Only Book Vendors Youre Comfortable With
Whitney Neal Studios
When it comes to booking wedding vendors, it’s essential to not rush into any decisions. Consider at least a few different options to make sure these important wedding day partners understand your vision and can also work within your budget. Wedding vendors are the nuts and bolts to ensuring your day is ultra memorable and everything runs smoothly, so make sure they’re a team of people that you really vibe well with. They should have a good sense of your vision and you should be able to trust them to execute it well.
Take notice of how a vendor communicates as you try to feel them out. If their particular style of communication isn’t a good fit or they seem unreliable or disinterested at this stage, it won’t be a right match for the real work. You should never feel bad about reaching out with any along-the-way questions.
Wedding Cake Tiers Sizes And Servings: Everything You Need To Know
Make choosing the size, servings and number of tiers a piece of cake…
Whether you dream of decorating your own budget one-tier wonder or you want a towering masterpiece created for your wedding reception, its time to find out how much wedding cake you actually need. Heres everything you need to know about wedding cake tiers, sizes and servings
The Bride’s Wedding Party Flowers
- Bridal bouquet
- Different bouquet for the maid of honor
- Flower girl headpiece
- Flower girl basket decorations
- Flower girl petals to toss
Flowers to Consider: Roses, tulips and calla lilies are formal and appropriate choices for bridal bouquets. The bride’s flowers are often more expensive and larger than those of the bridesmaids in regards to setting them apart. You may also choose to have the bridesmaid’s bouquets compose of lighter colors and the bride’s bouquet as fresh and vibrant. For the maid of honor, consider a different bouquet from the other bridesmaids. A headpiece constructed of handcrafted felt flowers in light colors such as white, green, pink and yellow can grace your flower girls head.
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Weeks Before Your Wedding
- Start wearing your wedding shoes around the house, as needed
- Make sure your wedding party knows any critical information as it pertains to the rehearsal dinner or wedding day
- Schedule a final dress fitting
- Print wedding programs, if youre having them
- Confirm all rentals
- Sit down with your wedding stage manager or day-of coordinator and walk through all the details for your wedding day
- Get your marriage license
- And finally, for fun, if you havent picked a wedding hashtag, get moving on that
- This is also a good time to review your wedding checklist and overall plan, add stuff you missed, and remove stuff you dont care about anymore
Meet With Potential Florists
Much like hiring your other vendors, you want to be simpatico with your florist, as well. In order to do that, we suggest polling friends for recs, scrolling through Instagram inspo, and asking your planner/venue coordinator who they recommend in the area. It’s important that you find someone who is able to deliver on your vision and budget.
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Your Wedding Planning Checklist: What You Need To Do And When
So, you just got engaged?! Congratulations!!! This is going to be one of THE most exciting times in your life, and its just the start of your adventures together as a soon-to-be married couple! You should definitely take the time to revel in what just happened. I mean, youre engaged!!!! Once youve let that sink in, youll want to start planning the best party EVER. But where to begin? Let this wedding checklist help you navigate the way!
Each section below is listed in the order we feel is most important for your scheduleand sanity! The timeframe is going to be different for everybody, and this is important: ITS NOT THERE TO STRESS YOU OUT. Trust us, we have seen hundreds of brides plan a gorgeous wedding in less than four, heck even two months. It IS possible. Also, your wedding checklist timeline might not include half of these things. For instance, you might already know exactly where and when you want to get married before you even said Yes! which is great! But if you ARE starting your wedding planning from scratch, this list or priorities will hopefully help, especially if you have a year to plan it. After youve told your closest family and friends heres what we recommend focusing on:
Want a printable version? Download this handy checklist from our fave bridesmaid dress company Bustle & Veil!
Bridal Shower Thank You Cards
After your bridal shower, it is customary to send a Thank You note to each guest for their generous gift. Be sure to collect addresses ahead of time from the bridal shower host. You may also want to designate someone to write down who each gift came from so you can properly express gratitude in your card.
Card Size: Usually folded cards, sizes range from A7 or A2 with a coordinating envelope. They can also be sent out as postcards .
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Plan The Before And After Events
Theres often much more to a wedding than the big day itself, though you wont necessarily do them all. As usual, the particulars depend on the size of your wedding, the logistics, and the complexity of the ceremony. These are the events you may prepare or need time for beyond the wedding:
Pro tip: You should also plan breaks for yourself and your partner into your schedule. This includes ten-minute breaks to catch your breath between activities to entire weekends off between events to recenter and relax. Do whatever makes you feel rested. It can be anything from booking a luxury massage to deep cleaning your storage closet to taking your dog on a hike. Just add in these non-negotiable breaks to your schedule to keep your sanity in check. Which brings us to our next tip
What Kind Of Planner Are You
I planned my wedding budget on a post-it that I kept on my desk with a rough outline of a budget on it. While you should definitely not follow my lead , suffice to say I was not a super type-A organized planner. A wedding checklist with a hundred steps would have just stressed me out. If youre like me and cant handle a million part checklist, Brooklyn-based professional wedding designer, Michelle Edgemont recommends breaking your wedding checklist into more manageable big picture chunks before you get into the details of your to-do list. She says:
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Choose Your Wedding Ceremony Location
Deciding where youre going to hold the ceremony has an impact on where the reception, and the rest of the wedding events, will be held. Some venues offer both ceremony and reception space, while others, like many places of worship, may be ceremony-centric. Use a wedding venue search tool like Wedding Spot to sort venues by services offered, distance to other venues, and more.
