I LOOOOVE typography and unique wedding day ideas. This is what you get when you combine them. What a lovely idea! Forget wedding programs. Let’s face it. Your guests are probably going to toss it anyway. Your parents, in-laws and, perhaps, a few bridesmaids may keep one…but most are going in the garbage. Why not whip up a eco-friendly idea like this! Not only are you saving trees, but it’s an eye-catching conversation piece, too!

Want to see more unique chalk typography? Head over to Dana Tanamachi’s site here.

Well, regardless of what your budget is, you’ve got to decide what your priorities are, commit to those priorities and be willing to be more flexible with other areas of the budget.

Here are a few ways we stuck with our smaller wedding budget:

1) Save on flowers. Or consider a unique alternative. I had no desire to budget money towards something that was going to wither away and die. I spent weeks perusing blogs for floral alternatives. Thankfully I found my bouquet solution when I stumbled upon Amanda Heer’s amazing brooch bouquet creation. She created a beautiful piece of art that we now display in our home, plus 6 mini-brooch bouquets for my fabulous bridesmaids. (These also doubled as bridesmaid gifts.) We rescued some silk florals from one of my cousins who had recently gotten married and integrated those with our centerpieces for our reception. See below. If you’re set on real flowers, ask around. You may have friends who have connections and could help you get wholesale prices.

2) Serve guests buffet style. Philip and I LOVE barbecue. After a bit of research, we found that Whitt’s Barbecue could help us keep food costs under budget, while still serving a delicious meal. At the end of the day, we only spent about $550 feeding our guests…which came to approximately $4.75 per person. This included tasty barbecue, buns, potato salad, coleslaw, sweet and unsweetened tea, water, plus 2 people to help serve our guests. We felt like our reception was a fun, backyard barbecue!

3) Save on wedding stationary. It’s easy to break the bank with paper products like invitations, place cards, wedding programs, save the dates, etc. While these items are absolutely lovely, it just wasn’t in our budget to splurge in this area. The only paper products we used were wedding invitations, response cards, programs and thank you cards. I found a lovely wedding stationary design/set at Target and printed them myself. The paper was a cream color with an apple green letterpress-feel design. I setup the print design using a pretty purple font. See below. I bought a box of 50 invitations, envelopes, response cards and envelopes for less than $35 per box. Quite a deal! I also printed our programs using cardstock and scrapbook paper. Plus, I only printed two programs per reception table.  I did not print programs for every guest. This was one of my few DIY projects and I was very pleased with how they turned out and how much we saved.

So these are a few of the ways we stayed on budget with our $5,000 wedding. Many people think that lower costs means skimping on quality or losing the “wow” factor. I hope you can see that by setting priorities and staying flexible and creative, you can make your wedding a fun, thoughtful experience without going broke.

Are you planning a wedding? How are you splurging or saving? Do tell!

Ashley’s Bride Guide, plus the network of amazing brides I connected with throughout our engagement, provided such amazing inspiration and support as we planned our wedding here in Franklin, TN.

Had she offered the event I’m about to tell you about during our engagement, I would have been ALL OVER IT. Okay…so drumroll, please…You’re invited to…

This event is a three-week series starting next Tuesday, March 13 and will run through the following two Tuesdays as well.

While bridal shows and magazines are fabulous for inspiration, if the couple doesn’t have a vision or budget in place, the inspiration can lead to frustration. (And I can speak for experience on this one!) That’s why Ashley has created The Smart Bride Boot Camp to educate and offer the inside scoop on setting realistic expectations to plan the wedding of your dreams on a budget you can afford.

Last year’s first-ever boot camp was life changing for the attendees. Many of them still email Ashley, letting her know that their wedding was completely different as a result of real talk about weddings.

Click here to register and comment below if you plan to be there! Hope you’ll join us!

Inspiring you down the aisle and beyond…

Krista

One idea I’d come across was a wedding wish jar. I initially found the idea over at the Marsha Stewart blog, however, the jar we ended up using was an adorable little “wish pot” I found at Swoozie’s in Green Hills (which is now closed).

This adorable little wish pot now sits in our living room on a shelf. It’s full of paper hearts upon which friends and family wrote sweet words of wisdom and encouragement. I love lifting the lid now and then to read a few of them.

