My Wedding DIY Opinion

Let me start out by saying I love Pinterest. I can be on it for hours, sorting through the people who I follow's pins or searching things I am curious about. A lot of things in my house are the result of DIY Pinterest recommendations (the ones that were NOT more complicated than the blogger made it seem). My wedding was almost entirely DIY.

Essentially all of my decor was made by myself with the help of friends and family. Most of these ideas came from Pinterest. Overall, every project I started was easily accomplished without much difficulty or time. Some things I knew would be tedious, but I scheduled myself enough time to take care of it without stress. This is part of why it is so important to stay organized for your wedding. If you have a lot of DIY ideas, you need to be planning out your time specifically so you can get it done (not the week of or night before the wedding). My book can really help you get organized.

See? Even now I am getting distracted. This is why I was ultra organized with my DIY projects. Putting them off to clean the house or go out to dinner would have put me severely behind and cause a great deal of unnecessary stress.

Even though I love DIY projects, the ones I can actually accomplish anyway, there are some parts of my DIY wedding planning I would love to go back and redo. As an experienced DIY who was planning on a budget, I am here to give you my DIY opinion.

Invitations - Buy Professional

I tried to add a personal touch to my invitation envelopes based on an idea I found on Pinterest. All you had to do was put a lace doily on the corner of the invitation, spray paint the envelope your desired colors, let it dry for a moment and Voila! Beautiful and handmade envelopes.

This was my first wedding planning DIY experiment and it went horribly, horribly wrong. First, if you have more than 30 invitations it is a terrible idea. Second, you need high quality cardstock envelopes to endure the weight of the spray paint. Third, you better plan on coming back to the envelope and spraying the back so you don't have weird overspray around the edges. Fourth, you have to wait at least 15 minutes before peeling the doily off. Fifth, the doily will rip apart within six sprays. Sixth, Krylon will NOT spray evenly and leave a horrible, horrible envelope mess. 

Just don't do it.

Centerpieces - DIY

I believe making your own centerpieces is much better than buying predone centerpieces, expensive floral arrangements, or basic candles and vases. You get to customize a look that is unique to your wedding and save money at the same time. If you want floral centerpieces, it is a lot of fun to get together with your bridesmaids the day before the wedding with flowers you purchased in bulk and create the arrangements.

Wedding Favors - Buy Professional

If you choose to have wedding favors, buy them completed or choose a vendor who will customize the favors for you. Trying to make the favors yourself will slowly drive you insane. The pain of creating your own favors is especially harsh when your guests don't take the favors with them.

Signs and Miscellaneous Decor - DIY

It is difficult to buy any signs or other miscellaneous decor for your wedding professionally. Usually this decor is highly customized and extremely expensive to get from a vendor. It can also be hard to find the specific vendor that came make any misc decor. This is the perfect time to browse Pinterest and get inspiration or how-to's for your misc decor.

Guest Book - Buy Professional

If you have some digital media skills, like I did, feel free to build your own guest book. Otherwise, look at Amazon to find a pretty guest book for the ceremony and reception. You can also see if your photographer can make a photo book with spaces for signatures. They might even add some fun questions for your guests to answer.

Wedding Album - DIY

This is not specifically for the wedding, but rather a result. Your photographer will probably offer to build your wedding book for you. Usually this is expensive and they do not put all of the pictures you want in the album. Go to a photo book creator website, such as Shutterfly, to build your own album. If you choose this route, you can make the building process as easy or as difficult as you like, so don't worry if you have no experience making a photo book. 

What is your DIY opinion? Is Pinterst your best friend, unimportant, or your worst enemy? Let me know in the comments!

Being Unique: How to Personalize Your Wedding Day

Let's face it, weddings are pretty traditional. Millions of weddings happen every year and they hit the usual roadmarks that all couples plan for their day. Some people even hate weddings because it is the same thing at every party.

Don't be that couple! Thanks to resources like Pinterest, The Knot, Wedding Wire, and other inspirational websites, you can find ways to personalize your wedding and make it memorable for yourself and your guests.

Make a Theme

For the ultra creative, you can choose an entire theme to base your wedding around. Right now, country chic and Jazz Age themes are very popular. These choices are beautiful when every detail is considered and a lot of fun to attend. You can base themes on locations, time periods, books, movies, music, and more. While more details need to be considered for a theme wedding, they are overall easier to plan because you have a roadmap of items you need to get.

