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 with what kind of STDs (as we called them, heehee) would be a nice touch and finally went with a flat magnet bottle opener that we could mail that had our date on it. It's nice to still see these on friend's fridges when we visit, so it was definitely an added touch we (and they) still appreciate three years later.
2. Another must for me was to make sure the bridesmaid dresses stayed affordable and were chic enough to use again. I know this sounds incredibly cliche, but I'd been in a couple of weddings before ours, and was slightly appauled at the cost that was assumed in being a bridesmaid. Keeping it simple for them was a priority for me. We finally found a great new option through J.Crew; the dresses were under $100 and were vibrant colors, great flowing fabric that said "wedding" but still said nice-evening-out-reuse to me. (Photo above)
3. Last, enlist your friends that offer help, even if that friend is an author you don't know. As you know, there are so many facets to planning a wedding that it's practically a full time job for the months ahead no matter how many months that actually is. We took our time and set the date for 18 months out once we got engaged, but right away I began to think that too much time actually made the decisions harder. From picking everything out for both a wedding and a reception - colors, invites, locations, reverends, clothing, table shape, food, alcohol, cake, etc - to writing or deciding on vows, remember it's been done before, hundreds of thousands of times!! Sp enlist that network of knowledge whether you want your wedding to be unique or not.
What to ask? Ask your married friends what their favorite unique idea was, ask your close family to help sample food and cake, ask girlfriends to help find a dress, and ask that creative artist friend to help with invitations... and so on!
The key is don't try to do everything on your own; so even if, say, you're in a new town and don't have many friends nearby yet, enlist the help of Amazon and buy a couple used wedding books (why buy them new? I even resold several of ours afterwards!). I got some great ideas from planning and prepping to the timing of the entire event from the 3 books we started with.
Next up: DIY party favors. Stay tuned!
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