During the holidays I am sure you will attend quite a few family gatherings.  Use this as an opportunity to discuss who needs to be on your guest list so that you can have a ball park of guests for your budget planning.  Also take this opportunity to gather addresses. You will probably see family members that you have a tough time getting in contact with through the year.  Your parents will have their address book handy with names and addresses.

I am sure we all have family members that have done some event planning on the side or even DJ on the weekends, but it is important to make sure you hire professionals for your big event. Let me tell you why, they will be EXPERIENCED. Chances are they work several times a year on several events. They will have the experience needed to make sure they can tackle any unforseen incidents or have a back up plan when things can go wrong. They will have a slew of options for you to make your day special and unique.

Instead of using your family and friends for day of resources, ask them for recommendations on past professionals they have used in the past that have done a great job. Let them sit back and enjoy your event!

I cannot stress this enough. The event will only be what you imagined if you make it personal and unique to you and your style. Yes peruse blogs and magazines for inspiration, but take it just for that, inspiration. Start with a vision/inspiration board that is close to what you would like to have, then close your eyes and imagine in the perfect world what your event would look like. Would the flower choices be the same? Would the colors be the same?

Maybe you have saved pictures from the wedding you have seen on Southern Weddings or Weddings Unveiled, what elements would you like to keep and what could be changed to represent your persona?

I wish I knew how to sketch (actually I think I may take a course), I would love to sketch each phase of the planning process for my clients then later frame that for keepsakes. If you can sketch think about jotting down some ideas and drawings on paper and sit back and watch it come to life.

At one of our recent weddings, the bride gave her locket with a picture of her deceased father to her florist for him to secure down the aisle so that her father would be present on her wedding day. The bouquets were beautiful when they arrived but the locket was LOST! Our bride was completely heart broken. We were able to save the day with an alternative but our client was devastated, even if only for a minute.

Here are some tips to make sure this does not happen to you:

• Give your valuables such as heirlooms to your wedding planner. They will have the goods needed to get the job done and will make sure that it gets back in the hands
• Have multiple options of including loved ones during your special moment
• If you must drop these things off to other vendors, discuss what reprecautions there may be in case of an incident such as above

Dropping off those beautiful invites to the post office is not the end of it. Unfortunately there is another MAJOR step involved. You will need to ask them to hand cancel your invites.

What is hand canceling exactly?

Hand canceling is when a manual stamp is placed on your envelope to show that it was actually processed by the post office. The reason you want to go this route is to prevent any marking or tearing that can occur from the mechanical processing of the envelopes.

Chances are your local friendly post office personnel will not want to do this process your envelopes for you (even if they promise to do this chances are the minute you hit the door they will be headed for the machine). To avoid this possible poor treatment of your paper lovelies, ask for the stamp and hand cancel them yourselves.

There is an upside to custom photo stamps, since they already come with the barcode they avoid the machine all together and do not need to be hand canceled.

Tiffany from Gourmet Invitations showed a great snapshot of the difference between hand canceled and machine processed.

We are starting a new series here on the blog titled – Tips and Tricks. Here we can share useful findings that may have occured from our previous events from the weekend or just share our observations in general.

One thing I see time and time again are brides not taking their dress out of their bags after they pick it up from the salon. This step is CRUCIAL. If your dress is left in the bag for several days after pick up, there will be wrinkles in your dress that may take hours to remove depending on the length.

If you are living with your Fiance and you do not want to him to see your gown, make arrangements to leave it at a family members house or in a locked room.