Incorporate Interests or Hobbies

If a theme is not really your thing, try to at least incorporate some hobbies or interests that you and your fiance share. For example, if you both love to go camping or hunting, incorporate some wood motifs into your decor. You could have guests carve their initials into a fake tree or have a mini campfire as the centerpiece on tables.

My husband and I both love Star Wars, so we incorporated pieces of the movies into our wedding. Our cake toppers were Han Solo and Princess Leia figures we got from Comic Con. We were announced as husband and wife to the Cantina Band song and we had a Darth Vader element I'll cover at the end of the blog post.

Signature Drinks or Desserts

To add a touch of personality and more choices for your guests, consider offering a signature drink or dessert based on you and your fiance's personalities. At my wedding, I specially ordered alcohol. I had Pink Lemonade and Vodka for my signature drink and Crown and Coke for my husband's. You could also do two of your favorite desserts. To make it more fun, have guests vote on which is their favorite to see who "wins" at the end of the night - the bride or groom.

Reception Games

Some guests don't like dancing, so give them something else to do. Photobooths are starting to lose their newness at weddings, but they are a great way to entertain your guests. You could also have some fun games available, such as an I-Spy game. Consider switching out traditional reception activities, such as the dollar dance, with unique and fun spins on classics. The picture above is my husband and I playing the Shoe Game. It is like the Newlywed Game, but you answer questions about your relationship using the other person's shoe.

Another fun thing we did at our reception was have Darth Vader kidnap me instead of doing a traditional dollar dance. While I was kidnapped, my husband had to raise the "ransom" money to get me back. This was a HUGE hit at our wedding and my awesome DJ Nick Chavez persuaded me into doing it when I was worried no one would participate. 

When looking for fun things like this to do at your wedding and reception, start Googling. There are so many great wedding blogs that have tons of unique ideas submitted by brides across the country. Adding these little touches to your wedding will make it extremely memorable and way more fun. 

Today is the last day you can get my eBook "How to Create the Ultimate Wedding Planning Binder" for FREE!

The Importance of Organization and Release of Print Book!

The whole reason I created this blog and wrote my eBook was to help brides become stress-free and how organization is the best way to do that. To give all the new Christmas brides (and soon to be Valentine's brides!) more awareness on how to be stress-free while planning, I have released my eBook in print format as well!

I felt like releasing the book in the print option would allow more brides to take advantage of my advice, and help it appear more often in Amazon searches.

As part of this signal boost for brides, my eBook is FREE from now until this Thursday, February 6th! Please review my book if you choose to take advantage of this free promotion so more brides can get the help they need!

Even if you don't get my book, I want to talk about how important it is to stay organized when planning your wedding. You may think in the beginning you can keep everything in your head or make little notes in your phone calendar. I guarantee you are going to get lost along the way and end up with those movie-quality wedding castrophies. 

It's like when you get your electric bill in the mail and you put it on the table to pay later since it isn't due for a couple weeks. Then more mail gets piled up and before you know it you have the electric company sending you late fee notices and power shut off warnings. You want to avoid this stress and panic for your wedding by staying organized. 

When you choose to keep all your wedding planning information and decisions in your head, it causes your short term memory to fizzle out. Your short term brain's hard drive is full and all processing programs are going to run slow. You know how you get stressed and irritated when your computer is running slow and not acting right? Your brain does the same, causing you to be stressed and anxious.  

• 48% of people experience a negative impact on their personal and professional lives when they are stressed
• 54% of people fight with people close to them (like your fiance!) when they are stressed
• 26% of people are alienated from friends or family members if they are stressed

When you start organizing all of your wedding thoughts, even tiny things such as ideas for centerpieces, your entire engagement period will be so much more enjoyable. You can avoid the horrible symptoms of stress, including irritability, anger, fatigue, nervousness, lack of energy, and the feeling like you could break down crying any second, when you get on top of your wedding planning organization. 

The Latest Trend: Chalkboard Signs

Every few years a new wedding trend will appear. Sometimes it is just the most popular dress style. Others it is a song that everyone uses for their first dance. For the past couple years, the trend has been DIY, simplistic-yet-chic weddings.

I'm going to attribute this DIY trend to the rise of Pinterest as a major influence in wedding planning. Women can now brainstorm ideas for their wedding before they are ever engaged (another great reason to get my eBook about how to create a wedding planning binder - it's never too early to be prepared!).

