My site was down all week!

Yup, you read that correctly, my blog has been down for nearly 4 days. It went down Monday afternoon due to a scripting error and it stayed down until just now. To top it off, I lost my entire march-inspiration folder while trying to move it from one computer to another using a thumb drive. I lost scores of images. <sigh> Hopefully I won’t have another week like this, um, ever.

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Image from Style Me Pretty

Luscious and inspirational Biltmore weddings have been featured at Style Me Pretty this week care of Woodward + Rick Photographers in Asheville NC. While a Biltmore wedding is not a budget wedding, there is no denying it, Biltmore weddings are inspirational!

Given my experience with a local student photographer I hired to shoot my NC wedding* I highly recommend that if you are going to splurge on anything, splurge on photography. You can dress up simple food, you can buy a pre-owned wedding dress, you can skip the favors. Every hindsight bride I have talked to who tried to skimp on photos by having family or friends take care of the photography has ended up disappointed. Need proof? Compare the pictures of a company like Woodward + Rick Photographers to amateur wedding pictures on Flickr.

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I love home made food favors. I think the act of making a gift is an intimate and loving gesture from a bride to her guests. Here in the South, cheese straws are a popular, if somewhat old-fashioned, party snack. In November of 2009, Oprah published this new twist on a Southern party favorite. Two or three, wrapped in tissue paper with ribbon on each side and a monogram in the center, these cheese straws would make a delightful favor, especially for a DIY southern bride.

Jam Straws. From Oprah Magazine, November 2009

The recipe from http://www.oprah.com/recipe/omagazine/recipes/200911-omag-recipe-jam-straws is simple enough: (more…)

On March 3rd, 2009  my husband and I got married in Mammoth Lakes, CA. Two months later, we had a second wedding in North Carolina. The amazing thing is that we put together two full weddings for under 5K (perhaps even well under.) That’s right, two weddings for under five thousand dollars! While I still have not added up all of the receipts to get an exact amount, I can tell you this: we did not go into debt, and we planned both weddings during a whirlwind six-month engagement.

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