I am on a wedding high right now! My wedding dress came in and it is absolutely gorgeous. 100%  my dream dress. I couldn’t be happier!! The only downside is I still have a wait a year to wear it! Ahhhhh!! Patience is a virtue, right? Well, something like that.

For those buds out there that haven’t started their dress hunt, I have just a few tips that I discovered during my adventure of dress shopping. My number one piece of advice is research, research, research! Not only should you research designs and styles of dresses that you like but also designers. This will help you be ten times more prepared than the bride that comes in with NO idea what they want. It makes for a much more productive appointment. Which brings me to my next piece of advice, make appointments! I highly recommend sucking it up and taking a day off of work to go dress shopping during the week. My entourage and I ventured out on a Monday afternoon and went to two salons where we literally had them all to ourselves.  Making appointments will keep you on track throughout the day as well as give you the attention from the sales staff that you deserve.

Check out WeddingWire’s Wedding Dress gallery

When it comes to actually trying on dresses, I highly recommend trying on one of each style: princess, a-line, mermaid, strapless, halter, etc, etc. Even though you may have an idea of what you want, you might be surprised how some dresses fit and make you look fantastic! When your consultant is pulling dresses, make sure you give her your absolute top price point that you’re willing to spend BEFORE she starts pulling dresses. I made this mistake. At one salon, she pulled a dress that was about $2,000 more that I was willing to spend and I feel in love. Thank goodness I put it back because I found one at another place that I loved even more!

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While browsing through Weddingwire’s vendors the other day, it dawned on me that I should probably start thinking about a place to get my hair done the day of my wedding. You see, I’m kinda a tomboy when it comes to getting my hair done (though I’m trying to get better about it) and am not that into my hair in general (most likely because it does not really do much), so I do not have a real hair stylist in D.C.

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I can’t even imagine planning a wedding before the internet existed.  First of all, there are an infinite number of places to get inspiration for your big day.  Second of all, and most importantly to me, the internet is a great way to stay organized for your wedding.  How did brides keep up with everything before the tools that are available today?

In case you missed it, make sure you catch Tulip Bud’s post on staying organized for your wedding.  She shares some great tools that she uses, and I’d like to share some of my own.  Specifically, the tools I use are great for collaboration: it’s so hard to keep things straight between your maid of honor, your new mother in law, your officiant, your wedding director; how do you keep it all straight?

Wedding Wire

As Tulip mentioned, Wedding Wire has some great planning tools.  One of the things I love about Wedding Wire is that you can create multiple log ins for the same wedding. This means your fiancé, mother in law and maid of honor can all have a login to share guest lists and RSVP counts.

Wedding Wire features several great tools, such as a seating planner:

Wedding Wire Seating Chart Planner

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How do you put all of your ideas out into one visual place where you can see it all come together?? The coveted “Inspiration Board”.

Making an inspiration board was one of my favorite activities, so far (I’m eagerly awaiting cake tastings). There are several ways to create the boards—until I figured it out, I thought that everyone around me was so creative and I had no skills in the world of design. You can use a fun site like Polyvore and create a “fashion” board and put some looks together. I loved using this site to see what dresses and tuxes would look like together.  I’ve also enjoyed using the boards at the fabulous Wedding Wire (along with the guest tracker, budgeting, other inspiration).

This is my board courtesy of Polyvore:

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Like many of you, I LOVE the handy services on Weddingwire.com‘s site.  I have found the guest list function extremely helpful, and I like that I can also allow some family members to go in and alter addresses, etc.

However, does anyone else find this part of it a bit stressful?:

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As part of our wedding mantra, Dahlia Dude and I are trying to be green. Our ceremony and reception are within two blocks. Our Rehearsal Dinner is three blocks away. Basically, we’re hoping that people from out of town don’t need to rent or use a car while at our festivities. We’re using green printing for our invites. And, we’re using Wedding Wire’s online RSVP.

RSVP

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When we started planning the wedding, Lotus Dude and I had decided that our colors would be red, gold and grey.  We liked the combination of these colors, and it would be easy to incorporate them both in the traditional Hindu wedding ceremony and the more modern decor we had in mind for our reception.  Of course, things did not work out exactly as planned.

When I went shopping in India for a reception outfit, I wasn’t able to find anything in either red or gold that wasn’t too loud for my tastes.  However, I ended up finding the perfect outfit in green and gold. So we rolled with it and talked to our wedding coordinator, florist, venue and linen rental company about the change of colors to green, gold and grey for the reception.  Thankfully, everyone was accommodating and there were no problems!

I also saw that WeddingWire has a wonderful new tool to help in creating inspiration boards.  The inspiration board I made several months ago incorporates the red, gold and grey we’re using for the ceremony.  I just used the new tool to make another inspiration board for the reception, and here it is.

I have to say that this tool made it really easy to create the inspiration board!

Being that half of our wedding guests are in Italy and the other half are all of the U.S., I knew I needed to create some sort of a communal forum to post information in both Italian and English for travel plans, registry, accommodations, wedding weekend schedule, etc. Creating a wedding website was the perfect solution!

weddingwire.com

Luckily, I found WeddingWire – a bride’s dream come true. It gave me the ability to create our wedding website, create a guest list (complete with addresses and a seating chart), search for ideas, and search for wedding vendors (only downfall – they don’t have any vendors in Italy).
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Photo Credit: Stella Alesi Photography

I’m sure we have all been to weddings where the bride and groom have arranged old family photos at the recepetion and many will include wedding photos from their parents’ and/or grandparents’ weddings. I love this idea. There’s just something about these old photos that evoke a sense of true love and happiness.

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Gerber Daisy Dude and I made a decision that turned us into an eco-friendly couple without us even realizing it…until now! This decision was creating our website through WeddingWire. I checked out many different websites and even though I’m sure it’s impossible to check out every single option, I found their features to be the best and reasonably priced – FREE! Other websites would offer basic things like posting your story, wedding info and a limited about of pictures, but if you wanted more (RSVP capabilities, guest book, links, more pictures and videos) you needed to pay more.

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