Pro tip: If youre planning on having live music for your ceremony, make sure your venue isnt located in an area with a strict noise ordinance in place, and consider the needs of neighboring homes and businesses. Youll also want to consider any sound issues your venue has that may interrupt your ceremony, such as nearby roads, gun ranges, etc.
Find the perfect wedding venue!
Start To Consider Your Wedding Outfit
Suits can be found much closer to the wedding date, so this is only really relevant if you’re a bride.
Start to think about the style of wedding dress you might want to wear on your big day. Look inside your wardrobe first and see what style you’re drawn too, then research styles and designers on wedding websites and on Pinterest, and finally look around to see which boutiques stock the styles or designer you’re after.
If youre not sure what style of dress youd like and would rather go with an open mind, find a local boutique and book an appointment to see what suits you. Hitched has lists of the best bridalwear shops in Essex, Liverpool, London and Manchester among others.
You’ll find that the dress shopping experience is a fun and exciting one, but unfortunately it can be harder if you’re plus-size and going to high street boutiques. We’d recommend those brides find plus-size boutiques which will offer samples you can try on and a huge range of specialist designers, styles and sizes. You can find six essential rules for plus-size wedding dress shopping from Jo and Al of TLC’s Curvy Brides Boutique here.
12 months before your wedding you should book and attend a meeting with your registrar. These can be booked for any time between one year and three months before your wedding date, but its best to get it out the way.
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Wedding Checklist: 3 Months Before Your Wedding
- Address and mail your wedding invitations
- Think about what ceremony extras you might need , and buy or rent them
- If youre DIYing anything for your wedding, start now or cross it off your list
- Schedule dress fittings, as needed
- Research your local marriage license, civil union, and domestic partnership rules
Construct A List Of Wedding Day Priorities
Leila Brewster
Sit down with your partner and determine what the three most important aspects of your wedding will be. Is it the venue or specific wedding date? Locking in a certain wedding photographer or live band? Prioritize those details and be willing to compromise on the rest. This will help you stay within your budget and help you focus your efforts on what really counts.
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Start Shopping For Your Wedding Dress
You may know exactly what you want or you might not, which is okay, too. To get you started, here’s an ultimate guide to dress shopping. Also, visit these places in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York Citybecause finding a gown may be a matter of trial and error, but finding a salon shouldn’t be.
Book A Dj Or Wedding Band
Other suppliers which should be booked at the earliest date include your DJ or wedding band plus any musicians youd like playing earlier in the day. Theyll be the life and soul of your party, and since they can only attend one wedding per day, its a good idea to book your favourite pronto.
If the wedding venue youve booked is not going to be doing your catering, youll need to consider hiring outside caterers. Think about the type of wedding breakfast youd like it can be a BBQ, hog roast or selection of sharing platters if you dont want something traditional and go from there.
Weve got a whole host of recommended caterers from almost everywhere in the UK right here.
If youre not planning on DIY wedding flowers, its a good idea to book your florist as soon as you know your theme and venue.
Lots of florists will work on more than one wedding per day, but if youve got big ideas of flower arches and impressive floral installations, theres nothing to lose from booking them early.
Dont worry you dont have to know exactly what you want just yet, as you and your florist are likely to head on a venue visit together later on in the process before you get everything finalised.
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The Vintage Camera Booth
No matter your weddings style, these cameras will fit right in. Pop Shop Photobooths vintage-inspired design will definitely catch your guests eyes, but the insides are all digitalmeaning the booths can text the images straight to your guests phones. The open-air design means you can fit as many friends into each shot as youd like, and the rental fee includes a customized logo that appears at the bottom of the printed photos. Upgrade your rental with a printed backdrop .
Everything You Need To Plan A Wedding
Almost everyone has a dream wedding plan in their head: white dress, smart tuxedo, that first dance, leaving for your honeymoon in a beautiful vintage car.
While its easy to get caught up in the romance of it all, there are a lot of things big and small that you may not think to consider when preparing for a wedding. With a wedding, the detailswhether its gifts for your groomsmen or having a repair kit handycan make or break the day.
Below, you can find a checklist to help you make sure that youve thought about and planned for every part of your wedding: from the earrings worn by the flower girls to the ribbons on your car.
Some items also have recommended places to source them. Hopefully this guide and checklist will help you have a happy wedding day!
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The Lowest Key Wedding Checklist
Before we get into a huge checklist, lets step back and look at the whole picture. We created this flowchartto help you figure out the big picture of how wedding planning is going to work. This walks you through the fact that you need to figure out where youre getting married first, then book your most important vendors, and you know maybe then buy your dress . This will help keep your priorities straight when youre tempted to, say, spend $500 on decor before youve got your venue locked down. Pin it to your Pinterest board, or put it on your fridge and just follow the general big picture steps.
Make Contact With Entertainment To Finalise Details
Here at Entertainment Nation, our acts all provide a 4 week call to clients in order to finalise details of your day. This includes timings, venue discussions , and any live music requests if youd like to choose specific songs from their repertoire. If your band also provides a DJ service , you can let them know any songs you want included.
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Wedding Dj Equipment Checklist
Oh of course, please dont forget the music! Weve all heard of nightmare gigs where the DJ has forgotten their CD wallet, records, USB stick, or hard disc. Dont be the that DJ!
All of the items above are available to purchase on the Amazon website. I always shop for wedding DJ equipment on this website, as I find that most of the time it has the best value and cheapest prices. If you have an Amazon Prime account you can also get it all shipped to you really quickly.
