Summer Wedding Ideas

Summer weddings are always more preferred because of the versatility in wedding themes and ideas during this time of the year. With the abundance of nature blooming in the surrounding area, a pleasant summer wedding is easier to put together. Not to mention, the beautiful warm outdoor weather is always conducive to a celebration and outdoor ceremonies.

The most popular theme for a summer wedding is a beach themed wedding. For a beach themed wedding choose a public or private beach for your wedding. Set the beach wedding theme from the very beginning. Let the beach wedding theme reflect on your invitations and stationary by adding sea side elements and decorations to them. You will save on the wedding decorations for a beach themed wedding as the beach itself will set the scene. Add subtle touches to your tables and centerpieces with seashells.

For your menu, definitely seafood in your menu and there are some fabulous wedding bake designs with a beach theme. Select a cake topper that reflects seaside elements to tie it all together. To top it all off make sure to give out wedding favors with a beach theme such as a sea shell gel candle. The most fun part of a beach wedding affair is picking out wedding favors. There is an abundance of beach wedding favors to select from. For a formal beach wedding give sand and seashell tea lights and use personalized Adirondack chair tea light and place card holders to guide your guests to their table at your beach wedding reception.

How to Become a Successful Wedding Planner With Inexpensive Weddings

Can you make a living planning weddings? Yes. As a self-employed professional, you can either charge a set fee for the wedding or a percentage of the total cost. Your income can be uncertain when you first start planning these extravaganzas, but as your reputation spreads and you gain more experience, your income can increase dramatically.

Of course, you will make more income on an elaborate, huge wedding, but several smaller and simple weddings will be less stressful when you are starting out and, when the separate income is added together, you will probably make the same amount of money.

Some agencies who track salaries report yearly incomes in the $50,000 range for wedding planners. One such agency, PayScale, currently reports these average hourly rates for the profession:

* California $28.00

* Georgia $27.50

* Massachusetts $20.64

* New York $15.00

* Louisiana $14.00

* Pennsylvania $10.23

* Texas $9.00

As with any self-employment, your success depends entirely on your creativity, reliability and marketing skills. There are online courses you can take to teach you the skills you need to plan the perfect wedding for your clients. Some of those courses will lead to certification as a Wedding Planner, which will give you more credibility with your clients and improve your professional standing with your colleagues.

Getting Started

What a professional Wedding Planner actually does is take on the details and responsibility of the event, relieving the bride and groom and their families, from the stresses involved. In turn, this allows them to enjoy the preliminary wedding events, like bridal showers and picking a honeymoon location.

There are lots of details you, as a Wedding Planner, need to know to keep things running smoothly and within the budget available. You will have to have a set of resources you can tap into to get the best service at the best prices, like reserving the church or chapel, catering the reception, ordering flowers, getting the wedding dress designed and ordered, selecting invitations and announcements, booking the music and hiring a professional photographer, among many other tasks.

It would probably be very good advice to start your career on small and somewhat inexpensive weddings. Giant extravaganzas can be very complex and time consuming to the most experienced Wedding Planner and you would be well-advised to start smaller and work up.

Some of the following tips should help you get started on planning a smaller wedding that will save money on several of the more expensive features of normal weddings. The bride's father will love you for it.

The Wedding Gown

* The wedding gown can be expensive enough to break any budget. You can offer your client several options that are affordable and will still make the bride look like an angel as she floats down the aisle.

Renting a gown is becoming more popular every day. Think about it. The bride is going to wear it once and it was probably worn once before she rented it. It also avoids the storage problem for 20 years if the bride will not be saving it for her firstborn child to wear at her own wedding.

* If a member of the bride's family is a good seamstress, suggest that she ask the family member to make the dress. Providing all the material and even paying the family member for the service will more than likely be less expensive than buying one from a bridal store.

* Another way would be for the bride to wear her mother's wedding gown, if she saved it. You might want to check it carefully for any deterioration before the bride commits to wearing it. The mother is probably from a generation that thought saving her wedding gown was an obligation of the marriage and believed for several decades that her daughter would wear it at her own wedding.

