Walking In a Wedding Wonderland

On May 19, 2012 I married my best friend Ryan Howell.  We were engaged for almost 2 complete years before we got married, so as you can imagine we were very anxious for the day to arrive!  However, having a long engagement gave me the time to plan the wedding that I always dreamed of.  Our wedding was a complete DIY wedding.  My mother, husband, and bridesmaids (thank you Jennifer, Nicole, Amy, Cresence, and Marisa) were all part of the wedding planning process.  In saying that, we decided to save money and not hire a wedding/event planner for the day.  In the end, I was exhausted for all the work, but I felt so proud that our wedding was something that was completely crafted with out a wedding planner.  Also, in saying this, I did have an event coordinator at the reception site the day of my wedding because we had to have a representative on site and our wedding ceremony was at a church not the reception venue.  However, the event planner did not design the wedding...just decorated (and she was great at the decorating we were very thankful to have her).
Our wedding could easily be categorized as a budget wedding.  Weddings are expensive, and while it is an EXTREMELY important life event, there is no reason to completely break the bank in the creation of your dream.  Before we started buying wedding items we made a budge of how much we could spend, and how much items would probably cost.  In the end we were almost half way under what we were expecting to
have to pay for our wedding.
I want to help other brides who are working within a budget for the wedding.  Therefore, I am going to dedicate my next few post to DIY projects that I did for my wedding along with tips on how to plan your wedding yourself.  First of all, I have nothing against wedding planners and I think wedding planners are wonderful and there are many benefits to having one.  However, when you are on a budget hiring a wedding planner is not always the best financial decision especially when you have many wonderful people to help you plan.


Some tutorial I will be posting include

• Making Wedding Wands
• Decorating the Head Table
• DIY Popcorn Bar
• Photography Checklist

There will also be many others that I will be posting so check back often, and PLEASE let me know if you have any specific questions about my wedding day! I can not wait to here form everyone!