Wedding Help

Green weddings interest me. I hadn’t heard much about them when I was planning my wedding, but now it seems as though I’m hearing about them everywhere! It seems couples everywhere are getting in on the idea to plan their wedding details in a way that isn’t going to be harmful to the environment. When I first started researching this idea, I thought that it would be really difficult to plan a green wedding, because your options for decorating might be limited, or it might be really expensive to plan a true green wedding. But a good portion of my ideas were way wrong. It happens that way sometimes I suppose. But this morning I started researching how to create a menu for your wedding that is earth-friendly to keep in line with my current series on tips and tricks for planning green weddings. I found lots of great ideas for earth-friendly menus for your wedding, so if you need help, here is a great place to start.

Creating an Organic Menu

Even couples who are not planning green weddings are wanting to eat healthier, and are thus looking to include more organic foods into their menus.

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Tags: green wedding, Green Weddings, organic wedding menus, organic weddings

To me, there’s nothing like a spring or summer wedding on a beautiful warm day with new blooming flowers and romance in the air. In fact, many other couples agree and want to have their weddings in the spring and summer months. There’s just something about the newness of spring and the beauty of the wild life coming back after a cold winter that makes spring that much more enjoyable. As I’ve mentioned before, there are so many different ways for you to decorate your wedding in the spring or summer that can not only be decorations, but a celebration of the season. One of those decorations that I’ve mentioned is fruit. Now you’re thinking, Sarah you’re crazy, what can you do with fruit? The answer is plenty! Here are some great examples of wedding decorations with fruit.

Submerged Fruit in Water

What a fresh and trendy potential wedding centerpiece! Just grab a bunch of lemons and limes, cut them in half and submerge them in water in a big beautiful vase. The lemons and limes will keep their vibrant color and will make a beautiful centerpiece. Any size or shape of vase will work wonderfully.

Submerged Fruit with Candles or Flowers

Another twist that you can add to the option above is to place some floating candles in the water above the fruit to add a romantic glow to your wedding reception tables. If you are not able to use candles in your wedding reception, then consider filling the vases only half full of fruit and water, and then placing a small bouquet of colorful flowers in the vase as well. I’ve seen this done before and the effect is beautiful. If you are on a tight budget, then use a vase with a wider mouth, with just a few blooms on top of the water to float. This is a truly elegant and beautiful centerpiece.

Fruit Tower Centerpieces

Another fun idea for using fruit in your wedding decorations are some fruit towers. I’m not sure of the specific name of them, but they are basically a tower of stacked fruit which sits on a flower pot vase of some kind. From what I understand, they are pretty easy to make, and you can find lots of great instructions for making them on the internet.

These are a great way to add some color and height to your reception centerpieces as well. Fruit is a beautiful and inexpensive choice for wedding centerpieces. I’ve only mentioned using lemons and limes, but you can also use oranges, grapes and whole pineapples to help create the beautiful wedding look that you are going for. If you’ve used fruit before in decorating, or have seen a particular wedding centerpiece done with fruit that you loved, then please comment and let me know about it!

Tags: fruit wedding decorations, wedding decorations, wedding decorations with fruit, wedding reception decorations

There are typically several different wedding speeches given throughout the wedding reception. These wedding speeches can include the father of the bride, the maid of honor, the best man, and any other family members or friends who would like to get up and give their well-wishes to the newly married company. While some members of your family and friends may want to give heart felt and totally serious wedding speeches, there are others that will feel more comfortable giving funny wedding speeches followed by something a little more serious. Funny wedding speeches are a great way to liven up the mood at the wedding reception, and to get everyone involved in enjoying the wedding speeches that are taking place. If you are looking at having to give a wedding speech in the near future, and are looking at some funny wedding speeches for some ideas, then here are some basic steps to take and places where you should think twice about going.

What to Look for in Funny Wedding Speeches

To help you create some jokes for some great wedding speeches, you’ll find the Internet to be a great resource. You can find some great one-liners on the Internet that can make a great opener for your wedding speech. Also, you can think back a little ways when you remember how the bride and groom met, or other funny stories during their dating lives about when you knew they were made for each other. Another idea is to find a little poem that is meant for weddings and has some humor about married life.

Funny Wedding Speeches - What to Avoid

While some jokes and material you may come up with for your wedding speech may sound funny to you, be sure to consider the total audience you will be speaking to at the wedding. Make sure that any material you come up with will not be offensive to parents, grandparents, and will not have to be censored from small children. You get my drift here. Embarrassing stories are another thing you may want to be careful with. The last thing you want to do is to humiliate the bride and groom on their wedding day in front of all their friends and family - on the most important day of their lives thus far. Stay away from anything that could cause a fight between the bride and the groom, such as the romantic past of the bride and groom, or secrets they may not know about each other. Also, if you can at all help it, try to stay away from inside jokes that only you and the bride or groom will understand or you’ll alienate your audience.

