Wedding Planning Panel Event TODAY

You may want to check out the real wedding inspiration and tips event at Lion in the Sun today from 7-9pm. There will be a wedding planning panel with Vane from Brooklyn Bride, Sarah from Brilliant Event Planning, Xochtil from Always a Blogsmaid and Loren from Naturally Delicious. Guests at the event will receive a 10% off coupon on their future purchase at Lion in the Sun and if you hire Naturally Delicious to cater your wedding you’ll receive 10% off your menu if you book by the end of the year. Lion in the Sun is located at 232 7th Avenue.  For more information...http://from-i-will-to-i-do.blogspot.com/2009/10/real-wedding-inspiration-and-event.html

Designer Wedding Dresses at Affordable Prices

Your wedding date has been decided, you want to look like a princess, but you do not want to spend a fortune. Every little girl dreams of her wedding day. Unfortunately not all brides or their families have thousands of pounds to spend. But you do not need an expensive dress to be the .....http://www.weddinguru.us/wedding-dress/designer-wedding-dresses-at-affordable-prices/

My Fair Wedding” starring David Tutera airs Sundays at 10/9C on WeTV

Wedding Salon November 2nd @ The Roosevelt Hotel

Check out some video clips of past events http://weddingsalon.com/video.cfm?show=NY   This is the place to be if your planning a wedding.

I do Weddings Course

presents:

I do Weddings Course Begins January 16, 2010

Learn how to Become a Wedding Planner

Meets 6 Saturdays 12-2 pm, Onsite, Midtown, NYC

$325 Prepayment required

We will be taking registration until November 24, 2009

Wedding Day Coordinator @ WedNDay.com 646-246-1922

20 Wedding Do's and Don't

1. Don’t make bridesmaids wear dresses that don’t want to wear
2. Don’t go over the top with hair and make-up – keep it timeless, look to the red carpet for inspirations
3. Do a test hairstyle with your gown on
4. Don’t get a veil that overwhelms your dress, your veil should compliment the dress not overpower it
5. Don’t have uniform bridesmaids dresses – choose different style options that flatter their bodies. If you are having a black & white wedding have them wear their sexiest black dress. You could choose the colors and fabric and then let the women pick their style. Think of your bridal processional as a fashion runway.
6. Don’t over spend on your wedding dress. Average cost of a wedding dress should be 10% of your total budget. Check out ebay.com and sample sales to save money. When your body is amazing you can wear anything therefore you may want to hit the gym. (A $15k wedding dress and a cash bar is a big NO NO)
7. Don’t rent a Tux instead buy a great black, navy suit, tailor to your body – Men’s Wear House, Department Stores offers affordable tuxedos for purchase
8. Don’t have the groom and groomsmen wear top hat, scarves and colored vest
9. Don’t upstage the bride if you are guest. Don’t be scared to call the bride and ask her if your outfit will be appropriate.
10. Don’t feel like you need to wear a tiara just because it is your wedding day unless the jewelry is real. Consider a headband that could also be used as a necklace.
11. Don’t over do it with getting a sun tan
12. Don’t pick identical hair styles for your bridesmaids instead work their individual style.
13. Don’t look to trendy instead look timeless because you do not want yourself to be dated when you look back at your pictures. Think about how your picture will look in twenty years.
14. Don’t wear white to the wedding if you are a guest
15. Do schedule your hair cut at least one week if you are a groom just in case there are mistakes.
16. Do not get a facial the day before your wedding
17. Do consider comfort when selecting your wedding dress and shoes
18. Don’t do crash diets. The average weight loss is 1-2 pounds per week.
19. Don’t drink too much because you want to remember every single moment of your special day, drink lots of water, and eat. Your want your wedding to be a joy not a joke.
20. Do look like yourself and be yourself: remember it’s Your Day – Your Way

Thriller Wedding

In Style Celebrity Weddings

Nia singing Can't Hide Love by Earth Wind and Fire at age 4

Funny wedding vows.

Black man gets excited at wedding - moved by the spirit!

10 Tips to Hiring a Wedding Planner

By Faith Walker If you are in the market to hire a wedding consultant, here are ten helpful tips that can guide you through the process of obtaining a profesisonal wedding consultant.

