Wedding Planning 101

I only had slightly less than 6 months to plan my wedding. Some people thought we were crazy, but I actually liked having that extra pressure. It forced me to make decisions and not falter back and forth on things too much. That said, it was difficult at first for me to narrow down a direction I wanted to go with our scheme because I found so many amazing things online and in magazines that I wanted to incorporate. 

If I had a million dollars I would have hired a wedding planner/coordinator. Planning everything ourselves on such a short time frame while working full time was definitely no small feat. We were fortunate that Ted had a month off before the wedding and starting residency, and I put him to work! He was extremely helpful in making phone calls, sending emails and tracking things down like our reception location and corresponding with our pastor, DJ, photographer, etc.

First things first - use The Knot  for everything. We used the guest list, budget tracker, checklist, and wedding website features and would have been much more stressed without them. Especially the checklist. They give you this massive list broken up by the months to go until your wedding date. Each month there are tasks to be completed like "hire a DJ", "choose color scheme", "send first deposit in for reception", etc. They get even more specific toward the end like "have final dress fitting" and "book wedding night hotel room." 

One of my favorite features was the idea image gallery. You can search by flowers, cakes, decorations, invitations, fashion, etc. to see hundreds of thousands of inspiration photos. I also really liked that you could search by color and then save your favorites to a folder. 

These were some of the ideas that I ended up actually using as a basis for our own designs. I spent a lot of time looking through these galleries because everything was so pretty.

Besides The Knot, I was hooked on several wedding blogs that had ridiculously amazing ideas. First up is Style Me Pretty which has a flood of real life weddings posted every day. I would literally check it like three times a day and drool over the photography and the extravagance. Some people have waaaaaaaaaaaay bigger budgets than we did! But it's fun to look at anyway.


Another one I loved was Grey Likes Weddings, which shows real weddings, engagement photo ideas, and lots and lots of cool products, giveaways, and fun ideas for cakes, flowers, etc. If I would have had a fall wedding, I love this pic below!

So many cool ideas here. Besides these two, I stalked photographer's blogs as well - especially local ones. It was cool to see familiar buildings and places transformed into wedding wonderlands. Here are a few links to some of my favorites.

Kristen Holly Studios

Harrison Studio

Kristen Taylor Photography

There are so many more resources out there it can get kind of mind boggling. I have a foot tall stack of magazines in my basement too, which I looked through hundreds of times. Wedding design and Interior design kind of go hand in hand in certain ways, so the whole process was so much fun for me. After the big day was over, I kind of went through a little withdrawal for a while! But the bright side is now I have more time for craft and house projects again. Oh yeah, and my hubby :)