Wedding Shows

I went to two wedding shows and I'd have to say over all I'm not a fan. The first one I went to with two of my bridesmaids was completely awful. It was big and crowded, pretty much nothing was to my taste, and the vendors were all pretty pushy and annoying. For example, one of the vendors from a big suit company was shocked that we didn't have at least 4 groomsmen who required tuxes and kept insisting that we needed to dress our fathers in matching tuxes. Not my thing.

The second show I went to with Mr. Knitting was much much better. It was organized by The Wedding Co., one of my favourite Toronto based wedding resources. This show was lovely and elegant with lots of amazing vendors. Mmm so much amazing food to sample. This one was a lot more fun than the first one, but it still wasn't the most helpful for my planning process because all these amazing vendors were way out of my price range.

For example, here's the gorgeous letterpress invitation by Sweet Peony Press that I spent a lot of time mooning over:

Photo from Sweet Peony Press

However, I was inspired (read: plan to flat out copy) by the way The Caketress (maker of my favourite charm cake) displayed her cakes. She draped pearl necklaces around the table and in between the cakes. I loved this as I love pearls quite a bit. If a piece of jewelry has pearls in it, it's likely that I will love it.

Here's an image of her table at the show. If you look closely you can see some of the pearls. The cakes look amazing too, but I get distracted around pearls!

Photo from The Caketress

Anyway, I plan to use this idea for my dessert table. I kept an eye out for $2 pearl necklaces at the St. Lawrence Market Antique Market and I managed to find tons. They're all different shades of white and I even have a few pink ones just to keep things interesting!

Here's the dessert decorating collection at the moment:

Personal photo

So despite my conclusion that overall wedding shows didn't factor too greatly into my planning process, I would still highly recommend the Wedding Co.'s wedding show to anyone in the Toronto area. It was a lot of fun and it was very cool to meet with all these fantastic (and not pushy) vendors and to get a bit of inspiration from them.

What ideas did you pick up from a wedding show?