Non-traditional gown (Repost)

{This was originally posted on the Weddzilla Blog on 8/14/09.}

A very recent obsession of mine is pink wedding gowns. Who knows how long this will last (to be honest, my wedding obsessions tend to be short lived), but in the meantime, I'd love to hear the opinions of some fellow brides.

Behold, the dress that sparked my obsession. I mean, if I'm dropping a paycheck or more on a dress that I only get to wear once, I want it to be drop-dead gorgeous. And THIS dress is drop. dead. gorgeous. Meet "Lena," an uber feminine concoction by Mon Cheri Bridals:

Mon Cheri Bridals

I am in love with the simplicity of this pale pink dress by (who else?) Vera:

via Brides.com

Aren't the color and the draping of this dress sooo romantic? Sigh, I'm in love again:

Mon Cheri Bridals.

If I lose my nerve and decide that I need to wear white on my wedding day, I would still love to incorporate pink in some way. I am in love with this photo not only because of the gorgeous pink sash, but also because of this bride's stylin' headpiece. I'm not normally a fan of headbands, but I think this look is totally fabulous:

Mon Cheri Bridals.

What are your thoughts on a non-white wedding gown? Care to share any of your own inspiration photos?

Reception venue tips (Repost)

{This was originally posted on the Weddzilla Blog on 8/11/09.}

Considering how jam-packed my wedding inspiration blog is with dresses, shoes and pretty pink things, I think it's a bit odd to do my third post in a row on saving money. But my role as a featured blogger is to document my wedding planning journey, and I am at the point in the process where I am trying to save money on every aspect of the wedding. Today's topic: the reception venue.

I know plenty of people whose ceremony and reception take place in the same venue. I attended a wedding like that a few weeks ago. The ceremony took place in a gazebo outside a stunning hotel & spa, and then we walked indoors for the cocktail hour, and then upstairs for the reception. It was incredibly well-organized, and such a lovely transition from ceremony to reception.

Jeff and I have a different story, because there was no other place we wanted to get married but Dahlgren Chapel on the campus of Georgetown.

Dahlgren Chapel via Exorcist Revisted Blog.

With the ceremony venue decided, the hunt for the reception venue began. I started by looking at all the hotels in the area (as all the weddings I have attended have taken place in hotels), and very quickly learned that I wouldn't be able to afford it. With a budget of $10,000 and a guest list of 100, I can't pay much over $60/person. Hotels in the DC (and particularly the Georgetown) area were running over $100/person NOT INCLUDING alcohol, servers, bartenders, setup fees and room rental fees. With all the extra fees added, the prices were over $200/person.

My next stop was nearby restaurants. Restaurants are significantly cheaper than hotels because typically you only pay for food and drinks, without extra fees. However, my search for a suitable restaurant in the Georgetown area was as fruitless as my hotel search, because the restaurants there were still outside my price range.

The revelation that the reception venue doesn't need to be right by the ceremony venue came slowly. My bridesmaids (what would I do without them?) told me that people who were making the journey to DC for my wedding would be fine driving 15 minutes to another venue. That finally brought me to my hometown, Potomac, Maryland. My parents' house is about 15 minutes away from Georgetown, and one of my favorite restaurants, Normandie Farm, is about 5 minutes from our house. Our family loves the fabulous Sunday brunches, and my dad and I attended two father-daughter banquets there in high school.

Normandie Farm via flickr.

I can't describe my elation when I realized that Normandie Farm was within my price range (for cocktails, food and an open bar)! Plus, I already adore the food there, and I love the laid-back elegance of the location. Jeff and I are going down to DC at the end of the month to take a look at the space and select a menu.

It took a few months of searching and agonizing (though I will admit that I still occasionally agonize about its distance from the ceremony), but I am really happy with the choice. I love that it's a restaurant that has some meaning to me. And I really think that Jeff will love it when he sees it in a few weeks.

So my advice for finding an affordable reception venue?

• Be patient. As I was accumulating a very long list of hotels and restaurants that I couldn't afford, I began to think my budget was too small for the number of people I wanted to invite. If you have a limited budget, I'm not going to sugarcoat it: the process will be long and frustrating, and you will get exhausted and angry. But keep looking! I cannot tell you how rewarding it is to find something that you love for the price that you wanted (isn't that so true of shopping in general?).
  
• Be flexible (but not with your budget!). A restaurant reception can be just as lovely as a hotel ballroom reception.
• Think about you. Think about places that are meaningful to you. I wasted a lot of time focusing on fancy-schmancy venues and trying to come up with a lavish reception hall, when Jeff and I really don't tend to those kinds of restaurants or that type of food. I was trying to design a reception that fit my idea of a reception, rather than something that was a reflection of Jeff and me.

Good luck! Are there any brides out there with reception venue advice? Feel free to share your own stories.

