Beginning 30 August, Michael’s coupons and weekly ads will be available only online – no more delivery with your local newspaper. To keep up to date with the latest ads and coupons, go to http://michaels.shoplocal.com/michaels/default.aspx. You can also sign up to receive Michael’s newsletter and ads via email if you click here: https://www.michaels.com/art/online/registrationForm

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The ever-fabulous Shanika Butts of SJB Weddings & Events has invited me to come host an all-day DIY workshop for you in September. Here are the details:

The Ultimate DIY Bridal Workshop

A Day with the DIY Bride Khris Cochran

presented by: Shanika J. Butts of SJB Weddings & Events and SJB Weddings & Events: the blog

Who: If you are interested in having a hands on learning experience on creating fabulous accessories and centerpieces for your wedding this is the workshop for you.

When: Saturday September 26, 2009 and Sunday September 27, 2009

Time: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm

Where: Embassy Suites Charlotte, 4800 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28217

Khris Cochran is the creator and founder of the award winning DIYBride.com one of the most popular bridal crafting websites and is also the author of The DIY Bride: 40 Fun Projects for Your Ultimate One-of-a-kind Wedding. Khris is dedicated to helping brides personalize their weddings by assisting them with designing elements that will enable them to put their own personal stamp on their wedding.

Topics for the day include:

* Intro do DIY Bride: How to do it well, on a budget and with your sanity in tact.
* Invitations 101: Invite basics and hands-on time creating rubber stamped invite set
* Favors for under $1: Showcase favor ideas that can be made for under $1 + hands-on project time
* Pimp My Wedding: Ideas for adding pizazz to basic wedding products. Learn how to embellish items such as shoes, gowns, favors, etc.
* The $20 Veil: Learn to create a fabulous veil for $20
* Creative Centerpieces: Showcase of inexpensive + creative centerpiece ideas

This workshop is designed to be fun and an open environment for questions for Khris as she shows you how to make beautiful items for your wedding day. You will come away with actual projects that you have made during class and the know how to create additonal items.

The workshop fee includes the hands on instruction by Khris Cochran, all class materials, hand-outs, takeaways and lunch. Please choose one of the two workshop dates that fit your schedule.

Please register here. If you have any questions please send an email to info@sjbweddingsandevents.com

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We’re oh-so-curious about your weddings! Not only do we get a peek into what real DIYers are doing, it helps us out in bringing the right projects and inspiration to our readers.

What kind of venue(s) are you using for your ceremony and reception? Church, garden, airplane hangar, museum, other? Please share!

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DIY Bride is hittin’ the road later this year and early next. If you’d like to join me for some hands-on crafty wedding goodness in your city, please let me know! I’m making workshop & travel plans for October – April right now. Let’s get together in your city for some DIY fun!

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DIY Bride is seeking projects we can take off your hands and give a crafty makeover. We’ll post before and after pictures and give step-by-step instructions to boot. We’ll turn those sad little projects into pimped out beauties you can be proud of.

We’re seeking reader submissions of any DIY wedding project that you’d like to take to from meh to fab in the following categories:

• Invitations and stationery
• Attire and bridal party accessories
• Centerpieces and table decor
• Flowers, ceremony/reception decor
• Favors and gifts
• Cookies, cakes, food
• Surprise us!

We’d be delighted to receive the actual project to work with! If you’d like to send it to us, please shoot us an email via the contact form and we’ll send shipping instructions.

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Kathy says:
We made this video to show at our wedding in May in Brooklyn; It’s called Kathy and Rob’s License to Wed.  It’s about the adventure of getting a marriage license in New York City.

If you spend a little time with iMovie or any other built-in movie editing software and have a point and shoot camera with video, anyone can make a music video.  This was a fun project because the video was an element that helped set the tone of our wedding.  We thought it had a lot of energy and showed off New York and we just had fun making it.

Kathy and Rob’s License to Wed from Bobcat Productions on Vimeo.

Kathy and Rob’s License to Wed from Bobcat Productions on Vimeo.

Oh, you guys are so clever!

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Thanks to Hudson Paint, chalkboard paint, is now available in 24 colors! {Queue my girlish squeals of delight here.}  Quart cans are only $7.00 making chalkboard goodness within the reach of most DIYers.

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When you prioritize, plan, and adopt some of the money-saving steps below, it will be the beauty and joy of your wedding day you hold onto forever, not the bills.

Food and Drinks
1. Serve a signature drink, such as a punch or favorite cocktail, instead of providing a full bar and limit other alcoholic beverages to wine and beer, choices that will satisfy most of your guests.

