(photograph taken by Jessica Peterson)

This is totally how I feel right now, in regards to wedding planning. A bit overwhelmed, a bit over my head, a bit like I’m drowning. I’m suspended, not sure where up is, everything is going so slow and I just need a little air. While I was puffy and stuffy, which is such a terrible combination, I got absolutely no wedding planning done. None at all. So, now that we’re about 125 days away, we’re really pressed for time. We have to get everything done twice as fast which is a bit stressful.

Wedding planning has been fun of course, but now that we have to go into overdrive, everything seems to be falling apart. The person who was making my wedding dress? They completely bailed on me. Oh yeah, just dropped off the face of the earth. That is the thing wedding nightmares are made of. But, after a bit of soul searching and eBay searching, I found something else for a bargain. But, that was an ulcer I didn’t need, you know?

As if the Dress Mess and Swine Flu wasn’t enough, I’ve had even more aggravation  thrown my way in the form of  thinly veiled nuggets of anti-Semitism and ignorance. The kind that hurt you for a few days and you think to yourself “Ugh, I should have said such-and-such and that would have shown them”.

But, like any challenge you come across in life, you just have to put on your War Face and Stompin’ Boots. Wedding things are getting done and I still have my fiancé Matt by my side. That’s what really matters. Our wedding rings have been ordered, I hopefully just secured an officiant, I’ve been in regular contact with a photographer, I have all the doodads to send to one of my vendors (I can not wait to make a post about that!), I’ve found a ketubah I actually like, and all of the paper products are nearing their final design. So, things are happening. At just at a bit of a hectic pace.

Hopefully, my next post won’t have a huge gap like this one and the last one did. But, now that things seem to be coming at me at about five hundred miles an hour, I’ll have a lot more to post about!

Weddings are a wonderful. Two people coming together to publicly state their love and join two families into one, what can be better than that? But, weddings aren’t cheap, they’re notoriously expensive. When’s the last time you ate a $2,000 cake? While I can’t afford a celebration fit for the pages of Martha Stewart Weddings, I feel that we can still have our beautiful cake, and eat it, too. The question is how to avoid spending a king’s ransom on a wedding!

The first thing I did: Prioritize. When I put together my budget, I made a list of all the little things that I wanted for my wedding that would make this day uniquely “us”. DIY is all the rage now, and I am all for that – I love to just sit down and make stuff! But, because I’ve been sitting down and making stuff for quite some time, I know that time and effort is just as valuable as what’s in my wallet, and just because you can do it yourself doesn’t mean you should do it yourself. I think that’s something many couples don’t really take in to consideration – that when you spend your evening crunching your numbers, you need to also budget all the time you spend doing things yourself. For those little crafty touches that I don’t want to do myself (like stamping 150 escort cards), I’m turning to Etsy!

But, back to our list of priorities… The wedding industry has seriously blurred the lines between wants and needs. A wedding is a very special day, and I can’t wait for mine, but I’m trying to keep in mind that everything I want to have at my wedding is not necessarily everything I need. We’re pretty conditioned by society to want a poofy white dress and awesome shoes and silk this and taffeta that and if you don’t have these things Your Special Day is Ruined with a capital “R”. But I’m going to tell you a secret. Come a little closer. A little more…

I discovered that no one will call the Wedding Police if  we don’t buy monogrammed Champagne flutes.

I’m pretty sure that the catering folks can find it in their hearts to lend me two extra flutes, so I’m going to go ahead and cross it off my list.  I’m pretty sure it will have me at least $45, and it felt pretty good to take it off my list. What about linen rentals and napkins? No sweat, I’m heading to the nearest fabric store where plain white or ivory cotton is about $3/yd (and I’ve even seen cheaper!)  Some fabric stores even hem them for you. Get a few yards, throw it over the tables, and you have table linens! Cut up a few yards and sew around the edges, instant eco-friendly napkins! And after the wedding, I’m sure I’ll have a few extra yards to play with.

There are many ways to cut the cost of a wedding by being a little thrifty. I’ve yearned for a set of letterpress invitations with sweeping swirls and hand-written envelopes, so I’m checking out a few font websites for more calligraphy-esque fonts and, may have the invitations printed up by a local printing company. It gives that same formal look for much less. Since I still have my heart set on letterpress, I may just go old school for the Save The Dates instead of the whole invitation.

Can’t afford the vintage photo booth rental? Me neither!  I plan to get some pretty fabric that coordinates with our wedding colors and hire a photography student to oversee a homemade photo booth that’s totally unique.

The real point of the post is to let you know it’s okay to want nice things for your wedding! It really is! But, you don’t have everything just because society tells us we do. The little things really add up in a wedding and so many of those little things go unnoticed anyway! It’s just not worth racking up the debt. Your wedding, as have the millions of weddings before it, have soldiered on without calligraphy and Jordan almonds.

Really think about fleshing out all the necessaries like I did, and come up with creative and inexpensive solutions for those details that are important to you.

