Hi! I'm Taryn, a writer, designer and soon-to-be-bride from Atlanta, Georgia. Sit a spell with me and catch up as I plan the wedding of my beer-loving, confetti-throwing dreams to the wonderful Mr. Williford.Why Every Bride and Groom Needs a “Top 3”
The Simplified Planner by Emily Ley
I’ve read it so many times I can’t even give you a source. This is the most repeated morsel of wedding planning advice every friend, expert and former bride has to share: Make a “Top 3” list. Before doing anything else, write down the three things that are most important to you for your wedding day. If there was only enough money or time or sanity to tackle three things, what’s most likely to make the day perfect?
I wasn’t about to argue with that advice, so the first thing Mr. Rooster and I sat down to do in our wedding planning meetings was establish what three things we each wanted most for our wedding.
(By the way, calling them “planning meetings” makes it sound like we were on top of this planning stuff. We weren’t. Our wedding meetings were unscheduled and always kicked off with me scrolling Pinterest and talking a lot, him saying “uh-huh,” me realizing he wasn’t listening, then getting him to close the laptop while we set a timer for 10 minutes.)
Here’s my list:
- Gorgeous photos.
- A cool venue.
- Good food.
Here’s his:
- A cool venue.
- Making it unique.
- Good music.
After looking at our lists, we realized exactly why every book and blogger wants you to do this first. Some potentially huge wedding expenditures—flowers, cake, the dress—were nowhere near the top in either of our lists. For a budget bride like me, that put money back in my pocket. It wasn’t going to ruin our day if the flowers wilted, so lets not spend a lot of money there. Our Top 3 lists also effectively became our first wedding to-do list; we knew the venue, caterer and photographer should be the first vendors we searched for. We had a vision, and now a plan.
Glee Wiki
Today, I’m proudly among the “Top 3” devotees that will sing the praises of list-making high and loud. Spelling out your top concerns is a great place to start to determine where to spend and what to do first.
Finding Our Style
I’m going to say “our” a lot, because it feels silly to say “my style” or “my wedding.” I mean, I’m the planner, but I’ve got to think for two here. That said, the mister’s interest in wedding planning ends at what people are eating and what music is playing, for the most part. But he still cares about making sure the wedding is cool. What cool means for us and our guests, however, is difficult to nail down.
Ellen
We just know it’s not this.
Since we’re more beer-and-tacos people than champagne-and-filet people, the first word that came to mind when we tried to settle on a wedding style was “casual.” Not beachwear casual (although, being a family of Florida Gators, I feel like we might need to specify jean shorts are not welcome), but more like low-key, night-out-with-friends-casual. Although I love attending big elegant ballroom affairs with a dozen bridesmaids and even more meal courses, I knew it wasn’t right for us. When it comes to weddings, I’m a fervent believer in the “just do you” philosophy. Make choices that make you happy, whatever they might be, and stick behind them with an unshakable passion, even when your co-workers, hairstylist or well-meaning mother-in-law try to steer you away.
So when it comes to throwing this major fete, we’re going to steer away from some more formal wedding choices and do things that feel more natural to us. More casual to us. Less fanfare, more down-home fun. That means stuff like assigned seats (even though I love seeing creative escort card ideas) could be left out, and things like lawn games and food trucks would be welcomed right in.
Kate Sears for Martha Stewart / Shyla Photography via Style Me Pretty
Bye cute escort cards, hello cornhole!
The elements in our casual-minded mental “yes” column had something else in common. They all felt very modern. I love tradition, but even more, I love throwing tradition on its head (just ask our black tinsel Christmas tree). I wanted our wedding to break the mold in a few places, but still feel a little bit classic. A traditional wedding, with a modern spin.
Romona Keveza dress, photographed by Jose Villa for Once Wed
Like a black wedding dress… maybe.
Lastly, the one thing I wanted to capture in our wedding was a local feel. With Mr. Rooster’s family in Michigan, and my family in Florida, A huge chunk of our guests are going to be visiting Atlanta from out of town, and it’s our job to show them a good time here in the South. So our wedding would have to have a Southern feel. Think grits, peaches and Coca-Cola.
Reese Moore via Southern Weddings
And “bawled” peanuts.
So there it was.
Casual. Modern. Southern.
Perfect.
Once we shook out those three words to reveal the big vision for the big day, something magical happened. We started to picture what each of the little pieces might look like. All of a sudden the venue, the menu, the music… I won’t say it came completely into focus, but it definitely got a lot less blurry. With just those three style cues and a guiding principle—to do what feels right to us, even if it’s not “wedding-y”—we could start to make some major choices and watch this wedding really take shape!
Do you have a wedding planning mantra or style cue words that helped your wedding come into focus?
