Cranky Bride Chronicles Post III: Wedding Planning Tips and Tricks

Now that I've had some time to settle after my own wedding, I thought I'd take the time to take you through the tips and tricks that I picked up along the way with my wedding planning.

I was extremely fortunate to have a wonderful day where all my planning resulted in an amazing day, so to start off with the best advice I can give to any future bride is to make sure that the wedding you plan is what YOU and YOUR HUSBAND TO BE want.

I am going to repeat that one more time, plan the wedding that you and your husband to be want. I can not stress this enough, if you start planning based on what you think everyone else wants you will begin to feel incredibly frustrated and overwhelmed, what the wedding is like really should not matter to anyone else.

Our perfect day - photography by Aubrey Strawberry Photography with my dress made by Chein Noir Dezines

My second tip for wedding planning is getting comfortable with the word "NO".

It is perfectly ok to say NO. Coming back to my my first tip, a lot of my unnecessary wedding planning stress was from people giving me unwanted opinions, the closer we got to our wedding, the more I was comfortable saying no. It's ok to say no to inviting your great Aunty twice removed if your husband to be and yourself do not want to pay for that person at your wedding. You do what you guys need to do so that you have an amazing day with the people you want to celebrate with!

Choose vendors who will help you create your perfect day - photography by Aubrey Strawberry Photography, hair by the Asgard Collective, Makeup by Jaye Marie Makeup and Beauty, Crystal crown from Crystal Eclipse Crowns, veil made by me, jewellery from Swarovski

Tip 3: Choose your vendors based on how you want to create your perfect day.

My husband and I are not very traditional so we went with a whole bunch of vendors who fitted our vision of our perfect day. We spent a lot of time researching to make sure that our vision came to life, we were extremely fortunate in being able to utilise the beautiful gardens of some family friends, Ruth and Matthew. Ruth and Matthew are the absolute sweetest and looked after us so well, ensuring we had everything we needed to make sure our day went off without a hitch, we literally can not thank them enough for all that they did for us.

Your wedding day is one of the most photographed days of your life, make sure you choose quality photographers who will create beautiful lasting memories for you. Make sure you allow enough money in your budget to have a quality photographer.

We were incredibly fortunate to have the amazing Pamela from Aubrey Strawberry Photography capturing all of our staged shots which we will treasure forever. Our wonderful friend Dean Goodwin from Dean Goodwin Photography did an amazing job capturing all of the moments of silliness after everyone started to relax a little post ceremony! Huge thank you to our wonderful best man, Jeff McCarthy of Photos of Art who captured some amazing photos of us as well as surprising us with an amazing framed print for us to remember our amazing day.

Hair and makeup artists - now I'm not just saying this as a hair and makeup artist myself, but you spend so much money on looking your best with your dress/flowers/veil/jewellery please don't forget about hair and makeup. Hair and makeup are such a personal thing, my best tip here is to do your research, have a look at the artist's body of work and their style to make sure you are compatible before booking hair or makeup trials.

My hair and makeup team on my wedding day were amazing and some lovely ladies I'm lucky to call my friends! Huge thank you to Amy from The Asgard Collective for my killer hair, you'd have never known how thin my hair was apart from me just pointing it out! Jaye Marie from Jaye Marie Makeup and Beauty did the most amazing job of creating my super dramatic makeup that was exactly what I wanted, Jaye is such an incredible artist and I knew before we were even engaged that I'd book her for my wedding makeup!

There's so many amazing catering options out there for weddings these days you can literally pick anything! We had a cocktail reception with some more substantial food options in there too, our catering was through Emporess Catering Perth - we can not recommend these guys enough! The food was super tasty and everyone was very well fed, they also left the kitchen amazingly clean and were very reasonably priced. We also had desserts and bar service provided by Delish Ice, they make amazing artisan pops in a wonderful variety of flavours, my personal favourite is the salted malted caramel!

Choosing the right celebrant is important, a lot of our friends and family have been getting married over the last few years so we have been paying attention to what sort of ceremony was conducted and how the ceremony went with the couple. We were married by my good friend, Veronica (Nikki) Mauri. Nikki was amazing, she is such a professional and brought such a warm lovely vibe to our day, her ceremony beautifully captured the sharing of my relationship with my husband in a way that none of the other celebrants we came across could have. I highly recommend that you have a chat to Nikki if you are looking for someone with a bubbly personality who will create a beautiful ceremony.

Last but not least, choosing the right dress should be a wonderful experience, I have another post that will go into this in further detail but a huge thank you must go out to my amazing dress maker, Beata Ridley of Chein Noir Dezines!

Now see the below links for the above mentioned vendors!
Emporess Catering - http://www.emporess.com.au/
Aubrey Strawberry Photography - https://www.aubreystrawberryphotography.com/
Dean Goodwin Photography - http://www.deangoodwin.com.au/
Delish Ice - https://delishice.com.au/
Jaye Marie Makeup and Beauty - https://www.jayemarie.com.au/
The Asgard Collective - https://www.theasgardcollective.com/
Chein Noir Dezines - http://www.cheinnoir.com/
Veronica "Nikki" Mauri - https://www.facebook.com/NikkiMauriMarriageCelebrant/