Guest Blogger: Kiara King

Once again, we have a guest blogger today, Kiara King, who blogs in two places now: Henry Reigns (her former wedding planning blog) and her newest design inspiration blog titled simply, Kiara King. Kiara is beautiful (what I wouldn't kill for gorgeous, red hair like that!) and had a beautiful wedding last fall. You may remember that I posted about it. Her wedding was so thoughtful and hand-crafted that I couldn't resist asking her to post something. I gave her the choice of posting a reflection on being married or something design-related. She chose a combination of the both. I was reading her post after she sent it to me and was so flattered to think that she incorporated something I did in my wedding into hers! I had no idea! Here, she talks about the all important splurge for your wedding (and how to make it fabulous and fun): the photobooth. Enjoy!

Hands down the best thing we spent money on for our wedding was our photographer Emma Case, who has given us a beautiful set of pictures to remember the day by and they still give us a warm fuzzy feeling when we look through them 5 months later. As well as knowing we would be getting beautiful photographs we were delighted to get Emma as our photographer because she does a cracking photobooth.

When I first started looking for stuff for the wedding, there weren't that many UK photographers doing photobooths so this was a real bonus and our friends took to the concept pretty quickly. Knowing that we were going to have a photobooth, I wanted to DIY some props for it and hopefully the background, but had to think of something that would fit in our cars for the 3 hour journey to the venue and that we would be able to put together easily.

The props were easy enough with the use of lots of foam board, felt and kebab sticks we created beards (in honour of John's beard which contrary to a lot of peoples' suggestions he wasn't shaving off just for the wedding!) and bought up mini chalkboards from the pound shop, The star of the show however was Henry our huge ginger maine coon cat.

Now although Henry is a big part of our wee family we weren't ever going to go to some of the lengths mentioned here to include our pet in our wedding, especially after he looked so
miserable wearing a potential wedding bow tie, but we did want some kind of mention of him on the day. Fortunately Marty saved the day when I saw the props she created of her pets,
particularly Zuzu. I knew a giant Henry head would be perfect and it was as shown by
Henry rocking out here.

To make this prop I had to follow the cat around the kitchen for a bit to get some good head shots and then cropped and enlarged them on my computer using photoscape and printed them onto photopaper at home, cut them out and stuck them to some white foam board. This was way
easier than my first idea of getting a lifesize cut-out made and I didn't have to look like a crazy cat lady in public.

More shots of Henry in action here, here, and here.

When it came to the background, I initially had great ideas for stapling lots of crepe paper to mdf board and creating a smileboothesque experience, but I quickly realised that was not going to happen. Instead we ran with the penguin books theme that we'd used for our invitations, save the dates and thank you cards and bought these fantastic pack of 100 penguin postcards of book jackets and clipped them together with lomo fotoclips, which, in the end, gave us a colourful and easy-to-hang background!

Hopefully, this inspires some of you brides-to-be! I have to agree with Kiara, too, that the photobooth we got from Photobooth Express, and the money we spent on our photographer, Theresa Scarbrough, was by far the best money we spent! You can check out Kiara's internet obsessions at Kiara King. Check back tomorrow for the final installation of guest bloggers!