mother loved each option, and had the florist create a sample centerpiece for the bride to review when all pieces came together. We met at the rental showroom so we could easily replace any pieces the bride didn’t entirely love. Due to the dark nature of the historic wedding venue, the main linen option for our 25 tables were a white satin stripe linen paired with a raspberry napkin.

We originally started with a specific floral budget, a variety of colors and heavier greenery. Once our bride saw all the pieces together alongside her mom, they realized they wanted more blooms and less greenery in the arrangements - even if it made the arrangements a tad smaller, which was fine since we had complete place settings and a family style dinner being served. The bride also fell in love with the violet colors and thistles, and wanted to emphasize those colors and textures on the wedding day vs the original inspiration which had more yellow and orange with more classic blooms.

The same arrangement was then staged on our marine velvet + violet napkin and ocean velvet + rust orange napkin. From there we also swapped out day-of glassware for an array of vintage goblets in a variety of colors to match the vibrant blooms.

WEDDING DAY TABLETOP + CENTERPIECE

On the wedding day, the florals were everything the bride wanted and more! When she walked into the finished space, it melted my heart to see her tears of joy, and the complete awe on both her and her mother’s faces.

The adjustments made:

More blooms, less greenery, tad smaller overall size.
Heavier on the bright, vivid colors, emphasis on berry tones. Zero pastels.
Added textural and a few larger blooms.

BRIDAL BOUQUET MOCK-UP

Bridal portraits are a wonderful way to mock-up your shoes, jewelry, hair and makeup, and bridal bouquet. Your bridal look will be in the mass majority of photos, you are one of the main stars of the day after-all. You can also see how things such as your hair and makeup holds up throughout the day, like if you’re curls fell flat while out running errands afterwards.

When mocking up bouquets, we advise our clients to focus more on shape, color palette and textures since specific blooms can’t always be guaranteed -especially if the mock-up season differs from the wedding day season.

Our bride noted she loved the shape and overall textures and size, however, just like the mock-ups, she wanted an emphasis on bold, bright berry tones, violet and blue-undertones.

WEDDING DAY BRIDAL BOUQUET

On the wedding day when we arrived at the getting ready location with the wedding party florals, our bride saw us through the window and started signing how pleased and excited she was with the bouquet, clapping her hands and grinning ear to ear. When we walked in the door she was so in love and my heart was so happy to know we did the mock-up and everything was as she hoped for on the big day.

You can see some big differences from the preliminary designs to the final designs, and how mock-ups can be a crucial part to visualizing your day. This allows those wedding day surprises to be more intentional, and if you’re a visual person, you can truly get a grasp on how your wedding design will shake out in the best possible way.