Non-traditional Centerpiece (Repost)

{This was originally posted on the Weddzilla Blog on 8/7/09.}

As you may have figured out by now, I am trying to save money on every aspect of my wedding. The centerpieces are a huge cause for concern, because I don't have any experience in arranging flowers myself, and I hate the idea of spending a lot of money on something that won't make it to the last dance. I considered paper flower decorations, but my time-intensive invitations are making me averse to crafting at the moment. I am still planning on incorporating tissue paper poms, but I came across this how-to for branch centerpieces and I fell in love.

via Apartment Therapy

I love the simplicity and the drama of these branch centerpieces. They are so unexpected! The best part is that there are beautiful dogwoods and cherry blossoms in my parents' yard, and I think this is a very doable day-before-the-wedding project that would basically only cost as much as the vases (and I think my mom has enough unusual vases that I might not need to go shopping). Their house is just 5 minutes from the reception venue, so it couldn't be easier.

Care to share any centerpiece tips?

Save $$$ on your "Save the Dates" (Repost)

{This was originally posted on the Weddzilla Blog on 8/4/09.}

I spent the past weekend finalizing the designs for our Save the Dates and our (totally awesome) formal invitations. We also bought a domain name for $6.99 (for one year) and started putting all sorts of useful information on our website, as part of our effort to save money on the invitation suite AND be environmentally friendly. I am dyyyying to share everything with you, but I want our guests to see them all first. So it's going to be a while. In the meantime, I will share a few tips with those of you who are planning on going the DIY route as well.

Because Jeff and I met and dated in the place where we're getting married, a map seemed a fitting design for the Save the Dates. I spent hours on Google Maps trying to figure out the best way to draw all the places in the area that are meaningful to us. In the end, I was forced to settle on just four locations (because of my lack of patience and artistic skill): where we met, our first date, where he proposed and the chapel where we will be married. I drew the streets and little icons on 8.5x11 copy paper, and traced over the whole thing in black sharpie. I scanned the drawing into my computer:

Then I imported the JPEG into Microsoft Word (there's probably an imaging software that is more convenient, but I'm comfortable with Word). I inserted all the words using textboxes and a font called "Handwriting - Dakota":

I'm not sure if this next part can be done on a PC. I printed the file to a PDF, then I opened the PDF using Preview, and saved it as a JPEG. Here is an early draft:

Then I inserted the JPEG back into Word, and shrunk the image to a width of four inches so I could fit six maps in one page:

I really wanted to make magnetic Save the Dates, and the cheapest magnet paper that I've found so far is at Walmart, five pages for $6.88:

I think we need roughly sixty magnets (or ten sheets). $13.76 for sixty Save the Dates = $0.23 per Save the Date. I will probably end up getting an extra pack of magnet sheets just to be safe, but I am still happy with the price tag, even when you add the price of envelopes (Kraft coin envelopes from Staples, less than $0.05 each) and stamps($0.44). It should come out to less than a dollar (~$0.72) per completed Save the Date. I will have to figure out a use for over 400 leftover envelopes, but I'm sure I could incorporate them into the wedding somehow.

I would love to know how all of you are saving money on your invites and save the dates! Care to share a few tips of your own in the comments section?

No pink or frills today (Repost)

{This was originally posted on the Weddzilla Blog on 7/31/09.}

I have been struggling to decide on a topic for my second featured blogger post. I had initially thought to share my wedding theme and bridesmaids ideas, but these elements seem much less relevant than they did a month ago (don't worry! I promise that I will have plenty of that sort of thing in the future). I recently hit a sort of turning point in the wedding process at which time -pardon my french- sh*t got real.

I was a tomboy growing up, and I never spent my days dreaming up the perfect wedding. So my wedding inspiration blog was an incredibly liberating experience. I discovered an infatuation with tissue pom poms, feather headpieces and invitation suites. I came to idolize Martha Stewart and her many websites. For three months, I gorged myself on wedding eye candy and gabbed non-stop with my girlfriends. The possibilities seemed limitless and magical.

Martha Stewart

Since that time, Jeff and I have written two wedding checks: one deposit for the ceremony venue, and one for the reception venue. Now that 11% of our budget is gone, all of the decisions became, for lack of a better phrase, distinctly heavier. Setting the date and the venues means that now the save-the-dates can be finalized, and the invitation can be drafted. But are the colors I picked good enough? Suddenly we have to decide on a menu and start looking at hotel and flight options for out of town guests.

Maybe some women, the kind that have been planning their wedding since before April, have stronger wedding convictions than I, but I just can't help it. It is impossible not to second guess each choice, even the ones I was absolutely convinced about weeks ago. My 45-minute subway rides to and from work are spent agonizing over every detail. Will my wedding colors be tacky? Should I wear a tea-length wedding dress? Is there too much time in between the ceremony and reception? Will a lone cello sound funny? ... ARGH.

I have started carrying a journal everywhere I go, so that when these random questions hit, I can just get them out of my brain. Paging through the journal now, I find it funny how something that seems so important in your head can look pretty silly once it's written down. At the end of the day, I keep reminding myself that the most important things on my wedding day will be that I married my best friend, and that our closest friends and family came to share in that joy with us.

Of course, it wouldn't hurt if the wedding colors were inspiring, or the cellist was a big hit too. (Clearly, I need more help than a journal can provide.)

Are you like me, and are having difficulty with your wedding choices? How are you coping with the stress?

And if you're not like me, do you have any tips on how I can get some cajones and just make the freaking decisions already?