Today I thought I'd share some of my favorite planning resources. They're the books, sites and magazines I use to stay on track or just play around.
I call this one The Book. I'm kind of fanatical about it. It's my cult leader and my #1 pick for books you must buy. It has very helpful worksheets for planning and lots of checklists. I especially like the lists of questions to ask each vendor. It really tells you what to look for and what to watch out for. You can record all your relevant information here too and it has a list of when you should get each item done - something you can also find on The Knot's website, but I like the pen and ink version better. As I said, highly recommended.
This is a pretty good book too. It's smaller and easier to carry around. But honestly, since I got The Book, I've barely looked at this one.
This is a repeat from a previous blog post but worth mentioning again. This embarrassing book is really great. If you have a year like I do, you could use this book for six months and see where you get. Then decide if you want to hire a personal trainer. One thing about the book though - I'm lucky because my gym has most of the equipment it requires, but if you don't have that, you may need an exercise ball, hand weights and ankle weights, as well as something that works as a weight bench.
As far as blogs go, Style Me Pretty is lovely. They have all sorts of photos of weddings you can aspire to recreate in your own way. At first, I used this blog a lot. You can make your own inspiration boards here. But eventually, I found a better way. (See next suggestion.) However, lately I've been using this to see weddings in my area and find out who the vendors were - photographers, etc. It's a great way to find good people. I would recommend doing it by search though and going through individual posts. I did not find that their "Little Black Book" had the best options.
Now if you want to make an inspiration board, Pinterest is the place to be. You can make separate boards for everything - a board for dresses, flowers, bridesmaids, grooms, etc. And there are so many resources there. You can look at the photos everyone is "pinning" and then "repin" them to your own boards. You can also "pin" something from any site (like Style Me Pretty) to your board by adding a "Pin It" button to your Bookmark bar in any browser (it's really easy to do.) You follow certain people and certain boards, but you can search everyone's board and sort by categories. One category is "Weddings and Events." I really like this site. There's new stuff all the time. Eventually, I made a mood board on Photoshop pulling from each of my Pinterest boards.
Now I could definitely recommend some magazines and maybe I'll list them at the end, but I've found the iPad apps for a few magazines to be really fun. The Knot has one - the upside is that you don't have to carry around the giant Knot magazine. The downside is that it takes awhile to download. The magazine is cool because you can interact with it more, for example you can tap to find prices on most things, and you can also save certain things to look at again later.
Brides also has an iPad app that's pretty fun to play with - also slow to download. I don't think I ever get very great information from either of these apps though - they're more for browsing.
Honorable mentions:
Martha Stewart - Her magazines and her site are awesome. They're very DIY though and since I'm going with a more full-service place, there's only so much information I can use here. But I love browsing them especially for ideas on favors and welcome baskets. Martha knows how to treat a guest.
The Knot Local - The Knot puts out local magazines for certain states and areas. They're a little hard to hunt down (try Amazon but be prepared to pay shipping) but worth it in the end. At the very least, you'll get vendor information.
Real Simple Weddings - I just kind of love Real Simple in general. I don't think this is a series of magazines, though I could be wrong, but I liked looking through it. No new information though really.
Hope this helps anyone looking for reading material. Happy planning!
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