The Reception

Another budget-buster is the reception, but some planning with a true reality check can reduce your client's expenditures here.

* Think smaller. Talk to your clients about how they can downsize the guest list. When the excitement of the coming event takes over, your clients and their parents will many times have a very long list of people to invite to the wedding and the reception after.

Many of the parents' visions of the reception can resemble an extravaganza with hundreds of guests, munching caviar and drinking champagne all night long in a huge ballroom. If their budget will not cover the considerable expenses involved in their dream reception, your skills as the Wedding Planner will be well served here.

To start with, keeping the guest list small and only inviting close family and friends will save money and still provide the dream celebration your clients want. If your client hasn't had a close relationship with college friends or neighbors from four moves back, don't put them on the list.

Instead of renting the largest hall or club banquet room in your town for the reception, you have a couple of inexpensive options that might appeal to your clients:

* Check out restaurants in the area. Some have banquet rooms that they will either rent out or provide free if you use their services for the sit-down meal or the buffet.

* Consider suggesting that your clients hold the reception at their home. The party does not have to include a full meal. Catered hors d'oeuvres and a champagne fountain will set the festive mood your clients want.

* Weddings held in gardens or other natural settings are very popular and beautiful. There's minimal decoration needed and the only expense might be for the minister, rabbi or Justice of the Peace.

* Not having a full bar will save a lot of money, regardless of where the reception is held. The champagne fountain mentioned above can also be combined with beer or wine if the clients want to provide additional libations for their guests.

The Photography

The formal wedding service requires a professional photographer who will create a beautiful album to record the special day and preserve the memories to relive as they wish. If you create a relationship with several photographers as you build your career, you will know which one to hire for your client's purposes.

The rest of the celebration can be recorded by all their friends and relatives with a digital camera in their pockets. Some clients put disposable cameras on tables for anyone to use. Have a decorated basket nearby and visible to give your guests a place to leave the cameras when they go home.

Unearthing the Origins of Nuptial Bliss - Our Most Beloved Wedding Traditions

Many of the wedding traditions we still include in the modern nuptial festivities have their roots deep in history. Though many of these wedding traditions are based on superstitions or historical necessity, to this day couples still - to some degree - acknowledge them. Though the dynamics of weddings change continuously, with new wedding customs being added to the 'canon' all the time, wearing white, tying cans to the bumper, and carrying a bouquet all remain firmly entrenched in the collective psyche.

Unearthing the origins of our most beloved wedding traditions - from the practice of placing wedding bands on the third finger of the left hand to putting coins in the bride's shoes - help modern brides understand why we continue to do things the way we do.

A Vision in White

"Married when the year is new, he'll be loving, kind, and true.

When February birds do mate, you wed nor dread your fate."

One of our most beloved wedding traditions is the white wedding dress. Many historians claim that the vivacious French queen, Anne de Bretagne, was the first to start this most cherished of wedding traditions by wearing a white wedding dress in 1499; however, there remains some speculation as to the veracity of this claim. Another 160 years would pass until accounts of Mary, Queen of Scots' marriage to the French Dauphin in 1558 also claimed she wore white. In most cases, the white wedding dress is commonly attributed to Queen Victoria of England, however, who in 1840 married Albert of Saxe-Coburg, clad entirely in a white gown that was adorned with some of her own prized white lace. But, as far as wedding traditions are established, it still took awhile for brides to catch on to this new idea; it was, after all, very hard to clean a white dress and keep it that way in those times. Another sixty or so years would pass before brides had the resources to wear white wedding gowns routinely and keep them spotless.

Prior to this time, there were no wedding customs that dictated what color had to be worn, and everyone - from peasants to royalty - would simply wear their finest gown, whether it was blue, purple, or yellow hued. The only colors strictly off limits were black (a symbol of death) and flaming red (often associated with 'ladies of the night.'), although brides in certain parts of the world wore (and still do) black or red gowns based on local cultural and social wedding customs and requirements. Nowadays, people think that a white dress stands for chastity, but traditionally, if a bride wanted to convey this fact, she would have worn blue in keeping with long-held wedding traditions.