1. Find out exactly what a wedding planner does do your homework.
2. Find the names of the reputable wedding planners in your area.
3. Make a list of things you would like the wedding planner to do. If you want to plan the entire wedding, but you want the planner to direct the ceremony and reception, then you should utilize the service of a wedding planner for Day of services only.
4. Make sure your budget is relative to the type of service you would like. Most wedding planners are willing to work with you for an allotted amount of time if you are unable to purchase a package. Check with him/her to find out if they charge and hourly rate.
5. Find out if your church requires you use their wedding coordinator. Many churches now require that for the protection of the churches property, that brides must use their wedding coordinator. This doesnt mean that coordinator will work at your reception; it means you may have to hire another consultant to do your reception.
6. Check with several bridal associations and see what their members must do to become certified. Find out what classes if any your wedding consultants have taken to become certified or how many years of experience they have had in doing weddings. If they arent that experienced, will they provide you with a discounted rate in exchange for a testimonial.
7. Ask for and check references. It is so important that the wedding planner live up to the expectations of the bride. A good testimonial from a bride is crucial to the consultants business. Check references and find out how the wedding consultant was able to handle stressful situations and how well the wedding guests were treated during the event.
8. Skinny down your list and invite at least three wedding planners for face-to-face interviews. Almost all wedding planners offer free initial consultations so take advantage of this meeting and get to know your potential wedding planner.
9. Ask for a face-to-face interview, dont just price shop. Some wedding planners dont like to give quotes over the phone. You are shopping not only for a service, but a personality. It is crucial to give your business to someone who understands what you are looking for in your vision.
10. Check to see if the wedding planner youve selected is affiliated with any Bridal Planning Association. Not only do you want your planner to be well connected, but you also want her to be in good standing and have a great rapport with any professional associations. Some wedding planners have won awards, and it is nice to be able to see this on a professional website as a sample of their work.

Taming the Runaway Wedding Planner

By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

SAYING “I do” to a wedding planner can be the second most important vow a newly engaged couple makes.

With people marrying later, more women working and weddings growing ever splashier, many couples are hiring planners to help sort through the dizzying choices concerning the location, invitations, flowers, photographers, color schemes, D.J.’s, bands, lighting, place cards, centerpieces, cakes and fog machines, to name a dozen.

But as the wedding planning field expands, some couples are finding that planners, like a broken engagement, can cause heartache.

David Mandel of Los Angeles, an executive producer of the HBO program “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and his bride, Dr. Rebecca Whitney, hired and dismissed two consultants because they were “planzillas.”

“It was like we had this mutual enemy — our wedding planner,” Mr. Mandel recalled. “We were not sleeping well. It was beyond miserable.”

The first, who Mr. Mandel said was “very well known in Los Angeles,” dropped out of sight for a month after the first meeting with the couple. The second tried to steer them to a hotel in Palm Springs with which she frequently did business.

The proposed wedding approached $1 million, “hundreds of thousands of dollars more than we originally thought,” Mr. Mandel said. “She was getting 20 percent of whatever our wedding was going to cost, so she was negotiating in her best interest, not ours.”

Finally, Mr. Mandel and his bride, a pediatrician, found a third planner they liked. They were happily wed last New Year’s Eve in New York, at Cipriani 42nd Street.

The couple’s experience was not all that rare, as even some wedding planners acknowledge.
“I’ve been doing this my whole life, long enough to know that some of us in this business are a little full of ourselves,” said Marcy Blum, a New York planner who got in on the ground floor of the field in 1986, when the number of planners nationwide was fewer than a thousand.

“In fact,” she said, “a lot of wedding planners are entering the field with no training, so buyer beware.”

The average cost of a wedding is now $27,852, Condé Nast Bridal Media says. Typically, the planner — there are about 10,000 in the United States, according to Gerard J. Monaghan, a founder of the Association of Bridal Consultants — receives about 20 percent of the total. Others charge a flat fee, from several hundred dollars to as much as $100,000.

Selecting a planner, or as they often prefer to be called, a wedding coordinator, can be tricky, especially if just what she or he can bring to the banquet table is not spelled out.

“A couple should sit down with a planner before hiring that person and ask a lot of questions,” said Leslie Price, an owner of In Any Event in New York. “Both sides need to fully understand each other’s expectations.”

Many couples use planners because they want to avoid the headache of directing an event that can quickly metamorphose into something along the lines of a major awards show.

Jacqueline C. Gordon, a homemaker in Derwood, Md., grew tired of the “checking and re-checking” of “every little thing” when her first daughter married. So, for her second daughter’s wedding, she hired a planner, and, as a result, she said, “I basically showed up.”

But the experience of Jennifer Rudin and Glen Pearson was far different. “We just didn’t connect with our planner on any level,” said the bride, the director of casting and talent development at Disney Theatrical Productions in New York.

