My Wedding - 1st Steps

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

{Date}
Setting the date for our wedding was fairly simple. We wanted a sunshine wedding, rather than a winter one, and The Boy has a year long job interview ending in July, which meant this summer was out. I certainly didn't want to be asking him what he thought about buttonholes and balloons, when he was stressed about work. So we looked ahead to 2011 and settled on the bank holiday weekend, so that our friends and family could come out to France for the full three day stretch. The Big Day will be 28th May 2011, but the plan is to have a whole weekend of activities....if our budget holds out!

{Budget}
Speaking of the budget, that was the next step. Initially I thought we should set a budget of £20k, and then I did one of those questionnaires in a wedding magazine, and realised that realistically our budget would need to be a bit higher. Gulp! £20k is a serious amount of cash, and I think one of the crazy things about the wedding industry is how much things cost. If anyone has worked out a way to do it for cheaper....please, get in touch! I'm determined to DIY as much as I can, but if we're making everyone come out to France, I think the least we can do is throw them a decent party, and decent means good food and wine, at the very least.

{Location}
The budget trauma lasted me a good few months, and there was also a fair amount of parental pressure to go for a UK wedding. My mum has a lovely house in Dorset, with a big lawn, so there was nothing stopping us from having a lovely countryside, marquee wedding. We even have a family church! But, but, but....we really wanted to get married in France, and despite resistance, The Boy and I decided it was our big day, and stuck to our guns. It wasn't easy though, and I definitely had a few moments when I worried I was being a bit bridezilla. I think it helped that we were going to be paying for quite a lot of the wedding ourselves - I imagine if your parents are footing the whole bill, it must be harder to put your foot down.

{Guest List}
Can I let you into a secret? I wrote the guest list for my wedding six months before we got engaged. Like I said in my first posting, The Boy has had to take a serious amount of pressure on the marriage front. I'm amazed he held out for so long! The good news is that I have a small family, and we have a pretty tight-knit group of friends, so we've managed to get the list under 150. Throw in a few people declining on account of distance and/or age, and I reckon we're around 120. Manageable.....I hope!

{Inspiration}
So we had a budget, a location and a list of 120 guests. Now we needed to settle our wedding style. One of first things a bride should do once she gets engaged is create her inspiration boards. Not only does it help your suppliers {florist, stationer, dress designer, etc}, but it is SUCH fun! Needless to say, I'd been saving pictures for months, and I churned out these boards pretty fast.

If you're newly engaged, and looking to do the same, there's several computer programmes that you can download for free. I use the collage function on Picasa, but there's also Picnik. Alternatively you can use the Style Circle function on US site Style Me Pretty. I tend to save pictures as I go {right click, save a copy}, picking my favs from wedding blogs, and then I put them altogether in a collage. If you're not web savvy and have access to a colour printer, then print away, and you can always tear out pictures from bridal magazines.


What do you think of my boards? Have you already created your own? Send them over to me at beforethebigday@gmail.com, and I'll post them up on the site!

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