Inspiration Board #8: Carnival

This board was inspired by Victor Sizemore's photos of a Carnival Themed Wedding in Anaheim, CA. You really must check them out - the wedding was so incredibly unique and looked like everyone in attendance had a super fun time. I will admit this isn't for everyone...it would require a pretty adventurous couple to pull off. But if you're looking to create an event people will talk about for years and years, this may just be the wedding idea for you.

1. Photo by Vallentyne Photography
2. Carnival Poster via Chica and Jo
3. Cornish Cream Tent from the Arabian Tent Co.
4. Ice Cream Cone Basket via Wedding Trikes
5. Cupcake by bookgrl (Flickr)
6. Ring Toss game from Stitch of Gold
7. Carriage from One of a Kind Pony Party

Inspiration Board #6: Southern Romance - Buttercream, Pale Yellow, White, Lace

Every morning when I arrive at work, I walk by a beautiful, black and white photo of Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana. For months I've been thinking about how it would make a lovely backdrop for a wedding and finally pulled together an inspiration board centered around the historic property.

I think some brides get carried away and think a romantic a wedding needs to have lots and lots of expensive details. But romance doesn't need to be complicated. In this board I paired buttercreams and pale yellows with simple but finely-detailed accessories. Notice how the table setting is uncomplicated with plates, linens, chair covers in the same hue and a large flower arrangement of complimenting tones. Also, due to the cake having a lot of lacey detailing, it is best presented in a simple, single-tier. This setting would make for an elegant yet relaxed afternoon wedding. You could make the reception brunch-style, serving fresh orange juice mimosas, chicken-salad cream puff sandwiches, fresh caprese salad and chocolate-covered strawberries. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.

Also, can I tell you how much I love the Maggie Sottero wedding gown in the two photos from Swensen Photography? It's simply gorgeous!

Sources:

1. Photo of Oak Alley Plantation via The Oak Alley Plantation Website
2. Nina & Shawn's Wedding by Swensen Photography
3. Nina & Shawn's Wedding by Swensen Photography
4. Fragrant White Bouquet by Teenas Creations
5. Cake – Fabulous Gourmet Patisserie
6. Vintage-inspired Necklace by Magical Becomings
7. Chicken Salad Crème Puffs via My Recipes
8. Bridesmaid Dress in Style 2053 by Dessy
9. Cream Table Setting shown on Marquee-Hire
10. Rose and freesia bridal bouquet by Wild Poppies
11. Wedding Ring Photo by Sakura Photography
12. Cream Wedding Favor Bag from Pac-HS (UK)
13. Cream Wedding Invitation (Style #AC4713B) from Indian Wedding

Inspiration Board #5: Spring Fling - Melon, Peach, Yellow, Orange

I was driving back from the Detroit airport today and noticed massive clumpings of daffodils in full bloom off of I-94. I decided to use these lovely signs of spring as inspiration to create a lively, bright theme perfect for this time of year. Warm and inviting colors with a few narcissus thrown in = a sassy mix of class and comfort.

1. Dahlia Gown by Simple Silhouettes
2. 320 Park Avenue in New York via EMRG Media
3. Striped Neck Tie from Ties-Necktie.com
4. Boutonniere from Wedding Flowers Guide
5. Cool Passport Invitations found on Ars Lounge
6. LulaKate Bridal Bridesmaid Dresses via Lucky in Love Wedding Blog
7. Bouquet shown on Australia Entertains
8. Serrano Ham and Melon photos from The Flirty Guide
9. Raspberry Lemon Pie from Thimbelanna
10. Ticket from Amemptos Music (UK)
11. Flower Hair Combs shown on Martha Stewart Weddings via Bridal Wave
    

Wedding Etiquette - Deciding Who To Invite

After setting a budget, the next logical step in wedding planning is to pull together your invite list. Completing this task early in the process determines the appropriate size of your event, confirms whether or not your budget is realistic, and helps you figure out where the wedding/reception should be held based on how many out-of-town guests you may expect and what reception venues will physically fit your party.

Deciding who to invite to a wedding can be a very stressful process. Many couples feel obligated to invite people due to pressures from their family or peers. And sometimes there will be disagreements over the number of potential invitees since the bride and groom have different approaches to their decision making. So how do you reach a consensus and figure out who makes the list and who doesn't?

