Many brides wonder about the necessity of “save-the-dates” as they compile the charges that pile up during the wedding planning process, but they do have their purpose within the framework of your nuptials. Why should you bother – and how should you go about creating and distributing your preemptive wedding stationary? Read on for some quick tips for your save-the-dates:

Guests from Out of Town:
Save-the-Dates are important for your out-of-town guests. A (timely) wedding invitation won’t make it to their front door in time for travel plans and timely accommodations (especially if your nuptials fall during a high-travel season) – they need to know well ahead of time that they should be planning to travel for your wedding. There is such a thing as “too early” for save-the-dates, however. Ten to six months ahead of time should be plenty warning for your far-away friends and relatives.

The Wedding Website:
Your save-the-date is a great place to debut the address of your wedding website. It doesn’t have to be perfectly finished yet, but allowing your guests to check out a few pertinent details can’t hurt, specifically locations of hotels with blocks of reserved rooms or registry information for pre-wedding parties.

Save-the-Date Etiquette:
Save-the-dates come with their own set of etiquette rules, so don’t wield them without thought. Save-the-dates are not like wedding announcements – everyone who receives a save-the-date must then receive an invitation to your big day. The same goes for the opposite – make sure, if you plan to send out save-the-dates, that everyone invited to your wedding receives one. If not, the people who don’t get one will feel like they weren’t originally intended as guests.

Some Creative Save-the-Date Ideas:
Save-the-dates are fun because you can be so creative with them. Many brides opt for magnets, postcards, or even stop-motion YouTube videos to stand as their save-the-dates. Just make sure that if you are going to DIY your save-the-dates, try to keep it simple. 200 balloon printed save-the-dates sound wonderful until you’re staying up until 3am with a hot glue gun and your last nerve. Have fun!

The Right Alternative Wedding Bouquet

Alternative Wedding Bouquet

Florists are a big part of wedding day expenditures, which is why many brides are eschewing big-budget bouquets in favor of an alternative wedding bouquet that better speaks to their style needs. An alternative wedding bouquet does not equal plastic flowers stapled together last minute, it’s actually quite the contrary. A lovingly-made alternative bouquet might be just what you need to make your big day as special as it can be.

So what, exactly, is an alternative wedding bouquet composed of? The short answer is – whatever you want! If you want an alternative wedding bouquet fashioned from seashells, ribbons, silk, crystals, or anything else you can think of, you’re in luck – am alternative wedding bouquet is already assembled and waiting for you. This type of bouquet is wonderful for beach brides who believe that azaleas have no place at a bonfire, or just the sensitive bride whose nose just can’t stomach a perfumed aisle on her wedding day. An alternative wedding bouquet is an exciting alternative that will turn heads as you walk down the aisle!

An alternative wedding bouquet is also much easier to preserve than its fresh cousin – keep the memories alive forever without the expensive preservation process!

Awesome, (Subtle), Fun Wedding Shoes

Fun Wedding Shoes

There are so many pieces to a wedding ensemble, and that’s half the fun of putting together your wedding day outfit. Everything about the pieces a bride wears on her big day makes them personal, fun, and memorable – why leave out the shoes? Many brides will forget about her fun wedding shoes until the last second (unless her fun wedding shoes are a big part of the outfit, a la cowboy boots or pink sneakers) or will eschew the purchase entirely, opting for more traditional footwear, but even the most formal of brides can partake in a good pair of fun wedding shoes with a little know-how and some creativity.

Fun wedding shoes don’t have to be loud and crazy as you walk down the aisle, they can be just as subtle as a pair of sensible black heels. Fun wedding shoes can be as simple as a cute message on the sole – visible only to the sly photographer who grabs a picture of you and your maid getting ready, or you putting your feet up after a long day of nuptials. Fun wedding shoes can indulge a pun “Heart + Sole” or be as simple as a set of “I Do” shoe stickers. Fun wedding shoes are versatile and sharp without being too conspicuous – so indulge and enjoy!

