If I Must Say So: Sheet Music Boutonnieres and Paper Cranes

I read lots of style, food, and local blogs. I also read a few wedding blogs. When I first started wedding planning I would visit up to five or so wedding blogs everyday. It gave me TONS of inspiration and ideas, but after a while it got to be too much. When you plan and plan for months and months you reach a point when you know what you want for your big day, but you continue to become influenced and inspired but the daily wedding blog roll. Then you run the risk of doing too much so the day starts to feel impersonal.

When I knew what I wanted and what was feasible for us to do for our day, I slowly started cutting out the wedding blogs. I still visit all of them here and there, but I mostly just stick to one or two on a daily basis now. And I'm no longer trying to get inspiration for our own wedding--I just love reading about couples and the journey they took to get married.

As for old sheet music, this is something I knew I wanted to include in the wedding since around week one. The look we are going for is a combo of playful and vintage, and Kyle also happens to be a musician. Old sheet music was one of the ideas we had to incorporate both elements, and when I scored a giant box of it for free at a yard sale I knew we'd be able to experiment and do something big.

Then I found Olivia and Joshua's wedding on Green Wedding Shoes and these awesome sheet music boutonnieres:

[Photo borrowed from GWS; taken by Alec Vanderboom]

These were a definite yes. The couple's floral designer then posted a handy DIY, and I started making sheet music boutonnieres left and right.

The second sheet music project is more personal.

When Kyle and I met I had just given up on a silly paper crane project. Have you heard the Japanese legend about 1,000 paper cranes? The legend tells us that he who makes 1,000 origami paper cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. I wasn't so hung up on the legend, but I thought a wall of 1,000 or so paper cranes strung together could look pretty amazing. So I started folding and kept folding until I had made probably 80 paper cranes, and then I quit. I didn't have time to fold paper cranes. But then I had 80 paper cranes to get rid of. So I just started giving them to roommates and friends when they popped over.

Around that same time Kyle came into my life, and the first time he came over he got a paper crane. He seemed worthy by that point. He kept it perched on his desk in his room until he moved. I think he still keeps it in his office at work, and I think that's kind of cute.

We aren't some kind of crane-obsessed couple, but the sheet music gave me another nifty idea for how to incorporate this personal story into our wedding.

I don't want to give away too much about how the cranes should look on the big day, but I will tell you our venue is full of trees with low-hanging limbs. Hopefully that can paint a picture for you.