Beginner Bride: First thoughts and ideas.

For as long as I can remember, my family have been members at The Cardinal Club in downtown Raleigh. Also for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to have my wedding reception there.

Luckily, Adam was familiar with the Cardinal and Capital City Clubs, so we did not waste any time before checking them out. We had actually emailed with them several months before we got engaged.

We went downtown to meet with the events coordinator, Shelly, and she was amazing! She gave us tons of great ideas, and she said she was very flexible and open to whatever we wanted to do.

So, being the huge dork and bookworm that I am, I went to the library the next day and checked out almost every single wedding book they had. (I also had at least eight wedding magazines at home already.) I could barely carry all of the books to my car. I have been scouring the books, magazines, and websites nightly, but here are a few things that I love so far.

Yellow Inspiration Board

I love yellow. It is such a happy color, and I definitely want to include yellow as one of our main colors. I absolutely love the idea of yellow shoes under the wedding dress and using lemons for decorations.

A NYC Wedding Reception

Our chairs at the ceremony and reception are going to look a lot like these, and I love how they look with the yellow/gold table cloths. I would love to have the same dim lighting with candles and flowers covering as many surfaces as possible. We are going to have round tables too--they are so much more intimate.

Monograms!

As many people can attest to, I absolutely love monograms. I am actually slightly obsessed with them, and I really need to learn how to do monogramming myself on a sewing machine. During the last few months I have had to remind myself that my monogram would be changing soon, so I have tried my best to stay away.

If I can convince my sweet fiance to agree to it, I think that our monogram on the top of our invitations would be beautiful. I have also seen it on the bride's slip and on the ribbon around her bouquet--love both of those ideas!

I also want to use this dark royal blue color as our other "main color." Right now, I think that the bridesmaids' dresses will probably be that color.