Wednesday, February 16, 2011

I'm just sayin'! Wedding Dresses From Mod Cloth

So how cute would this be as a wedding dress?


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Singing the Blooms Dress, Mod Cloth


In general, I think Mod Cloth dresses are always a bit too short, but if this were longer, or hit the knee, how cute would a bride be in this? Love!


Also, what about these two, also from Mod Cloth?


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Swan Cloud Dresses in blue and pink


How cute would they be with these accessories?

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Bouquet from OnceWed; shoes from BHLDN; hair clip from Oh My Deer

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

My Review of the Anthropologie BHLDN Wedding Collection

Hello everyone! I'm pretty sure every single wedding blog out there reviewed the new bridal collection from Anthropologie, BHLDN. The collection took me a while to really look at and I felt like to form an honest opinion, I needed to take the day and let it soak in.

And it has!

My verdict? It's a definite hit, with a few misses.

Overall, I'm in love. The textures alone in the gowns and dresses are stunning. I love that they played with that. The vintage details that have been added to the dresses truly give the "out-of-grandma's-attic" feel, albeit, for a hefty price. Yes, these gowns are GORGEOUS, but as with anything from Anthropologie, very expensive. I think that might be the collection's biggest downfall. I, of course, didn't expect this collection to be super affordable, but I also wasn't expecting the price tags currently attached to the dresses and accessories. Two of the weddings gowns offered are $600, a few at $1,000 and the rest can go up to $4,000, which isn't bad. However, the bridesmaids/special occasion gowns start at $200, most average $350, and some go up to over $1,000. Unless you're having a platinum wedding, I don't think the majority of these dresses are affordable for most bridesmaids, sadly. I also wasn't fond of the bubble-hemmed dresses, which seemed outdated (and not in a classy vintage way!) The accessories, I thought, were priced most outrageously, unfortunately. I found the jewelry pieces, especially, to be way, way overpriced, even for Anthropologie. A lot of the jewelry pieces seemed very simple and not quite as unique considering the price tag. I feel like the brand really took advantage of the "bridal" association with these pieces and really jacked up the prices. However, some of the cover-ups and shoes I thought were decently priced and well worth the cost.

Overall, a stunningly beautiful collection that I adore. I really do. I hope that over time, they continue to develop this collection to include more styles at accessible price points for the average bride and her bridesmaids.

So, without further ado, here are my favorites from the collection!


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Can anyone guess my favorite piece from the collection? No? Well, here it is:


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Gah! It's simply amazing. I'm smitten with this dress. I would love to wear this with amazing shoes and bright red lips.


A close second is this dress:

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I think I've managed to pick out two of the more expensive pieces from this collection. I adore this one as well, and ditto with the bright red lip :)


So there you have it! My review of the new Anthropologie BHLDN collection. Be sure to visit the website for the full line (I only posted my favorites).

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Updates, happenings and feelings

Hola, everyone! We've been back from Mexico fora little over a week, just in time for the awesome blizzard we had in Chicago here a few days ago. How fun!

I just wanted to update you all on some thing we've been doing here at The Owl and at SH Weddings. In January, we started a YouTube channel as a more interactive way to reach out to our readers and audience. We've had a BLAST creating these videos for you, and we hope that you find them useful. Rather than inspiration, the channel is more devoted to wedding planning and coordination topics, so we want to hear what you have to say. Do you have anything you want us to talk about? Leave us a comment and let us know! We'll be happy to make a video and address it. Seriously.

Secondly, I'm sure you've noticed we haven't been updating The Owl as regularly as we had planned. And since I was bitten by the feelings bug this morning, I'm going to be honest with you all. It's a LOT more work than I anticipated. I still adore this blog and will keep updating and discovering new photographers to share with you, but I've come to the conclusion that I will probably not be able to add new posts every day. My new goal is three posts per week of real weddings and fashion inspiration. Y'all, it's REALLY tough putting a single blog entry together that's loaded with beautiful photos! It really is quite the process, and I didn't realize that when I started. I'm ashamed to be admitting this, honestly. Please keep in mind that many of the popular wedding blogs out there - namely, Style Me Pretty - is the editor's only job. Because my main priority will always be my clients at SH Weddings, I really need to devote the majority of my time to that.

And as I've recently found, creating YouTube videos is actually a less time-consuming process (I swear!), and I feel it's also something that many other wedding professionals aren't utilizing, so right now, I'm really enjoying that a lot.

In the meantime, over the next year (grand scale, people!), The Elegant Owl might be changing names to correlate more with SH Weddings. I'm not yet sure what that means, but let me explain. When I started this blog, I didn't know if I would be starting a business right away. My main goal was to dabble into wedding blogging first, and take it from there. But shortly after I built this page, SH Weddings was born, and I never really had time to redesign them both to go together, which is what I would ultimately prefer. This blog will always remain edited and run by us, but the name may change in the future. To what extent, we shall see! That's pretty far into the future, though.

So there you have it! This was a bit longer of a ramble than I was anticipating, but I would rather keep you all in the loop than in the dark. I hope you don't hate me and you continue to be inspired by what we post. We do really try to find inspiration that's easily accessible to the average bride, but that is also very, truly unique. We don't aim to ever be a Style Me Pretty - we just aim to stay true to ourselves :)

We love you all, and we are always thanking you for your continued support. We truly are.

Hugs,

Us Little Owls