Month Three: Wedding Planning with Maddie
This is the fifth post in a new series about me, a professional wedding planner, planning my own wedding. If you’ve been following along on the blog, or on Instagram, you know that back in March, I got engaged to the most amazing man that I know! It has been a very busy and exciting last few months. With three years of experience, you would think planning my own wedding would be a breeze. It's one thing to be a wedding planner planning other people's weddings, but when it comes to my own wedding, people have had so many questions. “Is it more stressful,” yes. “Is it going to be a huge wedding,” not really. “I bet it's already planned and finished, right?”, not even close.” With so many questions, I decided to start a new blog series to share our wedding planning journey in hopes of answering them all. Here is what Nick and I did this month to plan our wedding:
Photography by Joy and Light Photography.
This post may include affiliate links. Disclaimer.
Book Cake and Caterer
Cake- There are lots of options when it comes to picking your bakery and wedding cake in Northwest Arkansas, and you can’t really go wrong with any of them. Two crowd favorites are Shelby Lynn’s and Rick’s Bakery. Shelby Lynn’s is my personal favorite for wedding cakes, but with them being so popular, they can get booked up pretty far in advance. With only a six month engagement, Shelby Lynn’s was completely booked for the month of October. I have grown up eating Rick’s Cake my whole life at birthday parties, and wanted something a little different for our wedding. I knew I didn’t want to book our cake without doing a tasting first. We scheduled a tasting with The Cake Occasion working out of Fort Smith. Stephanie, the owner and baker of The Cake Occasion, conducts her tastings at Fossil Cove Brewing in Fayetteville (one of our favorite places in Fayetteville). During our tasting we tried multiple different types of cake and filling combinations. Stephanie made our tasting experience so much fun and we made plans to book both our wedding cake and groom's cake on the spot. Stephanie and I even coordinated to make sure the details of the groom cake would be a surprise for Nick. We are so excited to eat our cake on our wedding day.
Caterer- When it came to our wedding menus, Nick and I were in complete agreement. On our first date, we had Italian food and we loved the idea of incorporating this into our wedding. While an Italian pasta bar was what we wanted for our wedding, we knew that a few of our family members have some dietary restrictions that do not allow them to eat regular pasta. We needed our menus to be gluten free, diabetic, and vegetarian friendly. A preset pasta menu just wasn’t going to work for our guests. Most caterers will customize their menus and make adjustments for dietary restrictions, but you need to communicate with them upon booking. We reached out to Catering Concepts about a Gluten and Vegetarian friendly Italian Pasta Buffet and this is what we decided on for our menu:
2 types of pasta (one Gluten Free)
2 sauces: one meatless tomato sauce and Alfredo
2 proteins: meatballs and grilled chicken
Salad
2 salad dressings
Garlic Bread
We did not go to a catering tasting because I have worked with Catering Concepts and had their food before.
Book a Day of Coordinator
Being a wedding planner myself, I know that the best thing you can do for your wedding is to hire a wedding planner. This was one of the most important things for me when it came to wedding planning. We are planning the whole wedding ourselves, and need to hire someone we trust to understand the plan and execute it on our wedding day. We don’t want to worry or work on our own wedding day. I thought back to wedding coordinators who I have worked with in the past and decided to hire one of my own event staff team members. Destiny Ross is the manager at The Ravington venue. She and I have worked many weddings together over the years since we met at Sassafras Springs. I feel very confident in my decision to hire Destiny and am excited to share all of my wedding plans with her closer to our wedding day.
Photo by Joy and Light Photography
Order Save the Dates
With our guest lists well on its way, it was time for us to order our Save The Dates. There are so many options for Save The Date with big companies like Minted and Zola and local companies like Shindig Paperie. There are even really good customizable and affordable options on Etsy. I actually found a style of invitation that I liked on Etsy and was able to see a preview of the customization options before deciding to purchase it. When I did the preview, there were a few things that I would have liked to change that I wasn’t able to. After playing around with Canva I was able to create a similar design the way that I wanted it. I actually had a lot of fun picking my own fonts and images for our Save The Dates. I was able to include photos and elements from our proposal in a unique way and could easily download a digital copy, or order printed cards through Canva. We decided to get printed Save The Date cards for all of our immediate family, a few extras for our wedding party and keepsakes, and then send the rest in an online e-vite format. This allowed us to save a little bit of money when most of our Save The Dates would end up in the trash cans within the week they were delivered.
Book Florist
After spending honestly way too long looking at wedding flower arrangements and bouquets on Pinterest, I had finally narrowed down the options and decided on the type of flower arrangements I wanted for our wedding. The first few florists I reached out to were unavailable. I experienced this with a few vendors, and It was easy to get stressed out and feel discouraged. Wedding planning is a bit infamous for being stressful, but it’s important to remember that the options for your wedding day are endless. There are so many amazing vendors out there, and you’ll find the right ones. I took a short break on the florist hunt for a while till I found Arloh Flora. The first question Mackenzie, owner of Arloh Flora, asked me was how many bouquets, corsages, and boutonnieres I needed. Now bouquets were easy, but I hadn’t even thought about whether we were going to need any corsages and if anyone other than the groomsmen need boutonnieres. After talking with Nick, we decided that we wanted to honor everyone walking down the aisle and give them each some florals. We ordered our mothers and grandmothers corsages, and our grandfathers and fathers boutonnieres. Even the ring bearer will have a little boutonniere. After emailing back and forth, we set up a meeting and discussed wedding flowers over coffee. She got me so excited for our wedding flowers, and I would recommend her to anyone.
Photo by Joy and Light Photography
Book the Band
When it comes to entertainment, there are two obvious options: DJ or Band. This was one aspect of our wedding that Nick had a loud opinion about. Nick and I met through Jr High Band and it has played a huge role in our relationship. The most important thing to Nick for our wedding besides the people, was the music. Nick wanted amazing, live music at our wedding. I loved the idea, but the price difference between a DJ and a live band is pretty significant. It took a bit of convincing, but Nick finally won me over. We spent some time researching and listening to different bands until we settled on hiring JukeBoxx for our wedding band. We are so excited for all of our guests to hit the dance floor and sing along to JukeBoxx.
Thank you so much for following along on my wedding planning journey. This has been a very exciting time of our lives full of family, friends, and anticipation for the next phase of our lives to start together. This was just one month of planning and there are still so many decisions for us to make before the big day comes. Subscribe below to get a reminder for next week’s post about what else we’ve been up to. If you have any questions about wedding planning and how I’m planning my own wedding, leave a comment below.
Cheers,
