Category: Wedding Invitations

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Eco-Elegant I Do’s: Inspiring Ideas for a Sustainable and Planet-Friendly Wedding!

wedding dress

Today, many brides consider the environment while they plan their wedding ceremonies and receptions. Avoiding waste , ordering planet-friendly supplies, and conserving energy at a grand celebration can be tricky, but it’s not impossible.

Planning a “green” wedding can be a remarkable experiment that most guests will really appreciate. There are plenty of ways to ensure that your wedding is as environmentally conscious as it can be; here are some excellent tips to help you get started:

Choose A Local, Sustainable Menu

Supporting local farmers and local businesses can be an excellent starting point when planning a planet-friendly wedding. After all, so much fuel, energy and packaging is wasted when food products are imported. Choosing local, sustainable ingredients is a perfect way to support your community and protect the environment. Look for fresh produce in season, and choose a menu that celebrates the hard work of local farmers.

Buying food products grown in your locality can be a great way of ensuring that everything served at your wedding is as fresh as possible. While certain types of food, such as wild-farmed salmon, organic beef and chicken, and organic fruits and veggies can cost more, they are free of harmful pesticides, hormones, and other nasty additives. Your guests will taste the difference, and you will support environmentally-conscious local businesses. Ensure your friends and family know you’ve chosen a fresh, local menu – they’ll love the idea!

Use Recycled Paper For Save-The-Date Notes, Invitations, Place Cards, and Menus

There are plenty of excellent ways to use recycled paper and cardboard to create gorgeous wedding invitations, place cards, and menus. If you’re outsourcing these items from a local designer or printer, be sure to request the materials you want – any reputable printer or artist will be more than happy to comply with your wishes.

To create lovely decorations, invitations, place cards and menus from recycled paper – get creative! Use appliques, ribbons, stencils and rubber stamps to give your work a chic, homespun vibe. A hot glue gun can be a great way to add embellishments to planet-friendly recycled wedding favors and invitations. You might also want to look for envelopes made from recycled materials…

Keep Things Simple And Old-Fashioned

A low-fi, old-school approach to wedding entertainment can give your reception a lot of charm. Instead of a noisy rock band or cheesy, loud wedding singers, consider a folk-rock musician who only needs a single mike, a couple of amps, and an acoustic guitar. Even a string quartet can provide amazingly beautiful music during a wedding ceremony, and they won’t need much “juice” to do it. You may also want to conserve power by planning a simple, outdoor ceremony with bright sunlight. Candlelight can be a romantic, planet-friendly option for your wedding reception. Votives and natural beeswax candles can be fragrant, flattering, and lovely to behold.

Plan A Natural Bridal Look That Reinforces Your “Green” Theme

bridal gown

Looking pretty, natural and fresh-faced will complement your wedding’s healthy, planet-friendly feel. Look for a bridal dress that is simple and not too sexy.

If you love funkier, edgier style, express yourself with an unusual gown, such as the cool bridal dress style shown above. Be yourself by choosing a white wedding dress that really reflects your personal taste and sensibilities.

A pretty laurel of flowers in your hair will be lovely choice – brides have worn this style since the Middle Ages. Keep your hairstyle soft and natural – avoid hairspray and a lacquered, fussy look. To highlight your bridal gown and hair, do natural makeup focusing on soft, neutral earth tones – pinky-brown lip glosses, such as MAC Lust, will add enough color and shine. Glowing cheeks can be achieved with a simple swipe of peachy blush, such as the popular Nars Orgasm. The foundation should be used sparingly and designed to create a soft, dewy effect. Almay’s lightweight, sheer bases are a great choice for this kind of look.

Your bridal rings should be carefully chosen to reflect your overall style – generally, the type of woman who wants a “green” wedding won’t need a lot of bling. Subtle Feri jewelry and a small bouquet of wildflowers can be enough to set off your natural beauty as you walk down the aisle in your wedding dress. If you’ve overspent setting up your green wedding, consider shopping for cheap bridesmaids dresses to save a little money; online bridal boutiques, such as our Best For Bride wedding emporium, offer high-quality designs for a reasonable price.

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How To Save Money While Planning Your Wedding

wedding dresses

Most brides and grooms-to-be must consider their wedding budgets when they plan their nuptials. Weddings can get very expensive, and it’s a rare couple that doesn’t have to worry about the cost of catering, alcohol, music, renting a venue, etc. For many brides, one of the most important parts of wedding planning is choosing the right bridal gown. In most cases, this white wedding dress is incredibly meaningful for the bride-to-be – therefore, it should probably not be a budget item.