I was absolutely a victim of this DIY movement. Most of my decor and other wedding ideas came directly from Pinterest. It was so much cheaper to do things myself than trying to pay for stuff premade. Some things completely backfired, like spending weeks creating monogrammed champagne flutes for the guests to take home. No one ended up taking them, even with my note on the table. Now I use my champagne flutes in place of red Solo cups at all family parties. Other things, like my chalkboard signs, worked out perfectly.

Pinterest is full of pictures for this beautiful, simple-yet-chic chalkboard trend. For years before I got engaged, I pinned these beautiful chalkboard signs as a simple decor option. The problem was you either had to learn excellent calligraphy or hire a professional sign maker to accomplish this look, neither of which I was willing to do.

Then I found this pin that taught me how to do my own chalkboard signs. You buy chalkboards, stencils, chalk, and a chalkboard marker (found at your local arts and crafts store, like Michaels) to create these signs. Sharpen your chalk to a point and use the stencils to trace the letters you want. Fill the blank space with the chalkboard marker and Voila! It looks like you had an expert calligrapher create your decor.

Of course, no DIY thing on Pinterest will ever go perfectly. I couldn't find the chalkboard size I wanted anywhere, so I wandered around Michaels until I came up with a alternative. I bought a four pack of canvas prints, black chalkboard spray paint, cardboard scroll frames, and blue spray paint.

I used the black chalkboard paint on the canvas to create an authentic chalkboad look. I then spray painted the cardboard scrolls to match my wedding color and hot glued it to the canvas. I didn't have the right size pencil sharpener to sharpen my chalk, so I made do and simply used my chalkboard marker over the actual chalk. I luckily found some chalkboard markers that contained all of my wedding colors (blue and fall shades) to make my boards more colorful.

I made a ceremony program sign instead of printing out a bunch of paper programs, an I-Spy camera game that I got off Pinterest in case guests got bored, the website and code to share photos from the wedding, and a fun little "History of Us" sign with significant dates from our time together. All of these ideas I got from Pinterest. I also made some smaller chalkboard signs out of silver serving trays explaining the desserts, guest book, and signature drinks.

I was extremely happy with my signs, but if you want perfection higher a calligrapher. It was trying at times, especially wrestling with my unsharpened chalk, lining up each letter of my stensils, trying to make everything fit, and forcing just a little bit more color out of my markers. As you can see, I used my very best cursive on some parts of the signs because I was fed up with the stencils. Overall, I love my chalkboard effect and would recommend this DIY project to anyone.

From now until Sunday, February 2nd, my eBook "How to Create the Ultimate Wedding Planning Binder" will be available on Amazon Kindle for only 99 cents! Take advantage of this amazing price while you can!

Release of my eBook!

Hello hopefully-soon-to-be blog followers!

I am so excited to announce the arrival of my first ever eBook: How to Create the Ultimate Wedding Planning Binder - And Other Helpful Wedding Planning Tips.

I just finished editing the complete draft last week, but rushed to get it on Amazon on January 16th, 2014. This date is significant, because a year ago to this day my now-husband proposed to me. I had no idea what I was getting into and now I have the wisdom and experience to hand down my planning secrets to future brides who also have no idea what they are getting into =)

I decided to write this book because of how many people were amazed at my organization and planning with my insane binder (pictured above).

Vendors, family, friends, and strangers were impressed with my binder and all the information contained in it. I gave advice to other brides-to-be throughout my engagement and was encouraged by my husband to create a book on how to plan a wedding using a binder for organization. I decided to go for it.

In the eBook, people will find how to make a wedding binder and all of the divider folders to organize the information needed. I teach how to construct a timeline, no matter how soon or far away the wedding date is, along with how to accomplish every major category of the wedding planning.

The eBook will be released at the initial price of $2.99, but I hope to run promotional specials every few months so more brides will be able to get help from the book. I also have the book available in the Lender's Library. So, if you have an Amazon Prime account, you can check the book out for five days absolutely for free!

I will also post regularly on this blog after the release of the book, giving additional wedding planning advice and tips, along with awesome things I see on Pinterest that I wish I had done. My initial goal is to post twice a week, probably on Tuesday and Thursday. I hope this increases over time. Please feel free to ask me any questions in comments about wedding planning and I will try to give you the best answer possible based on my experience. I hope you enjoy my eBook and hopefully will gain some insight from this blog as well =)

You can find my eBook on Amazon here or by clicking my book cover photo at the beginning of the blog post. Don't forget to rate and review the book!