Posts filed under 'Tips'
Another one for the “Why didn’t they have this when I got married?” file..
Courtesy of the folks at Weddingmapper.com, you can easily create an interactive map of all your relevant wedding spots (reception, ceremony, hotels, airports - you get the idea.)
You can even personalize the map with your picture and a welcome message to your guests! Its not the prettiest thing ever (think google earth with some wedding icons), but it sure gets the job done and would be a nice addition to your wedding website if you have one.
January 10th, 2007
Short of asking random passersby to snap a photo of you two gorgeous newlyweds, chances are the majority of your honeymoon photographs will be of each of you alone. Unless of course, you pack a gorilla pod! According the Gorilla Pod website, the Gorilla Pod “firmly secures your camera to just about anything- anywhere and everywhere. Unlike traditional tripods, the gorillapod doesn’t require an elevated surface for you to take the perfect shot.”
It even comes in three different sizes to accommodate point and shoot, SLR and cameras with large zoom lenses. (prices range from 24.95 to 44.95 depending on size. )
In addition to making sure your honeymoon photos are “a deux,” seems to me that this handy gadget would be useful for future photo ops long after the honeymoon is over..
Update: I spoted this on stylehive.. it looks even more gravity defying than the gorilla pod!
January 6th, 2007
http://www.dancesisterdance.com/myvid/index.php?v=59d9891949a81
Wooohooo, boogey!
Create your own dance videos here: www.dancesisterdance.com
Then send them to everyone you know…
October 27th, 2006
If you are DYIing your own paper products, chances are you want to use a font that is slightly more elegant than say Times New Roman. Fortunately for DIY brides, beautiful free fonts abound on the web! Here are some of my favorite sources:
http://www.dafont.com/
http://www.fontfreak.com/
http://www.houseoflime.com/
http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts-e3.html
http://www.specialtyfonts.com/deco/index.htm
http://www.listemageren.dk/fontarkiv/index.htm
How to Install on a PC computer
Fonts generally come in zip files. Download the zip file to your computer and unzip the folder. Do not directly unzip the contents (which is usually a TTF file and another text read me document) into your Windows/Fonts folder. Unzip it somewhere into your documents and then navigate to that location. Click once on your font and then copy or move the font into your C:/Windows/Fonts folder. Your computer should pop up a dialogue box showing that its installing the font. It will say installing one of one and the font name.
Thats it! Now open any program that uses fonts such as MS Word and you’ll see your new font in the list.
Dingbats & Webdings
Dingbats and Webdings are fonts that are not letters but rather collections of symbols or graphics usually based around a theme. The beauty of these little guys is that because fonts are inherently “vector” art they can be sized up to any dimension without losing quality or pixelating like say a jpg will.
You won’t have any trouble sizing dingbats to the appropriate resolution on your maps or invitations but you WILL have a problem if you find an image you like on the web and and decide it makes the perfect motif for your invitations. It will look fine on your screen, but when you go to print it, it will look fuzzy. This is because web graphics are 72 dots per inch (or DPI) where as printing requires a much higher resolution image, usually 300dpi.
So, for example if you decide you want a starfish as a motif for your beach-themed wedding, you are MUCH better off searching for a dingbat you can install on your computer than if you found a cute jpg of a dingbat by doing a google image search. Part of the reason is the resolution, but also because your google image starfish will most likely have a white or colored background which will prevent you from layering it over anything but the same color white.
Dingbats can be used for many different things from flourishes and motifs, to background design elements and map symbols.
Finally, Some Examples!
Here are a few different versions of a monogram/logo I did for a beach-themed wedding:
Obviously the big “W” is an alphabet font, but the starfish, Flip Flops and Hibiscus Flower were all symbols from a dingbat font called “Tropicana BV” available for download at Dafont.com: http://www.dafont.com/tropicana-bv.font
Here is a jpg of the front of my map insert:
And the back:
Every little graphic in this map insert is a dingbat font including the buildings, the plane symbol, the flourishes in between the hotel names and even the frame around our names!
Dingbat fonts as overlays..
One other example of how you can use a font to add a design element is by making it very large and low opacity like I did in our invitation design:
The bright white lily in the bottom left is a jpg, but the floral motif is from a beautiful set of floral fonts called “in my garden” also available at dafont.com: http://www.dafont.com/in-my-garden.font
There are, of course, hundreds of examples and it would take hours to go through all of them, but please feel free to post specific questions if you have any!
October 18th, 2006
Wow.
I came across this site recently: http://www.costofwedding.com/ which calculates the average cost of weddings by zipcode and even breaks it down by things like wedding attire, ceremony costs, reception costs etc.
