Andy's Idea Factory

As wedding season approaches and my wedding industry friends begin to hustle and bustle, I thought to share some of the Idea Factory lightbulbs from our own wedding in 2006. This will be a multi-part series of four topics: Prep, Gifts, Decor, and Honeymoon. Today's topic, PREP, is to help you get organized. Wedding planning is a long process with many facets, and doing it all on your own is daunting, so enlisting a good team and organizing your process is vital. We didn't enlist a wedding planner, but these tips can help you help your wedding planner too if you get one. Aside from the heavy duty first decisions like size, venue, band, and dress, you're going to have some smaller decisions that are just as important. There aren't many tricks to buckling down and making these decisions, so helping get the little ones sorted first will ease your mind. Here are three ideas to start... 1. Once you decide a location, you should send out your Save-The-Dates. We struggled ...

Re-Gift: something that you've gotten as a gift but either don't like, doesn't fit, or you won't ever use and you either put it in the Salvation Army pile or you (gasp!) throw it out. This touchy subject brings up several notions of "white elephant" and "gag" presents and Etiquette 101 from grandma. But you either regift or you don't, and if you do, here are some helpful tips to making sure you're not faux-pas-ing yourself into the BadGirl corner where you may never receive any gifts ever again! (Perish the thought!) I learned about regifting when I was a very small girl. As an only child, my gifts piled up after each holiday, and my "oh-so-thoughtful" mother started a wonderful ritual for me that I always assumed everyone did... after a big loot-earning holiday we'd assess my toy box. At about 2'x4'x2', there wasn't much room in this storage bench for all the toys. So before putting the new toys in there,...

A few weeks back I added two posts for making your own face products. Along that same home-factory-idea line is the typical bath salt. I laugh when I see them in the store for $15, when it's often only $1 of Epsom or Sea Salt and a few drops of essential oil, plus $10 of preservatives you DON'T want on your body! I making salt baths more regularly after a car accident several years ago that left my back in a pretty poor state of health. I was taking a pain-bath about 3-4x a week and it helped immensely. Now I take them for all sorts of reasons: relaxation, menstral cramps, headaches, chest colds, aching muscles, and psoriasis flare-ups. The salt is the base to this so let's start there! SALT First, all salts are sea salts either mined as rock or evaporated from the saline solution. Sea salt is sodium chloride, and is used in cooking and cosmetics. "Dead Sea Salt" is proven to have the highest content of body-healing minerals it it, from the Dead Sea. Table s...

This Idea stemmed from the realization that most people don't have time to read their entire camera manual, especially when the device works just fine with Power, Autoflash, and the Automatic setting. But making the most of your technology is the only way to make the most of your memories.... So let's dive into a few tips for you Photography Newbies. When I worked in the service industry and people would ask me to take their picture I'd chuckle and give them (and their camera) the once-over before saying Yes. Not because I thought to say No, but because a select few were open for a lesson, and some weren't. Without being sexist, I'll stop there; but suffice it to say most people don't read their instruction manual and yet it's such a powerful tool. You're probably one of those people whose camera takes amazing pictures MOST of the time. But occasionally it just doesn't and you don't know why. You set the dial to that green "Automatic...