2. Have your caterer use local fruits and vegetables that are in season. Not only will these items be more economical, they’ll taste fresher.

3. Order a moderately priced, plainly decorated cake, and make the focal point the cake topper. Vintage bride-and-groom figurines, wedding bells, horseshoes, a basket filled with fruit, or a pair of doves (from an antiques shop or handmade) are classic symbols that can make a cake memorable.

Flowers and Decorations
4. While most popular bridal flowers are available year-round, some traditional ones — peonies and lily-of-the-valley, for example — can be difficult to find and expensive out of season. Seek your florist’s advice before deciding on your flowers.

5. Use favors as seating or place cards to save a bit on stationery costs. For seating cards, write guests’ names and table numbers on strips of paper, affix them to the favors, and set in order on a table near the entrance. For place cards, put favors with names attached at guests’ places.

General Budgeting Tips
6. When it comes to invitations – save money and the environment by choosing digital options like http://www.pingg.com for save the dates.  For the wedding, you can use a more formal, printed invitation. We offer a number of gorgeous designs at pingg – http://www.pingg.com/info/designer_series?artist=martha_stewart.

7. Fridays and Sundays are generally less expensive than Saturdays for renting a venue.

8. To minimize the guest list, include your friends’ significant others but not casual dates.

9. For your reception, remember that a deejay can be less costly than a live band.

10. The most important thing about a wedding is making sure it is personal and reflects you. Prioritize aspects of the wedding that are most important to you. By compromising in some areas, you can afford to splurge on others.

Visit www.marthastewartweddings.com for even more tips and inspiration.

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There are many different types of venues and some require more logistical preparation than others.  In particular, tented weddings require different consideration because one is building a facility, so to speak, from the ground up.  A question I get all the time is, “What size tent should I rent?  And how big should the dance floor be? “Even though your caterer will probably be taking care of the rentals for your wedding, you should know how to calculate what size tent / square footage you will need.  You want to know what you are getting actually fits your needs.

The following are the standard industry formulas used to calculate what size tent and dance floor will be needed while insuring adequate space for any special event.

1st – Determine how many guests will be attending your wedding.

2nd – Determine the type of wedding your are planning:
Type:                                                         Calculate:
Stand up Cocktail                                     6 square feet per person
Cocktail some seating                              8 square feet per person
Sit-down dinner at 8’ banquet tables       10 square feet per person
Sit-down dinner at 5’ round tables           12 square feet per person

3rd -  Additional uses of space to consider and add to the above calculated number are:
If you are having:                       Add:
Dance floor                                    5 square feet per person
3 piece band                              100 square feet
5 piece band                              250 square feet
7 piece band                              300 square feet
12 piece band                            450 square feet
DJ area                                        200 square feet
Buffet area /lines                      100 square feet per 50 guests
Beverage service area                50 square feet each

Keep in mind that generally no more than half of your guests will be dancing at one time.
That’s 50% of your guests and each couple requires 10 square feet.   So if you’ve got 100 guests,
You’ve got 50 couples.   Next you split this number in half because no more than half will be dancing
at one time.  This gives you 25 couples.  Next multiply 25 x 10 square feet per couple equals  a 250
square foot dance floor.

4th – You will then add all your calculations to determine the total square footage for the required tent size needed for a comfortable affair.  Always lean toward larger for a comfortable affair.

A reputable tent company will always send a representative to do a survey of the area to be tented at no
extra cost. The representative will measure the proposed area to be tented, check the slope of the land and
surrounding area so that proper tent recommendations can be made.   These calculations are not
meant to substitute the actual tent company’s survey and recommendations.  These calculations are
meant to help you understand some logistics that go into having a tented wedding.

Submitted By: Stella Inserra
Stella Inserra is the principal event consultant of Simply Dazzling Events, a New York based wedding & event planning company. She is a featured planner on E! Style Network’s hit show, ‘Who’s Wedding is It Anyway?’

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Who exactly is Bridezilla? Though she has probably existed for a long time, she was discovered (and nurtured) by reality television. Think steamroller in a white dress. Think Medusa in a veil. Think Godzilla with a smaller waistline. We’ve all seen her, and she’s scary. She hurts other people’s feelings, she makes a fool out of herself. She builds whole mountain ranges out of molehills.

The real question is: does she live somewhere inside all of us? I’m not a dramatic person. I’m not confrontational. I consider myself to be rather “chill” in most social situations. And, yet, I wonder what this wedding process might bring out in me. At first, I worried about it so much that I developed a kind of planning paralysis.

