HOW TO: craft a wedding that represents you and your true love

by Christy Petterson

You�re engaged and it is time to start planning your wedding. The most important thing to remember when you start planning is that this day is for you and your true love and it should represent your relationship. Getting started can feel overwhelming especially if none of your friends have gotten married yet. And when I got engaged I felt like I was about 20 years behind in my planning because while a lot of girls were dreaming of their big day I was climbing trees. Looking at bride magazines didn�t help because I saw those brides and thought, �that�s not me.� There is an enormous industry dedicated to making you feel like your special day has to be a certain way. Crafty girls are not cookie-cutters and their weddings shouldn�t be either. Your wedding should represent your own personal style, and no one should tell you otherwise.
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As you get going you�ll notice that a lot of family members have strong feelings about different aspects of the wedding. So before we go any further, I do want to clarify the difference between family tradition and industry-induced-expectation. Family tradition is something significant for reasons that are cultural, religious or just unique to your family. Whatever the reason, the tradition is special. An example might be wearing your grandmother�s cross during the ceremony because she wore her grandmother�s cross when she got married. The industry-induced-expectations are those things that someone thinks you �should� do. They aren�t significant for sentimental reasons they just seem like the �right� thing because �that�s the way things are done.� An example of industry-induced-expectation is making your three closest friends wear matching hideous dresses that cost a lot of money and can never be worn again. Family tradition is important. Industry-induced-expectation is stupid.
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To get started with the planning buy or make yourself a blank notebook. Make sure it has ample pages and that you love it. This notebook is going to be your best friend. Write down everything. Every single idea you have. Every single idea anyone tells you. Every bit of information you run across. You can even tape in articles or business cards or fabric samples or pictures. Even if an idea seems like it isn�t feasible or of interest right now�write it down! You might change your mind later or circumstances might change and you don�t want to have to hunt for that information again. My everything notebook had an adorable Curious George on the cover.

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And now for some tips�
#1 The biggest challenge in planning a wedding is finding a location for it. This is the item that will cost the most, have the most restrictions and could already be booked for the date that you want. Keep an open mind, think creatively and shop around. One cost-cutting measure is to have the ceremony and the reception in the same location. I went to a beautiful wedding last summer in a historic home where the ceremony was on the back garden patio and the reception was inside the house.
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My wedding was small and we rented the large gazebo on the town square just a few yards from where we met. We only invited family and a handful of friends to the ceremony. For the reception, we used the paint-your-own-pottery shop where I worked. The night before a team of us came in and decorated the space. I painted enormous panels of paper to cover the shelves of pottery and our decorating totally transformed the space. We invited all our friends to the reception and the space worked out great for us. As an added bonus, I now use some of the panels in my living room. �
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#2 Once you have picked your space think of the rest of the preparations as planning a party. While I hadn�t been dreaming of my wedding since I was 5 years old, I had thrown many parties and thinking of the wedding as a party made it much easier to organize. A wedding is really a whole bunch of crafty projects if you think about it. Invitations, dresses, food, flowers, decorations. What could be more fun?
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I would start by picking a color and style that you want to focus on. I chose red and went with an Asian theme. That meant when I painted the panels, I painted bamboo on them and when I created the d�cor for the tables that meant folding origami cranes. Having a theme made it easier to come up with ideas.
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#3 Look for ways to simplify the process. There will be some aspects that are so import to you that you don�t want to compromise, but others where you can cut corners. I just had one bridesmaid and it was my sister so I told her to pick out a dress that she liked that matched our red theme. This made everything much easier, especially since my sister lives in San Diego and I live in Atlanta. By simplifying the bridesmaid dress process I had more time to work on other projects like making the veil with my Mom.
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#4 Remember this represents you and your true love. Look for ways to express who you are. Otherwise, your wedding is just like any one else�s. We chose to use a traditional Episcopal service for our ceremony but we switched up a few aspects of it and even played a recording of John Coltrane�s A Love Supreme. Coming in at just under 8 minutes, playing this song might seem a little crazy, but it really meant something to the two of us and made the ceremony all our own.
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#5 You would be surprised the talents your friends and family have. Enlisting them to help with different preparations made the whole event much more meaningful for me. A friend did my flowers, and we had fun going to the market to pick out the flowers the night before. A childhood friend who lived down the street did my makeup. It was so much fun to have someone I had known since I was 6 years old come over that morning to fix me up. It made everything much more meaningful to have her there than a stranger that I had hired.
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Planning a wedding is a huge undertaking. Staying organized makes all the difference in the world. Once I got past a certain point in the preparations I graduated from the notebook to �The Countdown,� a huge piece of craft paper with a checklist arranged by category. Looking over it three years later, I am amazed that I pulled the whole thing off in just three months. To make it all happen I had to, no matter what the circumstances, remain calm and creative--two words that I feel will take you far in life!

Christy Petterson lives in Atlanta where she writes, sews, works in PR, organizes crafty events, roadies for her drummer-of-a-husband, eats the yummy food he cooks her, drinks coffee, goes for walks and spends time with her friends and family.