Inspired Shoot :: An Engagement Party

Welcome back happy people! Did you get to check out the first part of our inspired shoot, a picnic proposal yesterday? Today we’re sharing the happy couple’s engagement party, hosted by Maya & Josh, who have gotten some press here of late, celebrating their anniversary, a Junebug feature, and of course their own wedding! We found Clifton Inn’s Colina Farm house to be the perfect setting for the festivities that evening.

We can’t thank our incredible vendors enough for all their hard work!

Venue: Clifton Inn
Event Design: Simply Chic Events
Floral Design: Pat’s Floral Designs
Make-Up: Lora Elaine Kelley
Hair: Jennifer with Elan
Stationary: Rock Paper Scissors
Wedding Cake: Mahlia’s Creations
Signage and Calligraphy: Nichole Creative
Bride & Groom’s Apparel: J. Crew

The perfect POP!

While the ladies gush over the ring….

the boys enjoy cigars on the front porch at twilight.

Oh, what’s that…you want more? Well, we certainly don’t want to disappoint you then. Come back tomorrow for the intimate and sweet garden reception full of gorgeous details. You won’t want to miss their getaway in a certain classic car, too!

 

Inspired Shoot :: A Marriage Proposal

We knew when we did an inspiration  shoot we wanted to do something different, something more than just pretty pictures of pretty things and pretty people. When we spoke with our friend and fellow wedding pro Jamie Sears of Simply Chic Events, we all conceived of something with a real couple, doing things that real people would do, keeping it as relatable as possible. Since we love us some great moments, we knew we wanted to involve some of our favorite past clients.

So we called up our dear friends Eric and Lora Kelley, whose wedding we shot back in 2008, and who were eager to return to the site of their wedding and serve as our primary models for this three part shoot. We did it over two admittedly sultry days at picturesque Clifton Inn here in Charlottesville. It was important for us to create a team of professionals who regularly provide the highest-quality work for their clients, and since our little ‘burb is often a destination for weddings, we thought how nice it would be to highlight some of these wonderfully talented and hard-working pros?

We’re so grateful to all the dedication everyone put in to it, for Brigitte and the entire Clifton staff for their hospitality, and especially for the inspiration and good old-fashioned hard work that Jamie and her team, including Jessica, Kate, and Claire brought to the shoot. The Simply Chic Events team wanted to show how you can take something you love (in this case, the modern and very current chevron pattern) and seamlessly weave it into not only your wedding day, but all your big events leading up to the big day.

We were all thrilled to see the shoot featured on the What Junebug Loves wedding blog yesterday and thought we’d share some more of our favorites from the shoot this week. First up, of course, a sweet picnic proposal!

If you’re planning a wedding in Charlottesville, we can’t recommend the following talented wedding professionals highly enough.

Venue: Clifton Inn
Event Design: Simply Chic Events
Floral Design: Pat’s Floral Designs
Make-Up: Lora Elaine Kelley
Hair: Jennifer with Elan
Stationary: Rock Paper Scissors
Wedding Cake: Mahlia’s Creations
Signage and Calligraphy: Nichole Creative
Wedding Dress: Romona Keveza
Groom’s Apparel: J. Crew

The shoots encompassed three parts, shot in order, starting with a proposal from Eric to Lora. After you look through all this gorgeousness, check in tomorrow for the couple’s happy engagement party (with a surprise appearance from another of our past clients). Enjoy!

Join us tomorrow when we have the Engagement Party for you!

xoxo,
…a&b

 

Friday’s FAB Finds {036}

Whoa, is it Friday already?! Excellent! Well, I’ve been sitting on this truly fabulous find for a while now since we’ve had so many gorgeous weddings & fun portrait sessions to share with you. Since we’re not quite ready to share the next one in the queue though, I get to feature a great find today! Yea! We hesitate to say it, but we think you’re going to fall in obsession with today’s FAB Find…

Links We Love – Pinterest

You may remember a while back when Bill posted about using Evernote for your wedding planning. Well, a fantastic new website has come along to also help save your back from lugging around that wedding inspiration binder! Seriously, we hope you don’t hold it against us when you find all the copious amounts of free time that you we know you have gone. Just gone. But I promise you, this time-suck is worth it!

What is Pinterest you ask and how can it work for me? Well, it is a basically a virtual clip board and anything you see on the Interwebs or that you scan in, can be copied and pasted into a “board”. Basically, you can pin a photo that you find of interest into a board you created. You can create an unlimited amount of boards (or at least as many as any human would want). You can create collections of things you love and share them with your friends and followers. You can also follow other peoples’ boards and pin something they found to one of your boards.

(Clink on the screen shots to see them full size.)

I have to admit, though, I’m quite the newbie and haven’t pinned a lot yet, but I absolutely *love* using it! Since I don’t have a wedding to plan, I’ve been using it primarily for home decorating & design inspiration. What I have so far:

My Studio Inspiration board has the most pins and is my most active board.

You can follow your favorite event designers & bloggers, whose taste and style you admire and get updates when they add new pics to their boards. I checked with a few of my favorite “follows” to see if I could share a few of their incredible boards with you…

Courtney Spencer of Merriment Events has a huge amount of eye candy pins and I absolutely love all her many specific categories. Makes it SO much easier to find things of interest.

Her gorgeous ceremony details board…

LOVE these unique color combos!

Jeannine is the founder of the fabulous Small & Chic in C’ville blog. She also happens to be planning a wedding!

And, of course, in honor of the BIG Wedding happening today, some royal inspiration for you!

And no proper English wedding inspiration would be complete without some fabulous hats!

Well, that all looks and sounds great, Anne, but how the heck do I pin something??? First you need to request an account. Since they’re a new site, they’re trying to take it slow and add people as they can, but you should hopefully get your verification email in a week or so. Create your account and install the Pin It bookmark (instructions on are their website) and then start pinning (even works on iPad). If you see some eye candy you love, click the Pin It bookmark and then choose the photo you want to pin. It’ll ask you which of your boards you want to pin it to, make notes about and even create tags so it’s easier for you and others to find something specific. Pinterest takes the source link and credits where the item was pinned from.

And if you’re worried about your fiance, family or friends seeing “too much” of your wedding plans, I would suggest creating another account without your full name where you can put all your finalized wedding plans.

And they even have an iPhone app coming soon!

There’s only one thing I’ve found I don’t like about Pinterest and that’s that oftentimes the original creator of photos doesn’t get credit for the photo because somebody pinned said photo from another blog or website who obtained it from the original creator. Yup, it’s happened to us. We’ve found photos of ours pinned from wedding blogs and the wedding blog gets the link credit on Pinterest boards. We don’t see any way around this right now, other than to require blogs to keep our watermark on the photos, but please do try to be fair and pin from the original creator when at all possible.

So what are you waiting for? Get pinning! Recipes you want to try, books you want to read, things you love, favorite quotations…..the possibilities are truly endless! And let me know when you do – I’d love to follow and see what you think is FAB!

Yours in pinning,
…anne