I just got back from Key West celebrating my second anniversary. I still feel like a newlywed, albeit an inappropriately old newlywed, as I like to say. So to celebrate my anniversary, I thought I’d look back a little bit and write about how helpful Pinterest can be for wedding planning, even for midlife brides.
I’ve written before about how much I love Pinterest. In fact, I wrote that first sentence and didn’t come back to this post for 30 minutes because I opened Pinterest “for research” and got distracted. That’s a pretty common occurrence for me. But, it’s all too easy to caught up in “Pinterest Perfection”: the belief that anything you try from Pinterest isn’t any good at all unless it’s as perfect as your inspiration pin. And it can seem like a young woman’s game, particularly if you’re a midlife bride planning a wedding. I just did a search on Pinterest for “midlife bride” and the pickings are still pretty slim. They were even slimmer when I was planning my own wedding two years ago.
How To Have A Pinterest-Worthy Second Wedding As An Older Bride
Our Wedding Goals
We weren’t planning a big wedding, but I did want it to be special. As both the bride and wedding planner, I had a few goals for our big day:
- Stress-Free! There would be no staying up all night the night before my wedding making centerpieces for the tables.
- Cost Effective. There would also be no four-figure flower bill. Flowers were strictly DIY. But easy DIY.
- Reflecting Our Personality. Casey and I both share a strong love of music. I wanted our wedding to reflect that wherever I could weave it in without being too “theme wedding”.
- Love. I wanted the day to be a reflection of our love for each other and our love for the friends and family we asked to share the day with us.
And I had a final goal that I was a little embarrassed about. But it was important to me.
- I wanted to wear a long white dress. I wore a tea-length plain white cotton Laura Ashley dress to my first wedding. There are a lot of reasons why that happened, but the bottom line is I always felt cheated out of my princess day. I didn’t need a full-fledged princess day, but I wanted a long white dress that was appropriate for a 52-year old woman. I also didn’t want to show my arms. Nobody wants to see the bare arms of a 52-year old woman.
Using Pinterest to Plan a Second Wedding
I created an inspiration Pinterest board, Second Wedding Ideas, to track ideas from Pinterest that met the goals I had for our wedding. (It’s possible this started out as a secret board years before I actually met my husband. Shhh.)
At first, I just used the board as a sort of mood board; pinning whatever struck my fancy. And then as the date got closer I started keeping a notebook of all the elements of the wedding along with the inspiration pin.
Our Wedding Invitation
For example, here’s the pin I finally chose to emulate for our wedding invitation.
I created our wedding invitation in Illustrator using the pin as inspiration.
The Flowers
I wanted flowers but I didn’t want to have to pay for them or spend a lot of time creating artful arrangements. So I went for the best of all possible solutions. I followed the inspiration of this pin:
And I made things even simpler. Instead of Whole Foods, my florist was the local farmer’s market and instead of creating the bouquet myself, I outsourced the job to my beautiful niece.
I think you’ll agree she did a fabulous job.
The Cake
This pin was completely perfect as inspiration for a cake that showed our love for music and each other.
Here’s our interpretation. The lyrics are from The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year.”
Casey and I dated for a little bit in college and then remet 30 years later so the chorus, “This Will Be Our Year, Took a Long Time to Come” has a lot of meaning for us.
The Dress
As for the white dress appropriate for a middle-aged woman? It took a few pins to cobble together just the right look.First, the actual dress. I wanted something simple, elegant and timeless and this dress was just the ticket.
But I hated that thing on top of it. So I replaced it with a vintage cashmere cardigan because pins like this convinced me that was a viable thing:
Here’s the final result.
My wedding day was one of the happiest days of my life. We had the wedding in a lovely French restaurant in Atlanta and the food was so delicious. It tasted like love, I swear. As a wonderful added bonus, the building had, in a previous life, been my father’s office so I could feel his presence blessing us even though he’s no longer with us. You can’t find that stuff on Pinterest. But a pretty cake and a princess dress can help make a special day even more special.
About the author:
Katy Kozee blogs at Midlife Rambler, where she writes about life as a new empty nester. Her blog focuses on topics such as finding a new identity now that the kids are gone, forging a new relationship with your grown children, making smaller dinners, and learning to use your new free time. She and her husband live in Atlanta, Georgia with their two dogs who rebuff her attempts to turn them into substitute children.