Southern Weddings

This week, we put aside our college basketball rivalries (hint: someone in our office is highly outnumbered!) to bring you features full of wedding bliss and wedding fun. It started with a big birthday wish to our darling editor, Marissa!

Before we get into all the goodness that transpired this week, we wanted give you an important announcement about a new addition to the blog you’ll notice next week: sponsored posts. We’ve recently decided to begin offering these to vendors and companies in order to continue and improve the beautiful content you (and we!) love. For those who aren’t sure what a sponsored post is, it’s a post written by the SW staff that was paid for – kind of like a commercial. We know not everyone will love them, but we’re actually really excited about the posts we already have lined up: we’re going to be hand-selecting these companies to make sure we can honestly say good things about them! Of course, they’ll ALWAYS be clearly marked as sponsored posts in the title and/or the body of the post, so you’ll be able to tell immediately what’s going on — we hate feeling like someone’s trying to slip something by us, and figure y’all do, too. Also, we promise that on a day a sponsored post goes up, another post or two of gorgeous content will go up, as well. And that’s that! You’ll see the first post go up next week, and we all thank you SO much in advance for your support. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments!

Now, back to the good stuff! Remember how I’ve been telling y’all that we’re trying to decorate the office? Aside from my recent trip to Ikea (yay!), we haven’t made much progress. You see, there are just so many beautiful photos we could choose to hang! That’s where you come in. Help us decorate the office and vote for your top six here! Here are two contenders:

Marissa is always helping us shine the light on some lesser-known Southern histories. Take, for instance, the delectable benne wafer. These little cookies are said to bring good luck!

We’re bringing back the Ultimate Southern Challenges! This time around, we’re giving you the perfect blank canvas: burlap. The entries can come in any form as long as they involve burlap. Most importantly, they should be Southern! See here for more details.

It’s that time of the year, lovelies — Mardi Gras festivities are gearing up! We were giddy about the idea of presenting y’all with a ton of purple, green and gold inspiration full of Mardi Gras “hootenanny” (in Emily’s words). First up was a soft inspiration board.

Followed shortly by Marissa’s rundown of everything traditional about Mardi Gras and lots of inspiring images

And then a compilation of my favorite purple, green and gold Color Palette Finds to bring that Mardi Gras hootenanny to your wedding.

Natalie + Wade’s V4 wedding was a Watercolor hit! We love their soft color palette and sweet imagery by Tec Petaja. See it here and here.

We loved this wedding so much, y’all know we had to do a “Get the Look” feature with it! I pulled together some rustic finds with metallic details.

We’re always on the hunt for amazing getaway places to add to our Honey List. This week, Whitney tells us all about her trip to Cabin Bluff, where she even got to shoot clay pigeons!

We want to introduce you to the wonderful vendors that are filling our Blue Ribbon Vendor Directory daily! Say hello to our newest additions, A Southern Soiree, Chris Confero, Dodeline Design, Dylan Wilson, Gibson Events, Graham Terhune, Honour Hiers, Josh McCullock, Richard Ellis and Shelby Peaden Events.

Whitney’s the last of us to put together her dream Southern Wedding, which means she’s had a TON of inspiration to choose from! Take a look at her gorgeous plan and the sweet details she’s dying to include here.

This week, Sierra brought us back into the sweet Southern charms of Amy + Clayton’s Florida wedding in the featured Real Wedding Gallery of the week.

We love Real Weddings

Sydney + Lucas’s wedding was a homemade gathering full of genuine love. We think it’s sweet that the makings of the day were a family affair. Plus, plaid shirts and wheat bouquets are a win in our book. See it here.

Fun things ahead!

Tailored.co, a personalized shopping site for brides has just launched! Tailored allows brides to find and collect inspiration, browse wedding products selected just for them, create lists of their favorite finds, and share their picks with friends and family, all in one place. Want to learn more about Tailored? Check out their site!

If you haven’t seen it, Southern Weddings is featured on Bella Figura! We’re excited to share our predictions for 2012 wedding trends and our “trendsetter picks” from their collection. If you’re paper lovers like we are and want to see our picks in person (plus, who doesn’t love letterpress?), you can order a sample pack here. The cost of the pack is donated to The Conservation Fund!

Hi, ladies! We’re so excited for to hear about your upcoming weddings and have loooved seeing your engagement photos. (Y’all are adorable!) We want to know more, though. If it’s the week before you wedding, give us a shout out on Twitter and Facebook and let us know — we want to wish you the best in the Weekly Round-Up! So mark your calendars, y’all (but of course, we’ll remind you, too).

The ladies at Southern Weddings are sending out big welcome hugs to our returning vendors, Kat Braman and Botanica Florist and our newest Blue Ribbon Vendors, Millie Hollomon, Richard Ellis Photography, Anna Kirby Photography, Dodeline Design, Christopher Confero, Gibson Events, Josh Mccullock Photo, and Graham Terhune!

I’m off to Williamsburg for the weekend! What are y’all doing?

Written with love by Nicole