Including Sentimental Photos in Your Wedding Decor

There is a charming new trend popping up at weddings these days. More and more couples are choosing to make their wedding not only a celebration of a new future, but also a chance to honor the past. A wonderful way to do this is to include sentimental photos in your wedding décor.

The people whom you choose to showcase in your pictures usually include parents, grandparents, as well as the bridal couple. There are some really great ways to use the photos; it is even better if you can keep at least some of your intentions a secret from those you are honoring so they will encounter a happy surprise when they arrive at your wedding. This can also be a special way to pay tribute to a loved one who has passed on.

A very fun thing to do is to hang pictures of the bride and groom as children somewhere in the ceremony or reception site. Your guests will have such a great time looking at all the pictures of the newlyweds when they were little. Start with baby pictures and work through time, including photos showing the early days of the bride and groom's relationship, up until the present day.

Of course you will want every part of your wedding to be stylish, so be sure to arrange the photographs artistically. They tend to look best when presented in a large group, and some sort of visual continuity is also important. You might decide to have all the pictures printed in black and white or display them in coordinating frames of different sizes. At one wedding in a rustic barn, the couple used clothespins to suspend black and white photos along a clothesline in chronological order in the walkway to the barn. It had great visual style, and their guests all had fun taking a trip down memory lane.

Your wedding is also a great time to honor close family members. One lovely trend is to display the wedding photos of the bride and groom's parents and grandparents at the ceremony. People love seeing old wedding pictures, especially the vintage gowns and custom bridal jewelry on the brides. Of course, it is important to be sensitive to individual situations; you would not display pictures of a divorced couple's wedding, for instance. In that circumstance, it would be more appropriate to hang a group of individual portraits of each parent, perhaps showing them at around the same age as the bride and groom are now.

This concept can be taken even further. If you can get your hands on the wedding gowns of the mothers of the bride and groom, it is fabulous to display them at your weddings on mannequins. This can be a fairly large project, so be sure to start early. The antique gowns are likely to need some restoration and pressing to look nice enough to display. Complete the effect with photos of the original brides accompanying the gowns. It would be really special if the bride had a set of custom bridal jewelry created that echoed some of the features of her mother's wedding jewelry, especially since the guests will be able to see the inspiration for it.

One final idea for using sentimental old family photos is to set them up on the tables at the reception. Instead of table 1, you can have table Uncle Fred and Aunt Miriam. Your guests are bound to get a kick out of it, and it is a wonderful way to personalize your wedding.