Wedding of our dreams

The following article is a guest post by Shaily. Shaily and her husband planned their wedding in six months. In this article she gives some very useful tips on how she and her husband went about their wedding planning process and have a wedding of their dreams. Hope you enjoy! Photo Courtesy: Sandeep Ingale of Bestphotog

Planning your wedding is both an exciting and stressful time.  It doesn’t matter whether you have six months or two years, there are still the same amount of tasks that need to be planned and executed.  My husband and I planned our wedding in just six months and it was most certainly a labor of love.  How did we do it?  We did it just like any other couple does by focusing on what matters the most to us and recognizing our limits and our budget.

First we started with the basics that every wedding needs: a priest, a venue and a caterer.  Once those were in  place, we focused on what meant the most to us: photography, entertainment and decor.  While we planned our wedding in six months, we did take some time prior to do our research to know that it was possible to take the plunge in such a short amount of time.  We made sure we vetted all of our vendors as thoroughly as we could via email prior to meeting them in person, thus reducing the amount of time spend traveling from meeting to meeting.  Meeting with our top 2 or 3 choices whether it was a photographer or venue really helped to maximize our turn around time on each vendor decision.

Second, it was really important to us that our wedding be a reflection of our personalities and be as personal as possible.  We decided to DIY our invitations and chose a theme that reflected both my Indian culture and my husband’s late father: paisleys.  We found a graphic we liked from iStockPhoto and leveraged both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to create our invitation suite.  We created all of our paper products from the invitations, programs, seating cards, menus and candy buffet bags.  We leveraged the theme through most of these items and stayed with the same color scheme to ensure that they all tied together.

To further personalize our wedding, my husband and I chose to take the non-traditional route for several things from the ring bearer “pillows” to our guest book and even our table numbers.

•    Ring Bearer “Pillows”:  We weren’t excited by any of the options we had been finding when looking for ring bearer pillows for my husband’s nephews to carry down the aisle.  So instead we opted to use small plush versions of our favorite Star Wars characters: Chewbacca and Yoda.
•    Guest Book:  We chose a a picture book of sock monkeys to serve as our guest book.  On the sign posted on the table we asked our guests to use the pictures as inspiration as they left a message for the new Mr. and Mrs.

•    Cake Topper:  We also opted for a unique cake topper that we found on etsy.com, a version of my husband and I made out of wooden pegs and painted to loosely resemble what we wore on our wedding day.

•    Table Numbers:  We put a twist on the traditional table numbers and used old race bibs since I am a runner and we both enjoy running road races.  I had saved many of my race bibs which we had laminated at a local Staples and displayed instead of the traditional table numbers or table names.

•    Signature Drinks: Our venue offered the option of selecting up to two drinks to be personalized as our “signature drinks” so we chose a white mango sangria and a pomegranate martini since the colors also loosely matched our wedding colors.  To further personalize them, we named one after The Metropolitan Museum of Art, since it’s one of our favorite places and where we got engaged.  The other was named after Grand Central Terminal, which is where we had our engagement pictures taken and is another favorite place for us.  As our guests arrived to the cocktail hour, they were greeted by butlers serving “The Met Martini” and “The Grand Central” Sangria.

Finally, we planned our wedding the same way we would manage a project at work.  Both my husband and I have project management and planning backgrounds and we saw our wedding as another project that could be managed the same way.  We had requirements, a deadline (our wedding day!) and a budget.  We leveraged a project plan we had found from one of our many Google searches and tailored and customized it to our needs by adding and removing tasks that were or were not relevant to us.  It helped us to see that many tasks had dependencies and could not be completed without finishing prior tasks.  For example, we couldn’t complete our seating chart without receiving all our RSVPs, which required the invitations to have been designed, completed and sent in addition to having finalized the guest list.

Looking back over the wedding planning process, my husband and I are both agree that six months was the right amount of time for us to plan and execute our wedding.  Whether you have six weeks, six months or longer, remember to stay focused on the aspects of the wedding that mean the most to you.  We had a clear vision of what we wanted and when we didn’t we relied on the expertise of the vendors we had hired to bring our day to life.  Lastly, we truly feel blessed to be surrounded by family and friends who supported and helped us every step of the way.  Without them we wouldn’t have had the wedding of our dreams.