Weddings are an excellent time to discover what’s new in the world of accessories.  And I don’t just mean people-watching.  Everyone has realized the day of an event that they left their necklace at home, or they took the wrong shoes, or the bride’s veil has been eaten by her puppy.  Stuff like that.  And when you’re rushing to the mall to fill in a last-minute gap in your wardrobe, you don’t take the time to shop around; you grab what’s on display at the front of the first store you go into and run.

My cousin got married this week, and my mother had a new black (!) dress that needed some blinging up.  So we headed out to find her a necklace and some earrings just a few hours before the show.  Long, colorful necklaces are big this summer, so we didn’t have a hard time finding something that worked – she picked out a gorgeous, multi-stranded dark metal piece with a big crystal flower on one side, it was perfect.  Earrings, on the other hand, were more complicated – none of the ones on display exactly matched the necklace.

*Useful tip: if you’re one of the many who are allergic to nickel in earrings, and the pair you want/need don’t have hypoallergenic posts, grab a cheap nickel-free pair and switch out the posts.  This only works on the dangly wire-back kind.  Just use a tweezer to open the loops, trade dangles, and pinch the wire closed again.

The bride was wearing a double strand of pearls with matching dangly earrings.  For guests, headbands or pins with BIG flowers were the most popular accessory in sight, both for adults and kids.  Shoes seemed to fit into the patent-leather flats or mile-high heels extremes, with not a lot of in-between.