Weddingbee Blog

When we first started planning our wedding, I had no intention of creating a wedding website. I’d never really heard of them, and had no idea what weddings had to do with websites anyway. (This was clearly before I knew everything that the internet world had to offer me as far as wedding advice was concerned.)

After some planning and time, I decided to create one for a couple of reasons:

1. You can get a decent template for free!
2. They are fun, and you can share more informal information on them than you can in invitations.
3. They are a good way to spread info to all parties.
4. You can link to your registry.

I haven’t been to too too many weddings, but in some of the ones I have, the registration information was included with the informal invitations. I hadn’t thought anything about that again until I read on the Weddingbee boards that it’s not really good wedding etiquette. (Who knew?) With that, I then decided pretty much to create a website so that our wedding registry information could be translated appropriately.

Read more…

I’ve always enjoyed playing around on the computer with graphics and fonts. Most days during wedding planning, I wish I had the educational background of a graphic designer so that I could effortlessly whip out graphics in a matter of minutes. But alas, my training is in psychology, so the best I can do is to try and talk myself down after spending countless hours of unsuccessfully trying to craft graphics of my own.

But, I still have managed to have some success and fun with it. How? GIMP. Don’t get me wrong. Photoshop is the best; it has so many features and actions you can use that it’s hard to top. But at hundreds of dollars, it wasn’t in my budget (only the 30-day free trial was), and by the time my trial was over, I had done enough researching and playing around that I could transfer a bunch of what I knew to GIMP. GIMP is completely free, and while it certainly doesn’t have all that Photoshop does, it has enough to play around with. Today, I’m going to give you an easy demonstration of my wedding frame sign.

There are tons of free image sites out there. My personal favorite is sxu.hu, and I’ve been using that one for years. I found my labels for this particular project by searching for “free vector images” and then searching for “labels” on each of the websites. I downloaded a free PDF of images that looks like this:

All you need to do is search for an image that is the same shape as the one you want. I was searching for weeks for one like this one, and was glad to find it.

So for this project, you’ll need your free GIMP program and an image of your choice.

Once you have downloaded your image, you want to open it up with GIMP.

Read more…

Mr. Hawk and I recently went through the arduous task of developing our invitation wording. Although I ordered the design of our invites months ago, I kept putting off sending the finalized wording. When we finally got down to business I think I found out why I was stalling. The process sounded simple enough, but I kept thinking about how our invitation was going to be one of those items that I intend to keep forever and hopefully will display in our home. I wanted it to be perfect. Here are some tips that may help you as you work on your invites. I jumped in head first, and in hindsight I wished I had been more methodical about it.

1. Learn the elements of invitation wording. Although invites aren’t always in this exact format or order, I found it helpful to know what I was looking at when reading samples. (This also helped me later to make sure I was hitting all the necessary marks.)

Chart via Basic Invite

2. Before writing anything, read examples and get a sense of what wording or feel you like best. Are your invites traditional or casual? Are you having a religious ceremony? I found the Invitations Consultants to be a great resource for samples. While I was reading examples, I made notes of varying request lines and introductions that I found might best fit our style.

Read more…

When we last left off talking about my love of spreadsheets, I was explaining how my OCD kick-butt organization skills manifested themselves into this wedding spreadsheet.

We left off with this list of all of the spreadsheets:

1. Budget
2. Guest List
3. Guest Addresses—Checklist
4. Projects
5. Attire/Beauty
6. Ceremony
7. Flowers/Decor
8. Photography
9. Music
10. Stationery
11. Cookie Bar
12. Cake

Since I’ve already gone over budget, I’ll start with 2 and 3, Guest List and Addresses. You might be wondering why I have two guest spreadsheets, but it’s really worked out well. My first guest sheet is a “his and hers” list of all the people we want to invite!

Above is a quick shot of the first. This is your basic list of who we want to invite, and it is a good way to see our numbers. We also have a third list, as you can see, of people who we would like to invite but who we are not sure if we can money-wise. This is a great tool that we constantly go back to to figure out numbers.

Read more…

When I first started wedding planning, I quickly became completely overwhelmed with the amount of work there was to be done and all of the information and choices out there. I am a big organizer by nature, so I knew I would need to be just as organized in wedding planning. After attempting various methods I have found what works best for me, so I thought I’d share in case it should spark any ideas in others’ planning. After searching over the pricey “to do” lists and organizers, I decided that a Google doc with multiple sheets would work best for me.