In fact, brides-to-be tend to regret buying cheap wedding dresses after the ceremony and reception are finished. Of course, there are exceptions, but quality does show in wedding photos and videos. So, in general, it’s smart to save on other aspects of the wedding, so that you can enjoy getting the dress you really want. It still doesn’t have to cost a fortune, but it should fulfill your fairytale dreams for your special day – you deserve to feel like a queen when you walk down the aisle.

Luckily, there are lots of ways to economize if you’re smart and organized. Planning well in advance can be key – give yourself time to comparison shop on everything from catering to wedding flowers to wedding favors – if you’re rushed and under pressure, you’ll end up buying overpriced items out of desperation. Instead, use the months before your wedding to research deals and plan your strategy.

You’ll be glad you didn’t move too fast when you consider the overall cost of your ceremony and reception. By putting some energy into finding lower-priced items and services, you’ll be able to enjoy your wedding more – after all, no one wants to return from the honeymoon to be confronted with a mountain of debt. Debt creates stress, and it take a lot of romance out of the blissful newlywed state.

Here are some practical tips on saving money at your wedding:

 

Rent His Tux – Unless you have a lot to spend, you should consider tuxedo rental for your groom-to-be. Most men don’t really care too much about whether or not they actually own their tuxedo. If he’s not particularly obsessed with fashion, he’ll probably be glad to rent something nice and return it afterwards. You can outfit him in style when you choose to rent instead of buying. Good tuxedos are actually incredibly expensive.

Make Your Own Invitations And Wedding Favours – Many women enjoy making crafts – they watch Martha Stewart and other skilled crafters and feel inspired. Today, there are ways to get a completely charming and polished result when you make wedding invites, place cards, menus, and wedding favours yourself.

Scrap booking stores will usually have everything you need to do the job yourself. You can use stencils, pretty colored card paper, and stick-on embellishments, such as tiny “crystals”, to make your work look really special. If you’re seriously into crafting, consider investing in a die cast personal cutting machine, such as a Cricut. This type of computerized device can be loaded with cartridges that include pretty borders, letters, hearts, flowers, or whatever you can dream up! Then, you just feed in the paper and the machine creates perfect cutouts.

Choosing a cartridge with a wedding theme can be a great way to make your own decorations, wedding invitations and wedding favours, If you really like making crafts, a machine like this will pay for itself in terms of the pleasure it brings you through the years. It can definitely save you money as you prepare for your wedding.

Keep Things A Little Less Formal –

in general, the more formal and elaborate a wedding is, the more it will cost to plan it and to carry out that plan. By loosening up your wedding ceremony (or perhaps your reception) and keeping it more casual, you can be more creative with cost-saving techniques.

Food will be a huge expense at your wedding, so consider sharing some of the work with your caterer – perhaps the caterer could provide entrees, and you could prepare side dishes, salads, and other foodstuffs yourself. If you’re planning something fun like a beach wedding, consider outdoor grilling and buy great cuts of meat wholesale. Then, hire a cook or chef to take care of things while you celebrate. Look for recipes that are glamorous and high-impact, but don’t contain pricey ingredients. Be a frugal gourmet to save money as you feed your guests.

 

Brides-to-be who follow these smart tips and use their ingenuity to plan a cheaper wedding can reward themselves by choosing the wedding dresses they’ve always dreamed of wearing.

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Wedding Invitations: DIY or Shop-Bought?

Making your own wedding invitations is a great idea – that is if you have the time to spend poring over every detail for 200 invitations. But if you have only 50 guests, the idea is feasible. But there are lovely ready-made invitations of all designs, sizes, and colors that can change your mind about making your own invitations. So what should you do now?

wedding invitations

The DIY Option

Bridal couples who worked on their own elegant wedding invitations deserve awards for their industriousness and perseverance. Why? Preparing the invitations or working on each card lovingly takes time and there are a hundred things to do apart from slaving over these invitations. There is the shopping for bridal dress, the groom’s and his best men’s tuxedos, the bridesmaid dresses, mother of the bride/groom dresses, and choosing the venue, menu and music to do.

If you are bent on making your own invitations is popular way to save money. You can save as much as $100 for 200 invitations. There are online step-by-step tutorials that can show how to do beautiful handmade wedding invitations using rubber stamps or DIY invitation kits. To solve the time issue, use desktop publishing and le the local copy shop make several copies, and cut and fold the invitations.