Another idea I discovered thanks to Natosha over at Big Spoon, Little Spoon is a wedding tree print. She found it on etsy and shared it with me. There are a variety of “wedding tree” posters there which you can customize to your heart’s extent. I just did a search for them and here’s what I found. Here is what ours looked like:

This was a super-cool way to personalize our guests’ signatures and create another memento to enjoy for years to come.

Are you doing a guestbook? Have another unique idea for capturing guests’ signatures in place of the guestbook? Please share!

Thanks to technology, however, I got a front row seat!

The British Monarchy has an official YouTube Channel fittingly called TheRoyalChannel and I was able to catch the entire ceremony  in one clip! I’ve uploaded here for your enjoyment:

Kate was absolutely stunning. Simple, elegant and breathtaking.

I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the Royal Wedding than meeting up with my girlfriend Suzanne, who is a wedding planner (and actually woke up at 3am to catch the wedding in real-time!), and meeting up for a Royal Tea Party at Lulu’s in downtown Franklin. Here we are enjoying lemon tarts, petit fours and tea, of course:

Did you catch the wedding? Were you up early like Suzanne this morning? Or were you a straggler like me, coming in late to the party? What was your favorite part?

My favorite part was the vows. You could sense a bit of nervousness…(as I can only imagine…being on a world-wide stage!) However, I loved the way the seemed to gaze at each other. It’s the way I remember Philip and I looking at each other almost a year ago, when we were encircled by our closest family and friends. So hard to believe it’s almost been a year! Time sure flies!

In honor of the Royal Wedding, I’ve created a clip about how you can give your skin the Royal Treatment…but you’ll have to head over to my other blog, The Skin CEO, to see it.

Wishing you much love and joy on this beautiful Spring day!

Hello friends! Several months back I shared that I’m on the board of a wedding-related non-profit organization that is launching a chapter in Nashville. I’m thrilled to share that our launch party has been scheduled. You’ll find all the details in the news release below. Specifically, if you are a wedding/event services professional OR a medical/health care professional, we hope you’ll make time to learn how we can all work together!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Health issues shouldn’t get in the way of someone’s dream to marry his or her best friend. That’s why Wish Upon A Wedding is expanding to the Volunteer State and launching the state’s first chapter in Nashville. On May 18 at 6pm, all are welcome to attend the chapter’s launch party at Wedding 101 at The Factory in Franklin. Professionals within the local wedding and event industry and the medical and health care community are invited to learn how this organization will positively affect lives across the region.

This is a free event, however, the new chapter welcomes any donations. All contributions will go directly towards helping the chapter grant wishes to deserving couples. Reservations are required. RSVP by visiting www.wuwlaunchpartynashville.eventbrite.com. Light fare will be served.

“The outpouring of volunteerism we’re already seeing is very encouraging to our board,” says wedding planner and chapter president, Courtney Hammons. “With the amazing Nashville wedding professionals and the sizeable medical and health care population we have, I know this organization will be embraced and will touch many lives.”

The chapter is currently compiling a database of “wish granters” based on 20 different wedding vendor categories. When a wish is received, the chapter’s volunteer coordinators will call upon the wish granters to donate their professional goods and services, enabling Wish Upon A Wedding Nashville to grant the wedding wish, from simple to more elaborate, depending on the wish recipient’s health condition.

Wish Upon a Wedding is the world’s first nonprofit wish granting organization providing weddings and vow renewals for couples facing terminal illness and serious life-altering circumstances, regardless of sexual orientation. Often, couples facing such situations do not have the energy, time, money, or resources needed to plan their wedding. Our organization takes care of all the details, offering couples a chance to relax and enjoy a very special day while surrounded by the love of their closest family and friends. To learn more, visit www.wishuponawedding.org.

I’ve had the honor of having a voice on the past two Smart Bride Panels presented by AshleysBrideGuide. The first week we discussed wedding vision, values and priorities. That’s where it alllll has to start folks. This is the stuff you need to have lined out so you can budget appropriately. This week, our second session, we discussed budget.

Our budget was $5K…more on that later.

I caught a few testimonials from some of the Nashville couples who joined us tonight. This message is from Leah & Kevin. I really enjoyed chatting with them. You can tell they’re just happy and in love. And it’s SO cool that they’re starting off on the right foot by participating in a workshop like this and genuinely communicating with each other about their vision and priorities for the day they say “I do”.