Place Card Holder Wedding Favors Consolidate Time and Space

Place Card Holder Wedding Favors

When designing the favors that you want to distribute to guests during your wedding reception, it’s important to remember simplicity. With place card holder wedding favors, you kill two birds with one stone and guarantee that your trash cans won’t be full of tiny strips of expensive stationary by the end of the evening. Place card holder wedding favors combine the place cards (sometimes called escort cards) and the wedding favors into one glorious gift for your guest. Place card holder wedding favors are a great idea for weddings of all guest list sizes, and they help cut down on clutter on place settings. Instead of finding room for the place card, place card holder, and wedding favor, they’re all combined into place card holder wedding favors.

The consolidation of space isn’t all that’s important in place card holder wedding favors – they also make for wonderful and cohesive accessories. The stationary on your place card holder wedding favors (or lack thereof) will match the favor seamlessly, and might help to pull together the aesthetic of your table design. Place card holder wedding favors also make for a livelier (and less bare) escort card table. Guests can be excited for their place card holder wedding favors from the moment they cross the threshold into your reception!

Your wedding planning experience will vary depending on the budget and look and feel you’re going for on your big day. While most brides will choose something elegant, understated, and refined (probably something with soft lighting, a plated dinner, and white branches), there are always a handful of brides who will scoff  at such a venture and opt instead for a bouncy house. This is for those brides.

The “wedding experience” is not universal, and nowhere is it written in stone that you must conform to a certain set of standards for your event to count as a wedding. Do you want your guests to kick off their shoes and dance barefoot in the grass? Do you want orange dreamsicles instead of a fancy cake? Do you want the youngest members of your family to have as much fun as the oldest? Cool. Here are a couple of ideas for your awesome wedding:

A Bouncy House!
A bounce house is a colorful air-filled palace of joy and bruising. As long as all kids are properly supervised (and you make it clear that there will be no lifeguard on duty during the reception), there’s no reason why a bounce house couldn’t be a great addition to your reception. Obviously, this venture is best suited to outdoor weddings, but you’ll be amazed how fast your guests turn into 5-year-olds as soon as the thing is inflated. The pictures you’ll get due to the goings-on of the bounce house will be worth every penny you drop on the house (and, by the way, the pennies will be much fewer than other wedding staples, such as a photo booth).

Crayons!
For the brides who still ask for the kids menu due to the many coloring opportunities, this option might quicken your pulse. Forget fancy (and expensive) linens for butcher paper and small buckets of crayons at each table and watch your guests glue their noses to the table as they try to beat their neighbor at tick-tack-toe or doodle all through the night. Brides with more traditional weddings can pull this off too, though you might restrict it to the kids table or opt for fancier buckets.

If you’re going for a casual wedding where crayons and a bounce house won’t be out of place, just make sure you warn your guests on your invitation or save-the-date. You don’t have to spell it out for them, but the style of the stationary and accompanying casual pictorials can be helpful.

Wedding Table Numbers: Noticeable and Subtle!

Wedding Table Numbers

If you want any sort of order at your wedding, you’re probably already working on a seating chart – and seating charts mean wedding table numbers. Wedding table numbers are a detail that some brides don’t think about until the rest of the planning is over, but honestly, they’re just as important as your centerpieces and table runners. Wedding table numbers need to be noticeable without being distracting, and you need to make sure they won’t blow away! This isn’t a problem for indoor receptions, but it’s just one of the little details that some brides brush away until it becomes a problem.

So what are your options for wedding table numbers? There are several styles, designs, and materials that you could use to design your wedding table numbers; they’re as diverse and personal as the other details of your day, and they can be fun to integrate if you think about it far enough ahead of time.

You could stick to traditional circular card stock wedding table numbers or tent-style paper wedding table numbers (both simple, classy options), but don’t feel limited. Wedding table numbers can be fashioned out of anything if you have a handy-dandy liquid chalk marker at your side. The markers are washable and add a rustic, vintage feel to whatever you might be marking – wedding table numbers included. You could also include your centerpieces in your venture by option for vases with wedding table numbers personalized into them. Get creative!

Finding a Wedding Necklace that Suits You

Wedding Necklace

Whether you’re an eager bride, a mother-of-the bride, a bridesmaid, or just a guest fretting over the perfect piece of wedding-appropriate jewelry, the right wedding necklace can often be hard to locate in your average department store. The bride wants a wedding necklace that’s understated but special, a bridesmaid wants to shine without getting to flashy, and a guest just wants to get through the night without breaking any obvious fashion rules. So what should women look for in the right wedding necklace? The answer is pretty much the same from bride to mother to bridesmaid to guest: you want a wedding necklace with just the right amount of sparkle and simplicity.