But before anything else, go over designs you want copied or create your own personalized wedding invitations. You can use different materials for your invitation or even take your own snapshots and convert this into a nice invitation with the elegant printing at the back of the picture. For more ideas for your invitation, check out wedding sites online BUT if you can’t come up with an idea or if you have no time at all, choose from the countless designs for wedding invitations to suit your wedding theme.

wedding ivites

The Ready-Made Option

You cannot expect to have unique invitations if you buy these from bridal shops YET you can personalize the invitation to make it truly your own. Bridal shops have a stock of ideas for personalized wedding invitations for the discerning taste and offer a complete range of exquisite cards and envelopes. This gives you the flexibility to mix and match or get a coordinated look for your invitations.

With an assortment of invitations available, it is convenient to select one that conveys your thoughts, and tastes as well as the wedding style. All information – wedding couple, wedding host, wedding date and time and location of the ceremony and a brief note about the wedding reception are indicated in the invitation. You work it out with the bridal shop to get the right information down to pat and you can ask for a sample copy before finalizing the printing of the set.

The envelope is another detail. The invitations have two envelopes. The inner envelope is a sort of protective cover. This is enhanced with colored lines to reinforce your wedding color. The outer envelope is the mailing envelope. This contains the return address just in case there are undeliverable addresses. When you order these invitations, these are delivered after a week and after you have approved of everything and checked that spelling of names and other information are correct.

Your Choice

DIY or shop-bought wedding invitations? That’s your choice. Both have its pros and cons but if you want more time to do other wedding preparations, the smart choice is ordering your invitations.

Don’t forget to look at the selection of wedding invitations when shopping for wedding dresses or plus size wedding dresses and mother of the bride dresses. Visit BestforBride.com today for your bridal needs.

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Two Fun Ideas for Beach Wedding Invitations

There are times in a soon-to-be-bride’s life when quirkier wedding invitations are desired. By quirkier, we mean less conventional than the paper invitations that are sent out by the millions every year by couples across the country. Sure, they look very attractive but very common, too.

So, to make your wedding interesting from the onset, why not opt for either of these two fun ideas for invitations to your wedding?

wedding invitation

Message in a Bottle

If you have ever picked up a bottle on the beach with a message written on a piece of paper, you may have appreciated the romantic idea. Well, now, you can recreate the magic you felt by sending out message in a bottle wedding invitations!

You can either have a wedding store make these bottled invitations for you to save time or you can make these fun invitations yourself to save money. Whatever your choice, keep to the theme of a beach wedding by injecting touches of the sun, sand and sea.

Think of placing colored sand to match your color motif, little seashells to match those in your cake, starfishes to reflect your starry-eyed state of happiness and even small water balls to represent the sea. This way, you can evoke the beach-y mood to your wedding guests through these unique wedding invites.

If you decide to make them on your own, remember a few things. First, make sure that you have a pull mechanism to allow the paper to come out of the box easily. You don’t want your wedding invitation recipients to go fishing on dry land or hammering on glass to get to the paper. Even a simple strip of ribbon attached to the paper will do the trick.

wedding invitations

Second, think of shipping costs. Try to keep the weight to a minimum, say, by placing just a half-inch of sand so as to save on costs. Besides, you want your wedding invitations to be evocative of the beach, not mess up your guests’ tables with sand!

Flip Flops in a Shoebox

Well, flip flops are great beachwear so why not turn them into unique wedding invites? These might be the easiest invitations in a beach-themed wedding because you just need two basic things: a pair of flip flops and a piece of paper with the invitation words.

For more flair, you can always place the flip flops in a customized shoe box. Of course, this will add up costs per se but then again, you will have wedding invitations that double as wedding favors. Ultimately, you can save money from double duty wedding items!

And your guests will appreciate your thoughtfulness since they can use the flip flops on the beach. Whoever says that wedding favours have to be for display purposes only must have never attended a beach wedding where flip flops are the wedding invites and favors rolled into one.

Truly, when it comes to wedding invitations, you are only limited by the power of your imagination. So, veer away from all-paper wedding invites and start thinking of bottles and flip flops beyond their utilitarian functions.

BestforBride.com has the best selections of mother of the bride dresses and wedding dresses in Toronto as well as wedding invitations that can be customized to your beach wedding.