Beach Wedding Dresses - For Hawaiian Or Beach Themed Wedding

So you've decided on a Hawaiian wedding theme and now you need to find beach wedding dresses that go with your Hawaiian beach theme. Or maybe you are planning a beach style wedding elsewhere (not actually on the beach in Hawaii), wherever that may be. It's easy to bring Hawaii to any beach or even to your own back yard. And it all starts with the correct choice of Hawaiian wedding attire suitable to wear on the beach not only for yourself and your bridesmaids but the complete bridal party.

While a wedding on the beach may sound like a unique concept, it has been happening on various beaches of the world. A lot of brides are opting for exotic beach locations for their weddings instead of a traditional church wedding. In order to pick the right bridal attire for a particular wedding, you will need to consider many different elements. This can depend on the location, season and local practices or customs as well as the type of beach itself can be a important factor when selecting Hawaiian beach wedding dresses.

Hawaii is well-known for being laid-back and casual, so why not apply the same attitudes toward your wedding? It's not uncommon for couples getting married on the beach to throw tradition to the wind and dress down.

While nothing could be more romantic than a traditional Hawaiian wedding dress known as a "Holoku". The Hawaiian Holoku, a formal Hawaiian gown with a train, is also a gorgeous choice as a Hawaiian wedding gown for those who would like authentic Hawaiian wedding wear. The Holoku is an elegant, and conservative, formal tea dress, with its high neck, long sleeves, and lace. Maile, the character in Blue Hawaii who married Elvis at the end of the movie, wore a Holoku as her wedding gown as Elvis and Maile serenaded each other with the Hawaiian wedding song as they floated down a river on a canoe toward wedded bliss.

The Five Biggest Wedding Preparation and Planning Mistakes

Just as with any big show, your wedding day will not be perfect - but that's okay. While you cannot plan ahead for every little detail or problematic situation that may arise, you can arm yourself with some helpful advice to be prepared at all times for any potential wedding mistakes. But before you begin planning your special day, consider these five biggest wedding preparation and planning mistakes that amateur 'wedding planners' often make.

1. Not Budgeting Costs

It's hard to believe, but true - many couples do not create a budget when it comes to wedding preparation and end up in a deep hole of debt. The very first thing you should do to avoid disastrous (and bankrupting) wedding mistakes is devise an itemized budget, allowing for the necessary requirements, such as a venue for both the ceremony and reception, food and drinks, flowers, favors, decorations, etc. If anything is left over, either use this money for your honeymoon or spend it on something a little more frivolous, like a horse drawn carriage for your departure from the reception.

Budgeting ahead of time also involves your acknowledging the fact that you may surpass the total by at least 10%. Surprises do happen, so cutting back on other needless things will ensure that you don't go over budget too much. In these initial wedding preparation stages, you and your fiancé need to discuss who will be paying for what. It used to be that the bride's parents paid for everything, but this ideal is slowly fading away. If you're still coming up short on funds, there are literally hundreds of ways to cut costs for your wedding day, including having fewer guests, choosing an off-season date, selecting flowers that are in season, and having friends and family play a bigger part by making the wedding cake or trying their hand at photography.

Wedding Insurance - Cover Your Wedding Plans

Wedding insurance is as essential to your wedding planning as the dress.  Consider how much you spent on your car, was it less than the sum you are about to invest in your wedding?  Would you even consider not having adequate car insurance?  No?  Then why wouldn't you insure your wedding - when the average cost these days can fall between two and three times the cost of an average family saloon car?

A wedding insurance policy is comparatively cheap for insurance which covers a wide range of different parts of your wedding day.  Cover can be arranged that gives you reassurance about the largest disasters (cancellation) through to some parts that may give minor disruption but not devastating consequences (cars not arriving, for example).

Before deciding on the items that you need insurance cover for, and the value of cover that you will need, it will be worth investigating a couple of other sources of cover that may be available to you.  If you have sufficient limits on your household insurance policy, you may find that items such as the wedding gifts, rings and wedding dress/attire are covered whilst in your home.  A call to the insurance broker should be able to confirm this and/or give you a quote for the extension of cover required to the household insurance.