The two best materials for a wedding necklace (pearls and diamonds) don’t have to be real and expensive to fit the bill. With the right wedding necklace, it’s more important that they’re small and simple in design – nothing too crazy that might compete with your outfit (especially if you’re the bride!). Popular now are natural vine-like motifs for a wedding necklace – it keeps the necklace from looking too drab while remaining subtle and beautiful.

Don’t go crazy when you’re hunting for the right wedding necklace – remember that it’s what the necklace is complimenting that counts!

Who Doesn’t Love Tropical Wedding Cake Toppers?

Tropical Wedding Cake Toppers

For those brides that can see a summer wedding just dawning in the horizon, it’s time to think about your tropical wedding cake toppers. Tropical wedding cake toppers take many forms, and you definitely don’t have to be having a beachfront wedding to enjoy one. So what type of wedding warrants tropical wedding cake toppers? Really, any wedding where there isn’t snow on the ground (and even that isn’t a very firm restriction).

Tropical wedding cake toppers are more about a feeling than a location. Even if you can’t spring for a destination wedding in Maui or Fiji this year, you and your guests can fly there in spirit with tropical wedding cake toppers that range in motifs from beach to lovebirds to toucans to shells to palm trees and beyond. Tropical wedding cake toppers project a feeling of serenity and relaxation – definitely something you could use after months of wedding planning!

Tropical wedding cake toppers are also great for the couplelooking forward to their warm-weather honeymoon, or – of course – a beach or destination wedding! Everyone can enjoy tropical wedding cake toppers as we hold our breath for summer!

Congratulations to Andres and Andrea, who were recently married in Lomita, California! Don’t worry, there are photos and stories to come regarding the big day, but what about the little details that led up to the main event?

One of your most important wedding day duties is making sure that guests know where and when to show up!

This couple paid careful attention to detail when designing their invitation envelope, and their eye for design and detail was apparent to their guests. Remember that invitations are your guests’ first guess regarding the formality and feel of your wedding day. Put some thought into developing your invites and wedding stationary to make sure your guests will be impressed from the start!

Envelope

Plain white envelopes won’t get you shunned by your family and friends, but invitations can be a fun way to experiment with new colors and textures. Andres and Andrea chose to begin their invitations with a parcel-brown envelope that incorporated a simple, wrap-around blue address sticker with hand-written guest addresses. They also used a stamp that integrated their color theme!

Invite

The vivid, swirling colors that Andres and Andrea used throughout their invitation were also found all over their wedding day. From menus to table numbers, the stationary at their wedding promoted a feeling of unity and cohesion. Remember that simple designs are always appreciated by sometimes-overwhelmed guests. Andres and Andrea included only information that was necessary, and used an additional insert for extra info.

RSVP

Keeping with the colors and feel of the invite, the RSVP card was a simple, elegant design that would be easy for any guest to navigate. Note that they saved themselves some paper by making the RSVP card a postcard!

Website

A yellow insert with Andrea and Andres’ wedding website information allowed guests to answer any extra questions online. This is usually the best way to alert your guests of registry details (other than word-of-mouth).

A Unique Ring Bearer Pillow for your Ceremony

Unique Ring Bearer Pillow

The pillow your ring bearer will walk down the aisle isn’t usually a focus for brides looking to up the uniqueness of their day, but a good unique ring bearer pillow is a great opportunity to surprise and delight your guests on your wedding day. A unique ring bearer pillow doesn’t have to be crazy and bright, it’s just a little different. Experiment with your unique ring bearer pillow by trying new textures, shapes, and designs.

A unique ring bearer pillow is especially fun for a seaside wedding. Shells and marine motifs make for interesting textures and colors that can be integrated into your pillow. Choose a unique ring bearer pillow decorated with seashells or embroidered with a seaside scene for your big beach wedding.

You unique ring bearer pillow doesn’t have to be paired with an equally innovative ceremony; a pillow (designed in the shape and feel of a rose or decorated with ornate cherry blossoms) is right at home at even the most conservative church wedding. Every ceremony is the right ceremony for a unique ring bearer pillow (just make sure someone keeps an eye on the ring bearer!).