When you’re planning a wedding, it’s easy to draw inspiration from all sorts of different places for your own event. You go to a wedding and you like how the tables were set up. You log into Facebook and someone’s tagged at a wedding and you end up browsing the entire album, enjoying how they decorated or what they wore.
So naturally, it’s easy to come out of the experience feeling a bit overwhelmed with ideas and wanting to do so much to make your wedding stand out.
After all, what are Lebanese weddings if they’re not for showing off and going big or going home?
For us, that was never the intention.
We have always been working towards making it personal and reflective of our tastes. But I would be stupid to deny that I’ve been influenced so much by what I have seen on the internet, and sometimes I have kept myself up at night wondering if we have done enough.
My idea of keeping it personal has mainly revolved around exhibiting things to the attendees. We were lucky enough to find someone who saw our vision and created an identity for the event- I don’t mean to sound pretentious but I once took an Advertising class and I felt the term would be appropriate here.
I couldn’t be more thrilled with how all the colors and designs have come together.
As it turns out, and this is a piece of advice to any bride-to-be who is going through or thinking of doing the same, designing is one thing.
Printing is a completely different story.
It takes plenty of expertise apparently to get the quality, the size, and the texture right. You may have seen the designs on the PC in some form but when they’re printed out, they might be entirely different. And dealing with people who work at print shops is a whole different story.
Urgency, to them, is not a word that exists in the dictionary, because they are utterly so slow in delivering the final product.
And did you know how expensive it can be to print out the simplest of things? I didn’t. It seems like for every idea you want to execute, there’s a minimum charge that surpasses your budget. I’ll place that value at around a 100 dollars because here in Lebanon we have a love affair with the 100 dollar bill.
Seriously, I am not going to pay 100 dollars to print something I will only use for a couple of hours, no matter how amazing the idea seemed on Pinterest! So I compromised and the idea will remain an idea for now.
Here’s another tip: make a list of the things you want from the get-go! This is so you don’t have to go back and forth to the printers’. I tell you this because this is imperative for your sanity to remain intact. Those places can be bad for your health, I swear.
But be prepared, you’re not going to get everything you want. And that’s okay, I guess.
Beyond Beirut 
Your last line mirrors life. That’s an undeniable fact.