We all know that planning a wedding = a love/hate relationship with Pinterest. Tons of inspiration and easily searchable database, but there's inspiration overload and it can also make you feel bad about your design and DIY realities.
Offbeat Bride reader Katie had a brilliant idea to make Pinterest your ally again…
Another useful way to use Pinterest boards is creating one to share with your mother/sisters/friends to keep them from bombarding you with whatever “cute,” “neat” idea they came across via email or text messages. Creating a board to share with my mother gave her a place to put all the ideas she had where I could glance at them every once in a while, and has made my planning experience infinitely less stressful because I'm not spending every five minutes of my day fielding every wedding-related thought she has.
It made the most sense, since most of the time the stuff my mother would send me was something she found on Pinterest. So I told her to create a board and share it with me so I could see it and get notifications when she pinned something. She ended up titling it “Wedding Stuff You Can Ignore,” but it gave her an outlet where she could be excited and toss ideas at me without completely burying me.
Basically… use a shared Pinterest board as the visual version of the “Shit People Suggest” spreadsheet!
I did this. It gave my FSIL someplace to put all her stuff I was going to ignore, and deflected her to her own hypothetical wedding. I made the board when she started going nuts with suggestions, which was before I was even engaged… The board is called “Wedding Crap” and subtitled “Crap for weddings.”
Yay! I hope the idea helps some other swamped brides! It’s ended up being super helpful for me.
I created a Facebook group, put all the various mothers, aunts and so forth in it, made it private and let them link stuff to their hearts content. It was also helpful because they each saw what the others were suggesting. So, there was this crazy rush of suggestions the first couple of weeks, then they all realized that they were suggesting a million things combined and many of them contradictory. It kind of naturally petered out.
I did this for my friends wedding! Thanks to a certain website, I’m now obsessed with weddings of an off-beat nature, and so when my friends told me they were getting married, I had to try very hard not to explode with a thousand ideas I thought they might love.
I said to the couple, “Guys, I’m going to put together a Pinterest board, and fill it with ideas that I think will be great for your wedding. I will send you the link, and you guys can look at it whenever you could be bothered. If you see anything that inspires you, great! If not, no worries.” It was great because I could pin to my hearts content, and they didn’t have to shoot down or consider my ideas one by one. And when they got me involved in arranging the flowers, we were able to get a good understanding of what aesthetic we were aiming for by pinning pictures together.
My mom set up one of these boards for us, and we have been sharing things back and forth on there. It has been super helpful!