The couple, who were married in September 2005 at the Ritz-Carlton, Huntington Hotel and Spa in Pasadena, Calif., said the hotel required a planner, and recommended one. The couple say they sat with her in a bar at the hotel and flicked through photos of other people’s weddings, while she pitched themes (Hawaiian? Italian?), colored margaritas and her brother, the fantastic wedding photographer.

“It was always about her,” Ms. Rudin Pearson said, “never about us.” In the end they dropped that planner and chose one of their own.

Jill Hilts, the director of catering sales at the Ritz, said that she “is not aware of anybody who has ever had a complaint” about a planner on its recommended list. She said that the Ritz is vast, with 23 acres of gardens where weddings take place, and therefore, she said: “It is not possible for one individual to properly service a wedding here. It takes a team of professionals to assist one of our coordinators.”

Wedding experts say that planners are playing an increasingly large role in the marital-industrial complex.

“The idea of wedding planning has really existed for over 100 years,” said Maria McBride, the wedding style director for Brides magazine. “Affluent families always hired a social director to plan all of their affairs.

“We saw the wedding planner trend emerge again in the 1980s when the stock market and economy were soaring. By 1992, the wedding planner had exploded into its own niche business.”
Wedding planners say that their clients are vulnerable. They are often starry-eyed, eager to impress, young and clueless about the business.

That is why, industry experts say, couples need to enlist the help of planners who work for a flat fee and excel in negotiating contracts with event spaces of the couple’s own choosing. Antonia van der Meer, the editor in chief of Modern Bride magazine, said, “Good planners should pay for themselves.”

Laura Chavis, a planner in New York, said she deals with the managers of 50 wedding sites across the metropolitan area, including castles, lofts, bars and country clubs.

She passes all discounts to her clients, she said, and never accepts a finder’s fee. But not all planners work like that. Mr. Monaghan of the consultants association, a trade group with 3,800 members (up from one in 1981) based in New Milford, Conn., said his organization ejected a woman a few years ago for taking kickbacks from a limousine driver. “That’s a no-no,” he said.

One wedding trend is enlisting the help of a “day-of”’ planner, www.WedNDay.com which costs much less than a full-scale coordinator, usually a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The couple makes all the arrangements and then deputizes the planner to run everything on the actual wedding day, like checking traffic reports, alphabetizing escort cards and making sure the band doesn’t play “Louie, Louie,” or at least not too loudly.

BUSINESSES like Wedding One are another option. It is a one-stop wedding shop that opened in Flushing, Queens, 12 years ago, mostly serving Korean-American couples. Wedding One has a dress shop, beauty salon, floral studio, photo studio and consultants who can book D.J.’s, videographers and just about anything else. Branches now operate in SoHo, Fort Lee, N.J., and Los Angeles.

“My needs were pretty simple and everything was in one place,” said Dina Lim, a child psychiatrist in San Diego who married with the help of Wedding One in June 2005 in Central Park. “I didn’t want to complicate things with a planner.” Neither did David Mandel. “Weddings are a stressful enough time,” he said. “So my advice to people getting married is to find a planner who wants to put together your wedding, not theirs.”

Spiritual Love in the ATL: Robert Gray and Keisha Williams’s engagement

Check out their engagement at

http://www.photosbyknight.com/gray/

How early should I book my photographer? by www.windauphotography.com

Top Questions from Brides....

How early should I book my photographer?

Of all the items on your to-do list, selecting a photographer should be right at the top. Ideally you should start your search as soon as you have set your wedding date. Many of my clients consider the photographer selection, along with the choice of the wedding location, the most important decisions during the process of planning their wedding. Besides of course the choice of who you should marry ;o).

Once you have decided on a photographer, you should hire them as soon as possible. More than once I have had to disappoint a potential client after they waited too long to get back to me after our meeting. I often get several inquiries for special days (such as 08/08/08), and while I do give priority to the couple I meet with first, they're not necessarily the couple who makes the fastest decision!

Having said that, the reality of the time frame between getting hired for a wedding and actually photographing it varies dramatically. I have been hired as early as two years (and as late as one day!) before the wedding. Usually most clients hire me 10-14 months before their wedding date.

Something else to keep in mind: The cost of operating a successful photography business is increasing every year. If your photographer is successful and his business is growing like mine, it is likely that pricing will increase during the time you are planning your wedding.

So one other good reason to hire your photographer early is to save money. If you have locked the fee by signing a contract early enough, you will not be affected by any increases to the price list.

All the best, Jörg Windau
Windau Photography
Email:jorg@windauphotography.com
Phone: 212-781-8178
Web: www.windauphotography.com

Why Hire A Wedding Coordinator