And its pretty accurate too..
For a wedding in Miami Beach (I used the Palms’ zipcode 33140) the average cost is 37,386.40, not including the honeymoon, engagement ring or wedding planner.
In my own mind we spent 30,000, but there were so many things I didn’t count like alterations, groom’s suit, hair & makeup, my dress (!!) that easily add up to that extra 7k.. not that I would ever tell my husband that. So I would say that number is almost dead on.
Ways I could have saved alot more? Apparantly If we had decided to get married in Ft. Lauderdale just 20 miles north, it would have only cost us 25,565.70 - more than 10,000 less!!
And here’s the big shocker.. according to this site, had we had our wedding in NYC (where we are originally from) our wedding would have only cost $28,314.70. What?? Miami beach is more expensive than NYC? One of the reasons we decided to have it in Florida as opposed to New York (where 99% of our friends and family still live) was because we figured no where could be more expensive than NYC to have a wedding.. Of course i did use the zip code 10009, our last NYC address in the way way east village (alphabet city actually). I’m sure that a zip code on the upper west side would yeild a higher budget.. I’m off to check!
September 1st, 2006
Brides on the Knot have been forgoing the traditional “sign-your-name-here” guest book for ages. While there are many alternatives, one that is growing in popularity is the polaroid guestbook. The folks at Adesso Albums have even created an album specifically for this purpose, it includes a window in each page where you slide the polaroid in:
While this is a great option for many brides, there are a few drawbacks, namely price (they run about $60 each) and flexibility - the pages are bound in, so if you have more groups of guests than pages you need two albums.
For my wedding I not only wanted that flexibility, I also wanted the book to look more like it fit in with the theme of my wedding. Already burdened with too many last minute DIY projects, I was thrilled when my graphic designer sister Roxanne offered to take this project over as her gift to us.
We decided on the Newbury album from Kolo:
The album fit all our requirments: It come in many different colors (we chose “camel”) It had a window so we could personalize it with our picture or logo, and best of all it is expandable. It comes with 20 sheets, is expandable to 30 sheets - which means that you can have up to 60 pages which should cover you for at least 120 guests (The adesso album hold only 30 pictures and so half as many guests.)
The other benefit of an expandable album is that you can actually take it apart at the wedding and have people signing pages simultaneously.
The Final Result
Here’s how our guestbook looked with our logo printed in the window:
And here are some of the inside pages filled out by the guests:
Other Tips
I get asked alot about the camera and film. We bought the Poloaroid 600 camera at walmart. I can’t remember the exact price but I think it was around $32. I do remember seeing it at Walgreens cheaper because they often have sales/rebates on the camera. By far the best deal on the film that we found (polaroid film can be very expensive!) was from Costco. They came in packs of 50. We figured we’d need 60, so we bought one extra single pack of 10 exposures at Walgreens. We ended up with one extra pack. So for our 90 guests we used about 50 exposures.
To adhere the poloroid to the guestbook, we used that rollon craft glue stuff that people use for scrapbooking that should be available at your local craft store. Here’s an example of one from Sav-on-Crafts:
Definitely ask a close friend to “man” the guestbook. This was something we decided at the last minute, but probably saved the whole project. I heard later that he was very (gently) persistant at asking people to please have their picture taken and sign the book… and its probably thanks to him that we got as many pages filled out as we did.
That should be all the information you need to create your own photo guestbook. let me know how yours turns out!
August 12th, 2006
As anyone who saw my wedding pictures can attest to, I’m not affraid to accesorize.
I figured walking down the aisle was the closest to the red carpet I was ever going to get, so when my photographer referred to me as his “hollywood bride” I took it as a compliment.
So you can imagine how happy I was when I found these beaded shoes (bonus, they were silver like my dress!):
But unfortunately the beading caught on the hem of my dress so I had to settle for a plainer shoe I found at http://www.myglasssliper.com/:
Not to be deterred from my quest for bling, I realized that the clip on rhinestone earrings that my grandmother gave me were the perfect detail for my unadorned shoes. Clip on earrings function pretty much the same way that shoe clips do, but without the little metal “teeth” to keep them on. I solved that problem by using a strip of that sticky moleskin stuff on the inside of the shoe to keep the earrings in place. The result was not only a nicely accessoried shoe, but I had my something old!
If you don’t have a family heirloom to wear on your feet, try your local anitque, consignment or thrift store. For you non-DIYers, you can simply order them online from: http://www.absolutelyaudrey.com/products_bridal.html
July 14th, 2006
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