Paper or computer?

I’m a paper-organization girl at heart and, although I have a paper wedding binder, a computer spreadsheet just seemed the easiest and quickest route for me. It was easier to change any information on it, I didn’t have to remember to bring my binder everywhere, and it was neat. Computer it was.

What program should I use?

I started off just using Microsoft Office Excel for my spreadsheet. This worked out pretty well, but soon it became tedious for me to find in the computer. Also, I work at many different computers in my life—mine, Mr. WP’s, work, my family’s—so I kept having to email the document to myself. I am horrible at saving the correct document, so I could never find the same one. Honestly, I wasn’t very much into Google Docs until I found out I could do multiple sheets in one doc. Now I love it. I can change it from anywhere, and changes save instantly.

Where to start?

Read more…

I like making lists. I used to carry around a small Moleskin notebook exclusively filled with them: items to buy at the grocery store, texts to read before next grad class, errands to run on the weekend, things to do during the week. I love making lists and then crossing them off.

Needless to say, I have a lot of wedding-related lists shared on Google Docs. Most of them are crossed off. We’ve booked all of our vendors. We’ve paid all of our deposits. We’ve finished all of our projects. The only thing left to do is pack! I always make a packing list and lay all of the items out before I put them in a suitcase. It might take more time to pack this way, but doing so means that I won’t forget anything important.

Here’s an example of my packing method before the 2009 Boston Marathon

Read more…

Our wedding is less than a month away now. Yikes!! It’s so exciting and so nerve-wracking all at once. I’m so excited to marry Mr. Kettle and I can’t wait for our wedding day. But on the other hand, there are a million and one things left to do that I likely don’t have the man hours to complete.

There are big things that happen around the 30-day-out mark that any bride should be aware of. These things were not on any of my checklists!

1) Make final payments to vendors. Unless your vendors are magical elves who will take a credit card payment over the phone or internet, you’ll need to schedule time to make these payments. Between Momma Kettle, Daddy Kettle, and myself, we’ve been running around the Chicago/Joliet area like chickens with our heads cut off delivering certified checks to all our different vendors.

2) Confirm all details on all contracts. Again, unless your vendors are magical elves who have Ivy League or Oxford proofreading skills, check your contracts. There were errors we caught in contracts from our florist, our venue, and our photographer. They were small fixes, but they were details that were important to the vision of the wedding.
Read more…

With a few major holidays stacked together in December, January, and February, this time of year is when many newly engaged couples are dipping their toes into wedding planning. That means it’s bridal show season! While these events are a lot of fun, they can also be exhausting and overwhelming. You can also leave these shows with your arms full of brochures and business cards from vendors you didn’t even know you “needed” when you started planning.

With a few of these events under my belt, I thought I’d share three suggestions for navigating the bridal show waters effectively.

1. Be stingy with your contact information

I believe that you are under no obligation to subject yourself to spam and junk mail when you attend a bridal show.

Most large wedding shows attract hundreds (maybe even thousands) of couples. Their registration lists are used to push out a steady stream of emails and mailings to engaged couples. Some of the communication you get might be from a vendor that interests you, but a lot of it will be spam. I think that it is perfectly acceptable to use fake contact information and a slightly altered name at the registration desk of the huge bridal shows at exposition centers.

Read more…

If you can believe it, my “Wedding 2012!” Google Doc has even more tabs than I showed you in my mile long post on wedding organization. I saved the best one for last.

Screenshot via my own personal use of Print Screen

How could I possibly choose a favorite tab in my Google Doc when we’ve got a song list tab (featuring Mickey Avalon’s “My Dick”) and a statistical analysis of wedding venues’ pros and cons in the running?
Read more…

Christmas is over and New Year’s has since past. From the look at the proposals board though, there were quite a few engagements that happened during that time period. This time last year I was recovering from the excitement of my own engagement and discovered a book that proved to be very helpful to me.