Back in late July, I had the honor of being a part of my bridesmaid Stephanie’s bridal shower. Talk about an event! Wow! The Greeks know how to throw down! The shower was at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club in the Hyde Park area. Thanks to Stephanie’s sister’s fiance, Chris (who is also the Executive Chef for the Quad Club), we got an incredible deal on the food and the event space.

(Hey, it pays to know people. And a wedding is always a great time to look for those kinds of hook-ups. People are usually willing to help…so long as you don’t make a habit of asking…)

The Quad Club was beautifully decorated by the bridesmaids (Kudos to sister Mindy for the beautiful flower arrangements and crafty eye!), although all I really did was tie bows around the wine buckets and help with a few finishing touches…so I can’t take much credit!

Not a detail was overlooked! The flowers, the favors, the pink wine (my fave!), the adorable napkins…it was all so elegant and perfect. Thanks again to Stephanie for choosing me to be a part of your wedding party. Stephanie and Kyle’s wedding is coming up next!

So back to my wedding recap. As many of you know, we chose Journey Church (our church home) at The Factory in Franklin as our ceremony AND reception venue. Journey Church leases Building No. 8 at The Factory. It’s SUCH a neat building with exposed brick, large wooden beams, super-high ceilings and all of these incredible wrought iron candleabras we placed everywhere. My favorite part about our venue was that it didn’t call for much decoration. It has so much character…it’s naturally decorated. Covering it up is just wrong to me. Here’s a look at the inside of Building No. 8:

This wall is inside our church and it was painted by my incredibly talented artist friend Deeann Carson. The wall reads “We dwell in soul environments, knowing, living and telling the love story of Jesus to the world…” I LOVE this!

This is the gigantic wall of old, distressed windows and doors you see as soon as you walk in the front door. It creates the most perfect walkway/divider from the door to the rest of the large room.

Here you can see the opposite side of the door/window wall, where my handsome father is greeting our family and friends as they arrive for our wedding. Just look at the beautiful lit branches everywhere. I mean, this building is just naturally beautiful!

You may recall the wedding wish jar idea I’d found over at Martha Stewart Weddings last year. Well, we DID incorporate a wish jar and our guests loved it! Not only was it a part of our sign in process, but it’s also made a wonderful keepsake which we now enjoy seeing every day in our living room:

Thankfully I’d hit a fantastic sale on scrapbook paper at Joann Fabrics and purchased 2 full books of beautiful scrapbook paper at a buy 1 get 1 free discount! Plus, my adorable little wish jar was 50% off from Swoozie’s in Green Hills.

Another thing I loved about our venue was that our guests didn’t have to drive somewhere else for the reception. See, our ceremony was “in the round”, meaning our guests encircled us, on one side of the room and our reception was setup on the other side of the room. We covered our tables with purple linens and were VERY creative and frugal with our centerpieces. We collected a large box of wine bottles from friends and family, borrowed 2 sets of Ball jars from wedding coordinator Emily Humphries and then used scrapbook paper beneath the bottles and jars. Easy peasy:

Thanks to Bridesmaid Megan who has lovely, calligraphy-like handwriting, we had simple, easy to read signs for our “in memory of” candles:

The following image allows you to see just how large Building No. 8 is. Note the incredibly high ceilings, the candles placed around the room and the gorgeous lights strung across the center of the room:

Here we are surrounded by our friends and family, sharing a moment of quiet prayer before we vow our lifelong commit to one another:

And here we are coming down the aisle:

*sigh* SUCH a magical day! I still get teary thinking about how beautiful and perfect it was.

There’s more where that came from, folks. STILL so many things to share and tell you about! I’m ESPECIALLY excited to tell you about what I’m up to this Thursday. And I’m going to get to treat a few other local Nashville brides and brides-to-be too! Woohoo, I’m pumped! Stay tuned, friends. I promise to focus and dedicate more time with you! You will NOT want to miss what I have brewing.

If you haven’t bookmarked Classic Bride…go add it to your blog reader now. This is one of my ALL time favorite wedding blogs. Sarah really bridges the gap between all things vintage and modern. You will love following along with all the pretties she posts.

Stay tuned for my blueberry buttermilk muffin recipe. Mmm.