Items purchased or booked for your wedding and paid by credit card will often carry a level of insurance cover from the credit card provider.  In these cases, a wedding insurance policy may be duplicating cover that you already have.  For example, if the florist went out of business before your wedding day, your credit card supplier would most likely cover the refund of any deposit or payment made by the card.

When you have considered each of the alternative insurance options available to you, if you decide that a more comprehensive wedding insurance policy better serves your needs, start shopping for it as early as possible.  Most wedding insurances offer cover on a fixed scale of fees, providing cover until 24 hours after your wedding date.  The sooner you arrange insurance cover the more reassured you can be about issuing deposit payments to the various suppliers, etc., so make wedding insurance one of the priorities when you're making the planning list of items.

When assessing the level of cover you may need, take into account the various items that come together to make your wedding day:

Your Wedding Program and Guest Book Show Your Style

Your wedding program can certainly help convey so much about you and your wedding day. Here are some ideas to help make your guest book fun and add to your wedding style. Couples will often include a photo of themselves on the cover, but that is just the beginning.

The wedding program is a wonderful place to let your guests know the names of the beautiful songs that you have chosen. It is also a place to share the meanings behind the rituals that will be taking place.

We have seen many mothers begin to cry when they read the beautiful words that the bride and groom have written in the program about them. It is also a place to honor all of the attendants, children, readers and officiates that participate in the ceremony. You can even include a special message to your guests for their attendance on your special day.

Some couples have included quotes from literature or a poem that is special to them. We have even seen lovely handkerchiefs included inside of the program for those teary moments that are sure to occur.

The back of the program is the perfect place to provide your new home address and contact information. That way your loved ones will be able to stay in touch in the future. You can also include here the website that your photographer will use to post your wedding photos so that all of your guests will be able to see your wedding pictures.

You can have them printed or make them yourself with software and pretty paper, but what ever you choose, makes it your style.

Guest books can also define your wedding style. If yours is a destination wedding, you might want to consider a beautiful coffee table picture book of the location of the wedding having guests simply find a page that they would like to leave their sentiments. Or you could choose a book that reflects a special place to you both. This could be from a place where you met, a place you will visit on your honeymoon or even a place that you both dream about visiting. But rest assured as time goes by, this book will take on more meaning that just a guest book.

Another great idea is to create your own picture book. Put some one in charge of taking Polaroid photos of guests, fixing them into a blank album and letting the guests leave their well wishes next to their photographs. We have seen the same concept done with all of the components for this placed in a beautiful basket and passed from table to table allowing guests to take the photos of each other. That was a lot of fun and very special for the bride and groom.

A very unique idea for the wine loving couple is to select a magnum size bottle of the wine or champagne that you will be serving at your wedding as the guest book. You will want to provide either a gold or silver fluid marker that dries on the bottle. A magnum size bottle will provide ample space for all to sign.

So there are just a few ideas to help you create unique touches to your wedding and to help you make your wedding elegant.

Your wedding program can certainly help convey so much about you and your wedding day. Here are some ideas to help make your guest book fun and add to your wedding style. Couples will often include a photo of themselves on the cover, but that is just the beginning.

The wedding program is a wonderful place to let your guests know the names of the beautiful songs that you have chosen. It is also a place to share the meanings behind the rituals that will be taking place.

We have seen many mothers begin to cry when they read the beautiful words that the bride and groom have written in the program about them. It is also a place to honor all of the attendants, children, readers and officiates that participate in the ceremony. You can even include a special message to your guests for their attendance on your special day.

Some couples have included quotes from literature or a poem that is special to them. We have even seen lovely handkerchiefs included inside of the program for those teary moments that are sure to occur.

The back of the program is the perfect place to provide your new home address and contact information. That way your loved ones will be able to stay in touch in the future. You can also include here the website that your photographer will use to post your wedding photos so that all of your guests will be able to see your wedding pictures.

You can have them printed or make them yourself with software and pretty paper, but what ever you choose, makes it your style.