To create an invite list, I first recommend the bride and groom go off on their own and determine who they would like to attend (along with some parental input re: relatives and close family friends). Then the two of them should combine the lists into one and go through some basic questions together to classify each person into the following bins: Must Invite, Back-up List, Remove from List. Here are some questions that may help with this process:

• How long has it been since you last talked to this person? If this is a person you only "talk" to in a yearly Christmas card, or you haven't seen them in several years (even if they were your "best friend" at the time) chances are they aren't close enough to you now to be invited to your wedding.
• Are they mutual friends? If not, how much does this person know about the person you are marrying? If the person is a good friend, they should know quite a bit about the most important person in your life.
• Are you only inviting them because they invited you to their wedding or you were in their wedding years ago? Friendships can change over the years so it's perfectly appropriate to not invite someone whose wedding you attended several years ago (even if you were a bridesmaid).
• Would you call this person after the birth of your child? If you'd call them in person they definitely should be invited. If they're someone you would add to a mass distribution e-mail they should be on your back-up list. If you would just let them find out on Facebook or MySpace they shouldn't be invited.
• Are you inviting them just because they're a co-worker and you're afraid of hurting their feelings? You should only invite co-workers if you consider them to be a close friend. One way of putting this into perspective: When was the last time you spent time with this person in a social setting - outside of work?
• Has this person met both of you? If you have been together as a couple for two or more years, everyone on your wedding invite list should have met your fiance at least once.
• If you are planning to exclude children from your event, will this person understand your desire to have an adult-only wedding? It's perfectly appropriate to ask guests to leave their children at home. However, most sites recommend being very clear with this desire since some people don't understand etiquette. In other words, you should leave the children's names off the card when addressing the invitation -and- have "Adults Only" printed on the details for the wedding &/or reception.
• Overall, couples should remember their wedding is an intimate celebration to be shared with people who mean a great deal to them and who have made a positive impact on their lives. If someone on the invite list does not fit this bill they definitely shouldn't be invited!

I found a great article on CNN.com from last August that had 10 questions each wedding guest should be able to answer. For obvious reasons, I don't recommend sending out this survey to each of your potential guests :) Rather you should use this to help narrow down your guest list. The Political Calculations Blog also came up with a scoring mechanism to help you with this process as well.

Should you be invited to my wedding?
By Audrey Irvine
(CNN) -- One of my girlfriends recently got engaged. Before we could even bask in her happiness, the conversation turned to the dreaded guest list. Fun questions like, "So, honey, do we have to invite your great aunt, whom you haven't seen since you were 10?" So, who should get an invite?

Too often, women are pressured into inviting way too many people to their weddings out of a sense of obligation. Parents, prospective in-laws and grooms can turn a simple wedding into a grand affair.
And as soon as that engagement ring catches her eye, that occasional lunch acquaintance feels entitled to share in your happy nuptials. Then you realize too late that the majority of people at your wedding don't really know you or what has been going on in your life up until your big day.

This quiz is something I shared with friends years ago and feel inclined to share with other women.
Here are 10 questions couples can use to trim that guest list and weed out the people you really don't want at your wedding:
1) Name the city I'm living in now (Good one to weed folks out, especially if you have moved a lot. Don't use this if you've lived in the same place for 10 years).
2) Name at least two of my closest friends.
3) Name my current employer and my past employer (Again, if you've remained in the same job for 15 years, this does not apply).
4) Do I have any kids?
5) Do you know the name of my fiancé? Bonus question: Where and when did we meet?
6) Do you know where my parents are and whether they are still alive? (Imagine a friend at your wedding asking how long have your parents been married when they divorced years ago).
7) Name at least two of my hobbies.
8) How old am I? (My favorite is when family friends would query, 'Are you 28 now?" Imagine their surprise when I proclaimed, 'yeah, 10 years ago!')
9) Where did I go to college? (Some people might not remember whether you attended college or even graduated.)
10) Name my last boyfriend before this engagement. Bonus question: if you can name the last two and why we broke up. If you get the bonus question right, that might automatically get you in.

If you score 50 percent or below, you definitely are not getting invited. If you score barely over 50 percent, you are on the waiting list. If you score over 60 percent, you get an invitation.

We're getting Married!!! OMG - Where do I even begin?

ESTABLISHING A BUDGET

The most important thing to do before even starting to plan your wedding is to set your budget. Why? Establishing a budget helps keep you grounded as to what you can actually afford -and- it also gives you a good idea of how much something may cost...so you have a baseline price to reference when selecting vendors, etc.

