Andrew and I got engaged December 6^th, so taking the advice of some already married friends, we kicked back and enjoyed the holidays completely, no wedding planning what so ever. Then February rolled around, and we realized with angst – places are booking up! We feverishly got to work on all of the big items, researching all of our options. Thank god for my mom, who drove all over Milwaukee for us to check places out, while we sat in Baltimore waiting for picture updates!

As much as possible, I have wanted to incorporate sparkly gold into the day because it screams celebration! I found these fun personalized hangers on Etsy to ask my best friends to by my bridesmaids, along with a bottle of champagne of course! It was a really sweet moment, asking them to be a part of our day.

Searching for someone to capture the pictures and videos of our wedding has easily taken up the most amount of planning time. We are spending all of this time planning our wedding and I want to be able to remember as much of it as possible and relive the day again! So it’s a big decision. And a BIG expense. No one had warned us. I’m warning you, you could get all the bells and whistles of a photography package. Or you could buy a small car. That’s why there is so much research to do! I’m absolutely thrilled because we found an amazing photographer within our “new budget”: Carl at Front Room Photography. While searching through his photos, I came across this one and I was sold – this is all of the fun and excitement we want in our wedding day:

I have probably watched over 60 different wedding videos to try to understand which videographer fits us. Most nights when Andrew was working 3^rd shift while we lived in Baltimore, I would sit down by myself to research videographers, absolutely balling as I watched complete strangers’ exchange vows. I’m not kidding. I have no idea who these couples are, yet I couldn’t stop the tears! It’s pretty crazy. I know I’m not completely alone here, talking to other brides-to-be…We picked Simply Love and couldn’t be happier.

Since you already know I’m into this whole blogging thing, I was definitely excited to create our wedding website. I researched all of the different website options and built a few different websites to try them out before settling with theknot.com. Future brides: it was definitely the easiest to navigate! I loved getting to update the site with information about Andrew and I and also to share some information about “the best city ever”, as I like to claim, since a lot of our party will be traveling from Ohio or California.

We did something a little unconventional with our save the dates and decided to send them online using Paperless Post. This turned out to be an awesome choice! It was so easy to put the invite together, using a picture I took of Baltimore, and almost free to send out. The best part about it was getting responses back immediately from people we invited – it was so fun to hear back from everyone via email sharing their excitement! You can do a quick email upload of all of the email addresses and names and you are good to go. Another benefit was that we could include a link for people to go right to our wedding website with all of the details.

We are finally entering the arena of decisions that Andrew can get excited about – like cake tastings!

But now even the frosting-lover himself, has admitted to being cupcaked-out. We ultimately settled on the salted caramel cupcake below from Delicately Delicious.

Next week, the wedding invitations are going out – it’s getting more and more official each day!

And now I’m in to Santa Barbara with my sister, mom, and best friends to celebrate my last few days as a bachelorette!! We’ll be wine tasting and trying not to worry about the trouble Andrew and his groomsmen could be getting into for his bachelor party in New Orleans this weekend…Hopefully they just enjoy some of the street music :)

To see more of our wedding details, you can find more posts I’ve written here!