The one thing I hear people tell me most often is, “I can’t believe how calm and levelheaded you have been during your planning.” I always laugh and say, “well, the engagement isn’t over yet. I still have time to be a bridezilla.” For the most part though, I am a fairly calm person. However, I read a book at the very beginning of my engagement that helped shape my mindset. It is called, How I Planned Your Wedding, by Susan Wiggs and Elizabeth Wiggs Maas.

{Image via How I Planned Your Wedding}

It is a true story written by a mother and daughter who tell the story of them planning the daughter’s wedding. It is an interesting book because not only do you get the bride’s point of view, but the mother’s perspective as well. In fact, both my mom and I read this book at the same time in January 2011.

We all know how it goes soon after you become engaged.
Read more…

We weren’t originally going to have a wedding website. What did we need one for? Ohhhh, so people could find our registry? Did someone say…presents? In that case, we definitely needed a website. When we got closer to sending out our save the dates, I looked into free wedding-website templates through The Knot and the like, assuming I’d just find a template that was plain yellow and call it a day. I didn’t necessarily want or need something extraordinarily pretty or well designed. But I thought it would be nice to have the website match the wedding color scheme, at lease a tiny bit. After scrolling through template after template of swirly designs, beach backdrops, and flowery patterns, I stopped looking. What was the point of putting so much effort into making the save the dates match our color scheme if our website (our other first impression) was just going to have some random firefly motif on it? And that’s when I discovered Google Sites. (I swear I’m not being sponsored by Google. Why would they care about me anyway?)

Image via Google Sites blog

That being said, Google truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Google Sites is actually up on the Google menu along with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Reader, the other loves of my life. Go look, I swear it’s there! It’s basically a total n00b version of creating your own website from scratch. You don’t have to know anything about HTML (though you can edit it if you’re so inclined) and you can just use their page templates. The best part? I could customize the colors (yay, yellow!) and also upload photos to use as my background (yay, polka dots!). Wanna see the home page?

Read more…

I’ve gotten a lot of great ideas from Weddingbee over the months. I know it’s my job to put out inspiration and give the details of my plans for others to read, but I’ve gotten as much out of it as I’ve put in.

I decided to put in a sampling of some of my favorite posts that have given me some amazing ideas for our  wedding, for posts, or hell, just for everyday life. These are my top 9. I guess I could have found one more, but I figured I’d just stick with the ones I’ve been saving up for months now. If you’re new to the hive, I suggest you read these. They may give you inspiration anew!

Mrs. Hyena’s idea to put the garter on the football was genius. We have a ton of young un-married people coming to our wedding (at least 50 on the guest list). I am looking forward to the garter and bouquet tosses. But most weddings I’ve been to feature reluctant catchers. If he puts my garter on a football, the guys may actually want to catch it. Plus, it’s a great reminder of the day we moved into together and an inside joke  amongst all our friends that our football belongs to me and not Mr. Kettle.

Mrs. Macarons idea to use Nailtiques for nail growth changed my life.
Read more…

I realize that title can have approximately 27 meanings, but here’s the one I’m talking about:

Foxy and I have made the decision to go to a combo of premarital and couples’ counseling. The former for obvious reasons, and the latter because of certain issues and differences that we feel we need to work on—namely, communication. The best and worst thing about the two of us is that we are so different, yet so similar, especially when it comes to our stubbornness. Throw in a minor disagreement, and you can potentially have the recipe for disaster (or just a really big blowout for no real reason). Hence, couples’ counseling.

We had our first session this past Monday, and while I went in nervous, I left with an overwhelming feeling of hopefulness and anticipation. Part of that excitement, if you will, came from our first “homework assignment” - to buy, read, and implement strategies from the book The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman.

Image via The 5 Love Languages

Have you heard of this book? It’s been on my “must buy/read” list for a few years now, as I’ve had many a (bloggy) friend rave about and review it.
Read more…

Read more…

I think it’s possible that some of y’all might be operating under the misconception that I’m a decisive person. I mentioned how I found my dress on my first outing, and I’ve described the ease of booking some of our vendors and even securing our ceremony venue. But let me be very clear: those situations were exceptions to the rule. I just happened to have a strong feeling about those decisions, and my gut led me in the right direction. When it comes to most things, I am crippled with indecision. (OK, maybe crippled is a little extreme, but it is serious, y’all.) My latest dilemma? Picking a domain name for our wedding website.

Image via Joe the Nutrition Pro

Read more…