There are what seem like millions of wedding websites out there. So many in fact, most newly engaged gals must feel totally overwhelmed by the information overload. And although many of these sites offer tools for the bride, the focus of this post is to determine which wedding site is the best for budget planning. First, I searched the web to see which planning sites were mentioned the most ofen and then I created my own account on each of those sites. The sites I tested included: The Knot, The Wedding Channel, Get Married, Wedding Wire, Martha Stewart Weddings, EZ Wedding Planner, One Wed, and Brides.com.


The WINNER(s): Wedding Wire - This site is the big winner when it comes to budgeting. The nice thing is Martha Stewart Weddings actually uses Wedding Wire's tool so you can choose from either site to get the benefits. Using the tool is easy. Once you put in your overall target, it will calculate estimations for line item costs. And the it allows you to change these estimations - in case you're a DIY bride and want to do some things youself to save cost or want to splurge on some other item. Besides these features, this tool lets you to add line items, and insert and track the actual cost, amount paid, and date due for each expense. You can also insert and track responsible payer, amount still due, payment date, and type of payment. The only thing it seems to be missing is for you to track your number of guests/attendants to determine per/head costs which can be handy when selecting a caterer.

The Knot - The Knot's big plus is their payment tracking system where you can track deposit, second, and final payments for items including amount, due date, payment date, and form of payment. It also allows you to add payments due to a checklist, and e-mail yourself a reminder within a certain timeframe of the due date (ex/ 1 week before the payment is due). Like Wedding Wire/Martha Stewart Weddings, you can add items. However, the big negative I found is that although it gives you an estimate of how much things should cost there's no way to modify the estimated number. This can be a problem when you want to truly customize how much you want to spend on each item.

Brides - Brides.com's budget planner is in Beta format so it probably doesn't have all of the features the site plans to incorporate into the final version. The tool is a good start, but not worth the hassle. First, you have to add each line item youself (which requires using another site to come up with the basic items) and due to this fact, it doesn't give you an automatic estimate of what the items will cost based. Overall Brides Beta is not very useful to use as a planning tool - just a tracking tool. It does have a per head estimate and invited vs actually attending price which is something I think all of the sites should add.

Get Married - This site's budgeting tool does have the nice enhancements of tips for each expense item and a video for some of them. However, like Brides.com, it does not give you a baseline estimated price (you put it in yourself) and all you can track are estimated cost, actual cost, delta to budget, amount paid and amount due.

EZ Wedding Planner - EZ Wedding Planner is straight forward. However, it lacks any sort of eye candy, can be a pretty cluttered site, and doesn't have enhanced tools like the other bridal sites. Also, I couldn't figure out how to change the budget - it automatically gave me a budget of $17400? Out of all of the tools, I scored this one the lowest.

One Wed - Does not appear to have any sort of budget tracking tool. I'll check it out again when it comes to creating a wedding website for your friends/family to get all of your wedding details.

The Wedding Channel - This website appears to have a budgeting tool but after I logged in and then clicked on budget, it asked me to log in again and wouldn't let me in. After multiple attempts and then re-visiting the e-mail that confirmed I was entering the correct name/password, I got frustrated with it and gave up. If anyone has used it for budgeting, feel free to add your experience in the comments section.

WHO PAYS FOR WHAT?
The main issue most of these budget planning sites had was none of them listed who traditionally pays for what items or was a line-item added for designating who is paying (it may have been in another area on the site, just not mentioned on the budget planning sheet). Granted, trends are changing and some brides and grooms are paying for their own weddings. However, if you want to see who typically pays for various pieces of the wedding, Wed Alert.com posted an article written by Kristin Oiam. Here is a condensed exerpt from her article describing who traditionally is responsible for what expenses:

• THE BRIDE - Wedding ring+ wedding gift for the groom, Party or luncheon + gifts for attendants, lodging for out-of-town attendants
• THE GROOM - Engagement + wedding rings + wedding gift for the bride, legal documents/marriage license, honeymoon, transportation, lodging for out-of-town attendants
• THE BRIDESMAIDS and MAID OF HONOR - Bridal Shower, Bachelorette Party, Wedding Attire/Accessories
• THE GROOMSMEN and BEST MAN - Bachelor Party, Wedding Attire
• PARENTS OF THE GROOM - Rehearsal Dinner, Post-Wedding Brunch
• PARENTS OF THE BRIDE - Reception (music, flowers, food, bar, gratuities), Bride's Gown, all other expenses