Making the Easy, Early Decisions
Cards by A Two Pipe Problem Letterpress
To my mind, there’s three distinct stages of wedding planning. This model is totally something I made up, but if it catches on, we’ll call it the Hen Wedding Planning Doctrine:
Pre-engagement
The decisions you’ve made about your wedding—together or separately—before ever becoming engaged. Maybe you decided as a young girl that you must have a fall wedding. Or it’s important to you and your family to have a traditional Catholic ceremony. Or perhaps you and your S.O. talked early on about what city you’d be married in. These are more like dreams than decisions, even though they might fall into place later.
Early decisions
The stuff you nail down right after getting engaged. Maybe it’s the location, if you didn’t tackle that pre-engagement, or it could be the ceremony venue, date, general budget or how big the guest list should be. These are the must-haves, must-bes, must-dos and must-spends. A couple in the Early Decisions probably hasn’t booked any vendors, but has a good idea of what some of their wedding will look like.
Everything else
After all the easy, instinctual, necessary, we-gotta-have-this choices comes everything else. This is where you actually commit to those early and pre-engagement decisions by booking vendors, then continue on with decisions like what to eat, or what the bridesmaids will wear, or where people are going to drop their cards when they enter the reception. The bulk of wedding planning falls into this stage, and it follows you all the way through to the wedding day and even after (Thank You cards, anyone?).
Bunny Bear Press/Etsy
Mr. Rooster and I had four years together to work on the pre-engagement, plus a few days’ vacation in Disney World where he proposed to talk out a few other early decisions. So within a week of being engaged, we had a lot decided:
- Atlanta: We met in Atlanta, we live in Atlanta. We love it here. No brainer. And while our families aren’t in Georgia, Atlanta is a natural midpoint between Roo’s hometown in Michigan and my family in Miami, Florida. We’re excited, too, to share our new hometown with our friends and family over the wedding weekend.
- Secular Ceremony: Neither Roo or I are religious at all, nor were we raised in any religion by our families. So we’ll be having a secular ceremony that’s personal and focuses more about making a promise to each other rather than God.
- A Tight Budget: We’re paying for most of the wedding by ourselves, and unless we get lucky in the lottery, that means working with a budget that’s sizably smaller than the average wedding in Georgia.
- Less than 100 Guests: That budget decision helped us figure out that our attending guest count would have to be around 80 people, from an invite list of around 100 (since 15%-20% will RSVP “No”).
These were all easy or necessary choices for us, but everything else—the date, the venue, the colors, the theme—was up in the air. Having a short list of early decision must-haves leaves us a lot of freedom, but it also leaves us with lots of tough choices to make. I know indecisive me has her work cut out for her.
What choices were made easy and early for you? Do you think its better or more complicated to have more freedom in planning a wedding?
How to Turn a Blogger into a Bride
Hi, I’m Taryn. Maybe you knew that, and maybe you didn’t. But what you should know is that (a) I’m getting married next fall and (b) I can’t do anything without blogging about it.
I studied magazine journalism in college, then started writing for Apartment Therapy about home tech and interior design. Somewhere along the way, I decided to start a lifestyle blog, Formal Fringe, and discovered that creating recipes, styling parties and developing do-it-yourself projects brings me hours of both frustration and oozing-out-of-my-pores joy.
(Thankfully, it’s been way more of the latter. And to be honest, every paper-crumpling, glue-stick-throwing ounce of frustration can be traced back to my perfectionist nature. I’ve got nobody to blame but myself for that one.)
I revel in being crafty and dreaming up party themes. And most of all I love having the ability to save money and make something really personal by learning the skills people pay pros to do. I’ll never be quite as good as somebody who’s spent years practicing their trade, but there’s a lot I can do in a pinch to add something special to a party or gift and still make ends meet. Things like floral design or envelope calligraphy or building a wedding website.
Which brings me to my next perfectionist project: Our wedding.
J.R. and I were engaged in May and we immediately started planning this big shindig we’re hosting for a hundred of our best friends and closest family.
According to people like David Tutera* and bridal consultants who try to sell $25,000 dresses, this wedding is supposed to be the best day of our lives. But for it to truly be the best day of our lives (I consider “not sending us into bankruptcy” an important benchmark for a good day), I would need to ignore the David Tuteras* and financially-out-of-touch sales ladies of the world and stick to my guns. Things are way more special and cost far less when you can do them yourself.
So here, on this self-published blog, is where I’ll detail my experiences—the good, the bad and the frustrating—in planning a hands-on, love-filled, totally-us wedding with nothing but the cash in our pockets and a desire to learn to do it all.
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* No disrespect to Mr. Tutera. His weddings are ridiculous in the best way. He’s the bridal Xzibit, pimping weddings instead of cars. He’s all, “I heard you like the circus so I put a trapeze artist in the centerpieces.” Who can’t get behind that?