I have the fiancé of my dreams, and I’m generally excited to celebrate this love I thought I might never find. But there was a serious hesitation. It seems, from the reactions of friends and acquaintances, that I might be the only engaged woman in the universe who didn’t immediately run out and purchase a truckload of bridal magazines after receiving the ring. One night, I came home to find three of them fanned out stylishly on the kitchen counter. They were purchased with love by my fiancé. (A hint perhaps?) Still, it took me a few days before I could crack open that first one.

The theory I loosely adopted was that if I didn’t have a plan, there wasn’t anything I could get too upset about. This kept my fears at bay for a while. After about three months, I realized that if we didn’t have a plan, we probably wouldn’t have a wedding, either. So we went ahead and found a venue and identified date. It’s the only event space we looked at and it’s exactly what we wanted: sparse, cost-effective, loft-like, with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The place even has built-in bookshelves.

Then, we (or I should say I) stalled some more.

What disturbed me was that once we had a space, I began to have certain fantasies about how to fill that space and how to fill our time within it. But what if my fiancé didn’t want the same things? What if we couldn’t afford what we wanted? What if what we wanted came to fruition but then flopped? What if I ended up punching someone or frothing at the mouth? I had this horrible image of myself stomping my foot, and whining like a child, something I was not even prone to doing when I was four years old.

Again, it just seemed a lot easier to do nothing. I kept my ideas to myself like a squirrel hoarding precious nuts. When asked, we justified our dillydallying by telling people that we were just enjoying being engaged. This was true. But people who were sincerely interested in helping or just plain curious, started asking us so many questions that we have been gradually impelled to tentatively take some further steps.

I was afraid I might fall in love with a ridiculously expensive dress then throw a violent in-store tantrum upon realizing I couldn’t afford it. In fact, I didn’t even allow myself to try on gowns above a certain price. With the help of my mom and a few friends, I found a discount dress with an excellent silhouette. I’m unsure about the beading so I might rip it off and replace it with something else, a project I’m looking forward to. Likewise, we were concerned that staying in Manhattan would be too costly for our guests, so we went on our own little hotel tour in search of nice lodging at reasonable prices. In fact, we found a perfect one and secured a block rooms.

Still keeping a few of those dreamy wedding nuts to myself, I began wonder how much this wedding process foreshadows how your marriage will work. On one hand, I feared that my fiancé and I might start flinging plates at each other’s heads over something as silly as flower choices, and on the other, I didn’t want to feel as if I was therefore sheepishly self-censoring. That’s not what I’m about either. Would it really be so hard to communicate and keep level heads?

All I could do was try. Time was (and is) ticking. When I suggested that I thought it would be cool to have a bagpiper play while guests are arriving, his reaction was indeed extreme: he practically jumped out of his skin with excitement, and we booked a piper within an hour. Together, we designed some save-the-date cards with clipart I found online and printed them out at Kinkos. We joked about having a cake decorated with oreo cookies, and now have two tastings of oreo cakes set up at the end of the month. When he suggested something I originally didn’t want – i.e. including some religious icons in an otherwise secular ceremony – I braced myself, half-expecting that my head would start spinning around á la The Exorcist. It was a relief to simply agree and genuinely believe that if it would make his family feel more comfortable then it was important.

The weird thing is that even though organizing all of this so far has eaten up a lot of time, it’s been way more fun than I anticipated. In fact, things seem suspiciously smooth. Thankfully, my inner Bridezilla hasn’t appeared…yet. I haven’t sprouted fangs or even considered tackling anybody.

But wow, there’s still a lot left to do and only four months to do it. Glimpsing at a few of those wedding timelines provided by bridal mags confirms that we are woefully, almost laughably, behind the curve. There are all kinds of loose ends (and we probably don’t even know what all those loose ends are).

As we plan to do our own flowers, invitations, programs, and place cards, I still can’t shake the feeling that Bridezilla is lurking somewhere in there, perhaps crouching inside one of those very projects. I wonder what form she’ll take? How would I fight her off? With laughter? Deep breathing? Throw champagne in her face? Maybe we should just shake hands and I’ll introduce her to our guests. After all, I’ve heard that it’s good to keep your enemies close.

About The Author: Jocelyn Jane Cox is a staff writer for Manhattan’s uppereast.com and writes the regular Upper East Side Informer blog: http://uppereastsideinformer.blogspot.com/ .

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