]]> http://www.jewishweddingnetwork.com/how-to-the-secret-to-a-budget-wedding/feed 3 http://www.jewishweddingnetwork.com/8-days-a-week-changing-a-wedding-date-at-the-last-second http://www.jewishweddingnetwork.com/8-days-a-week-changing-a-wedding-date-at-the-last-second#comments Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:57:42 +0000 Asia A. http://www.jewishweddingnetwork.com/?p=3754 Wedding planning is stressful and difficult as it is, and even more so if you only have a couple of pennies and a bum sewing machine to work with like I do. So, I thought, why not make it even harder on myself and change the wedding date about ten times, and then decide on the final date at the last second? Sounds like a great time, doesn’t it?

It was really hard enough for me and my fiancé Matt to come up with a wedding date in the first place. Because we’re just a little offbeat (or because we’re nerds), we originally decided on the date of 10/10/2010. See, 101010 in binary adds up to the number 42. For those of you out there who are not Douglas Adams fans, 42 is used in the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the answer to life, the universe, and everything. The day you unite your soul with another human being seems to fit that description quite well!

So you can understand my distress when I found out that we would not be able to hold our wedding on this most perfect of wedding dates.  My younger brother has taken it upon himself to become the epitome of toughness and enlist himself in the Marines. So, while I’d be dancing the hora, my younger brother would be doing thousands of pull-ups and firing scary guns. About 1,000 miles away. And I just can’t have that.

My younger brother and I are really close. Well, kinda. We’re close in that our rooms are close. And we sit close to each other at the dinner table.  And sometimes even the couch, if his arm isn’t on my side.  I want him to be there. A wedding is the public joining of two families. No matter how much my brother smells and no matter how many of my iPod cords he loses, he’s still my baby brother and I still want him there. So, the wedding date was changed so he could attend before leaving for boot camp, and for the last time this time! My pocket-sized personal agenda can’t take the abuse of anymore white-out or pen scratch-throughs.

So, our new wedding date is May 2nd. Seems simple enough, and it’s even on Lag B’Omer! So now that I’ve effectively lobbed off six months of precious planning and preparation time, I’d better get cracking. We’re on full speed ahead as it were, and I’ve just begun to fight! Er…plan. Now, if only I could get my sewing machine to purr the quiet hum of leisurely cocktail napkin production as opposed to the fierce roar of a Bugatti Veyron about to tear up the asphalt of a racetrack! Baby steps!

Sometimes they’re big and sometimes they’re little, with a sprinkling of diamonds all around, or just the one important one in the center. Our Knight in Shining Armor brings it to us upon bended knee, after riding day and night across many lands on his white horse, storming castle walls and braving ogres and giants to serenade us with songs about how much he loves us.  He even swims across deeps moats–which is hard when you’re wearing all that armor! He sweeps us off our feet and we ride off into the sunset, happily ever after.

However, my now-fiancé doesn’t know how to ride a horse, and he certainly can’t swim despite having grown up in Florida. So I took the reigns of my own great steed, and like a true Type A personality, I ended up doing the popping and questioning myself.  Yes, I proposed to my boyfriend first. He was initially a little taken back and flustered, but he did say “Yes.”  There was no epic song or moat. There wasn’t even a ring. I just said “We’re going to get married!” and that was that.

Me and my fiancé Matthew.
I promise his arm isn’t freakishly long! I was just messing with the sleeve of his sweater.

Matthew and I met senior year in our high school photography class. I just wanted to be this kid’s friend, but the more we hung out at school, the more in like-like I found myself to be with him. So one day, in my best penmanship, I wrote him a note with many a comma splice and run on sentence telling him how I felt. I invited him over to my house to watch movies and I told him in true overbearing and I’m-the-boss fashion, “We’re going to go out.”

I’m lucky enough to have a great guy who’s willing to let me take the driver’s seat, and to let me be the main planner and do-er. I’m an ambitious kind of gal and I like to just do stuff. My fiancé Matthew is more passive and laid back. Whoever said “opposites attract” couldn’t have been more right. Some of my friends can’t even understand how we’re together–we’re just that different.

We’re at this point now, so I’d say that this type of dynamic has worked A-OK for us. Not only are we making a commitment to spend the rest of our lives together, but Matthew, who is not Jewish, is also making the commitment to convert and to join the Jewish people. Like any type of relationship, whether it be with a person here on earth or with G-d, you have to take it one step at a time.

Matthew and I are both full-time students who also work full-time, so life is coming at us fast. With the cost of school on the rise, we only have $3,000 to plan a wedding with nearly 100 guests, if not more than. 90% of our wedding is going to be DIY and handmade, and the other 10% is going to utilize local and independent artists and craftspeople. We have a little over a year to put together a wonderful and meaningful wedding that’s both eco-friendly and budget-friendly. Next October can’t come soon enough!

PS- Matthew did eventually propose to me– ring and all during a James Bond movie, but I think that was due mostly to societal influence and pressure from his family.