One thing you need to remember about putting together some funny wedding speeches is that you don’t want your whole speech to have people rolling. A few openers and jokes in the beginning are fine, but at some point near the end you’ll need to get serious about wishing the bride and groom good luck in their new lives together. Let them know how much they mean to you, and how much you look forward to the good times ahead. These simple hints for keeping your funny wedding speech under control can help you to really do honor to the bride and groom on their wedding day. For more tips and ideas on wedding speeches and jokes, check out my previous articles, Best Man Speeches and Maid of Honor Speeches.

Tags: funny wedding speeches, wedding speech, wedding speeches

One way that many couples choose to decorate their wedding ceremony is through the use of a wedding arch. I’m sure we’ve all seen pictures of wedding arches adorned with flowers and greenery, or tulle and lights, and you know that the effect that the wedding arch has on the wedding ceremony.  Wedding arches can be simple and romantic, or beautiful and elegant depending on the kind of decorations you use and the kind of wedding ceremony that you want to have. Plus, wedding arches can be rented rather cheaply and can be an inexpensive way to add decoration to your wedding ceremony without breaking the budget. Wedding arches look great in nearly every kind of wedding ceremony, whether you are planning a beach wedding, an outdoor wedding as well as church weddings. Here are some different ways to decorate wedding arches to help complete  your wedding look as well as creating a great wedding ceremony decoration.

Decorate Your Wedding Arch Using Tulle

Tulle is one of the best wedding decorations around. You can buy it at any fabric store for about a dollar a yard, and weave it in and out of your wedding arch to help create the look you are wanting.  For a more dramatic look, buy some fake greenery or flowers from a craft store and arrange them around the tulle. Many Christmas weddings using wedding arches use tulle and white Christmas lights for a soft glow. This is a great way to decorate your wedding arch without having to spend a lot of money.

Decorate Your Wedding Arch Using Flowers 

Another way that many brides decorate their wedding arches is to adorn them with real fragrant flowers. Many people choose to use their florist for this, though the end result can cost you a lot of money. If you’re any good at doing stuff like that by yourself (which I am not), then order the flowers yourself and decorate your own arch. Though you might want to try it with some silk flowers before trying to work with real ones so that you can get a feel for what you’re doing before it’s time for the real thing.

Decorate a Part of your Wedding Arch 

Another great way to save some cash and still have a beautiful wedding arch is to only decorate the top of your arch - perhaps by weaving a few branches or flowers into the top. This is a simple look that can be really beautiful, your wedding florist should be able to help with that.

Wedding arches can be a beautiful addition to your wedding. They’re not for every wedding though, so be sure it fits with your wedding ceremony location before you plunk down the money for one.

Tags: decorating wedding arches, wedding arch, wedding arches

For many brides out there, most of their time and effort goes into creating the perfect wedding reception. That includes an excellent menu with elegant wedding reception decorations, wedding favors that are made to impress, and of course, the right wedding reception music to help set the mood and create the feel you’ve been looking for when planning your wedding reception. The right wedding reception music can help to put people at ease, get them excited, and make them fall in love again. Music just seems to have that effect on people. There are several ways that you can use to pump that wedding reception music into your reception venue. Granted, with those different methods of getting your music out, there are also numerous price differences between each one of these options. So be sure to check and see what your wedding budget will allow before choosing which venue to go with to get your wedding reception music done.

Wedding Reception Music - Hiring a DJ

Hiring a DJ is probably the most popular way to get your wedding reception music taken care of. They can typically be hired for a (high) hourly fee, but they have a huge selection of songs that you can use to help make your wedding reception music something you’ve always dreamed of. If you’re having a dance floor, this is probably the best route to take, as you’ll probably need a live person to choose the songs that you can dance to. Be sure to talk to the DJ before the wedding and give him a list of songs that you absolutely positively do NOT want as part of your wedding reception music, such as any offensive songs, the YMCA song, anything like that. Hiring a DJ can be an expensive proposition to have a way to play your wedding reception music, but you will know that the songs will be taken care of.

Wedding Reception Music - Hiring a Wedding Singer/Band/String Quartet

Personally, I’ve never seen one of these at a wedding, though I do know that bands and wedding singers can be hired to provide some great wedding reception music. A live band may give off some great sounds, but again, you could be looking at a huge hourly bill to pay the singer and everyone in the band. Also, another bad thing about having a live band is the noise. It could be hard for your guests to have a private, intimate conversation if they have to yell over your loud live music wedding reception music. If you are hiring a string quartet, you won’t have to worry about the loud noise that your guests can’t talk over, but be sure to check their prices.

Wedding Reception Music - Rigging Your Own

Perhaps the most economical way to arrange your wedding reception music is to take care of it yourself. Hook up your Ipod or computer play list to some speakers placed strategically around the room, and set the volume that you want. This option works best with a wedding reception without a dance floor, as you can’t control which songs will be played at a particular time. But this option will provide you with exactly the kind of wedding reception music that you want to help create your perfect day, and the only cost you may have is buying and downloading songs, and renting speakers if you don’t have your own.

Wedding reception music can be tricky. In most cases it needs to be economical, functional to your wedding reception music needs, and to set off the mood that you want your wedding reception to have. So be prudent in choosing what kind of wedding reception to have, as well as how you want to get your wedding reception music out.

Tags: wedding dj, Wedding Music, Wedding Reception, wedding reception music