How to Make a Beach Wedding Theme Work

Yesterday's post got me thinking about beach weddings. It's the time of the year to be planning your nuptials by the sea - though really, with the prevalence of materials available nearly anyone can put together a beach wedding regardless of whether they have access to an actual beach at all.

The trick to planning any kind of themed wedding is to narrow your focus. Far too often brides decide they want a beach wedding and that's where they stop their planning efforts and begin gathering decor items. As a result they pick up anything that;

1. captures their fancy, and
2. reminds them in any way of the ocean.

As a result, pretty soon their budget is spent and they don't really have anything more than a box full of sea shells, some plastic flower leis, and a few Frisbees.

Instead they should choose an aspect of beach life that stirs their imagination and look for ways to make every item in your wedding lend to your theme (it's an article on building a mermaid wedding but it serves as a great example of this point). Starting with your dress, consider how each element of your wedding serves or detracts from your theme. For a beach wedding, a dress with a long train, for example might not be the right choice. Maybe you'd want something in a shorter gown whether than means short as in knee length or short as in just to above the ground. Then you might want to choose barefoot sandals with shells and pearls instead of high heels.

For a lighthouse themed wedding, maybe you'd want to choose a restaurant on a bluff with lots of windows and get a slowly rotating light. If you did, you could play the sounds of waves crashing on the rocks and then hold your reception at night to give the illusion that your reception is being held in a large lighthouse.

To continue the lighthouse theme, you could build a wedding theme around the beauty of lighthouses what elements are characteristic of lighthouse scenes? Light? Fog? The sound of waves crashing on the beach? Lighthouses? Raincoats? Umbrellas? Rocks? Ships? Sailboats? The list goes on.

The trick, whatever your beach wedding theme, is to then do a theme specific search for the decor, favors, accessories. That way, if you choose your accessories and favors well, you won't have to spend as much on decor because your they will go a long way to creating your theme.

This is one reason that I love shopping on the Internet for nearly everything you need for your wedding. Simply put, you can do very specific searches as you look for the best decor, favors, and accessories to build your theme. That makes it easy to find what you are looking for from the comfort of your own home without wasting an entire day and a tank of gas looking for something that may or may not be available in your community - and when you do find it, it can be shipped right to your door!

I digress.

The point is that the key to building a beach wedding theme (or any theme) is focus. The beach wedding theme is entirely too broad. But by zeroing in on a specific aspect like sea animals, or surfing, or mariner, you can create a wedding theme that will be remembered for years to come.