An open letter to Broke ass Bride

Dear Broke-ass Bride,
I really like you. I really like your ideas, and your ideals that weddings can be something glamorous and wonderful with out breaking the bank. As a person with a wedding budget I totally love what you are doing.  I have really been trying, so don't hate me when I say


Weddings on a budget are hard.

I know that there are better places to get a wedding dress then a small boutique. I KNOW. But as a person who has never shopped for a wedding dress before, and really dislikes buying things from websites that are relatively unverified I just couldn't bring myself to buy that dress that was supposedly $200 on that possibly Chinese website. So I bought this.

Casablanca 1936

It came from a tiny boutique that I drove by a few times. Yes I know there were other options. But at the time I didn't know about that wedding dress exchange site, where I bet I will be selling this dress after the wedding.

I tried David's bridal where I was treated like dirt because I only had a vague idea of what I wanted.  OH and god forbid I ask the sales girl what she thought might look good on my body type. I've worked retail, I get it, but common courtesy when a non-briedzilla comes in wanting an opinion would be nice.  (That lady is still calling me.)

I also went to a fancy place thinking it might be nice to be pampered, but that lady was so pushy that she didn't care what I said I liked (or had already tried and knew looked bad), she brought me whatever was 1000 over the price I said I could pay.

So I think the $800 trunk show price I paid for a dress that had to be ordered from England and took 7 months to make is pretty good.

My photographer, while a friend I have known forever, is a professional wedding photographer, so that cost a TON. (I won't talk prices there, as she is a friend, and I knew what I was getting into.) But I decided early on that a good photographer can make a crappy wedding look amazing, so the price was whatever.

Be proud of me here Broke ass bride! After my original wedding reception venue  tried to tack on an extra $2000 that wasn't quoted to us (they did it while we were about to sign the contract, so we just got the deposit back) I changed my reception venue to the church hall, which will cost a whopping $150! We can bring in our own ANYTHING, so money saved on booze and....

Food. My friend's brother owns a gyro (yee-ro) trailer in town, and has not just agreed, but offered to do a gyro bar buffet at COST!!!!

I booked the same DJ as M's sister, which gave us at $100 discount. They threw in a free light show because they happened to be one of the bad original venue's preferd vendors, and are letting us keep it, because its not our fault that the other people are jerks.

Bridesmaid dresses were easy to do cheap. I found some great ones on clearance at Anthropologie for $53 each. and they turn from dresses into skirts.

The thing that has been hard is impulse things. Like my engagement journal, and Handmade weddings, and this book I found on making invitations.  With any luck I'll keep these under control.

Thanks for listening

Wedding Stress Resolved(ish)

Remember that time when I said I got engaged? You know how I promised to share wedding stuff?
Yeah, sorry about that.

Since getting engaged I relized something about myself.......   Planning weddings is not my thing. 

I don't think it's my fault. I am just not a details person. I can throw a kick ass party, but things like decorations? Come on, I'm surprised I remember that I have things like serving dishes to put food out on. There is also the fact that my mom is not that kind of person either. You know how much planning she put into her own wedding? She went with her mom to the bridal salon to pick the dress out.  And by pick the dress out I mean she was the body it was on. (Okay, exaggeration? Maybe, but my point is its not her thing either.)

Now, this lack of caring about details would not be that big of a deal if I had people around me that were willing to help in a way that was actually helpful.  Or if I wasn't getting conflicting stuff from both sides about my levels of enthusiasm.

Examples? Okay:

My family knows this isn't my thing, so the way they deal with it is by asking me NOTING for months, then jumping down my throat when I don't know about something I should have planned months ago. Oh, was that important for me to do by now? Maybe you should have said something. All the wedding guides say send save the dates at 6 months, but 2 months in I was getting emails wondering if I was EVER planning on letting anyone know when the wedding was going to happen. Shesh. OK sorry I am delaying your planning of your trip to Cabo in 14 months.

M's family, sweet and interested as they are are constantly asking me how things are going with the planning, and then are disappointed that I have no updates, because I... you know.... still have a non-wedding life that I deal with most days, and don't wedding it up every day. They then precede to tell me about their wedding, or so and so's wedding and how beautiful the monogrammed napkins were.... wait, I have to monogram napkins? huh? and I leave feeling very flustered about what it is I need to be doing.

Also, what is the deal about keeping every detail a secret? I have never tried on wedding dresses before, so needing help knowing what looked good on me I posted a picture of a wedding dress on facebook to get an opinion. Within an hour I get a phone call from my grandmother who doesn't even have facebook saying that the family is in an uproar that I am ruining all the surprises. I asked who it was, and it was all people who I don't know well enough to put on the guest list. And I wasn't even considering buying that dress. 

How do you balance that with people wanting to know every last detail of how I decided on which color was my accent color?

I was starting to feel like I must be the only person who feels this way, especially after reading blog posts about what exactly you should do with yourself now that you no longer have a wedding to plan. (sleep? catch up on paperwork from your job?)

Then something magical happened. I got an email from amazon thanking me for my order. I didn't remember that I ordered anything, so I logged on, to see what it was, and sure enough, A Practical Wedding the book, which I had pre-orderd for my Kindle came out, and downloaded to my e-reader.

This book is EXACTLY what I needed. I am not even half way through it, and I feel like I have already reached my wedding zen. None of it matters. With this new found OK-ness about my non wedding minded-ness I can now sit down and look at the wedding things that I have frantically shoved in the corners of my life.  I have booked everything I needed to book, because I had to, but now I can sit down and really think about how it all works together. Now that I know that I wont remember the details so it is -dare I say it- OK that I am not obsessed with them I can look at table cloths and centerpiece vases without that impending sense of doom that I had which said "this will not be perfect and everyone will think you failed as a bride."

So now I am going to go into my back room, and see if I can get all my info in one place, so I can start telling you what I am doing, even though planning a wedding is so not my thing. And now I know that is OK.

Until next time.

Mail Labels

I found the cutest mailing labels ever at: A Very Chocolate Wedding. They are a free download so I have nothing to say other then I will be using these all the time!!