Choosing a Venue

When you have the ability - or ants in the pants - to begin planning your wedding roughly 2 years in advance, you figure that the venue situation is one that won't need your attention right away, as the vast majority of to-do checklists are for just about one year. However, I can tell you right now that's wrong!!

Your venue is a HUGE part of what you will do on your wedding day (DUH). Bakers may want to incorporate parts of your venue into your cake(s). Caterers will want to know details about location and size of your event. And you can forget trying to talk to a photographer or a florist about plans when you don't know the size of your space or how easy it is to transport gear there.

Don't forget that there are people who have 5 year long engagements either, so you know they've already nailed down venue stuff leaving less room for you and your desired date! Places just book up very fast, especially for Saturday weddings in the summer.

From just after the time we got engaged, I've pictured a church-y wedding. I'm not religious at all, but having majored in religions I just think that churches are incredibly beautiful and sacred regardless of belief. They're an example of our values, the things we hold most dear, and our fears for the future.The fact that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to show which things have importance and really emphasize them is, in this day and age, growing more and more rare and in its own way sacred.

Picking my dress, I wanted something worthy of a church wedding. I wanted something gorgeous and breath taking, but not enough to distract from my beauty or the details in my surroundings. I wanted a fun dress, but one that was appropriate for a special place. I still can't believe we're spending as much money on it as we are, holy crap.

I had a specific location here in Madison, Wisconsin, picked out. It was a synagogue at one point and was moved, to save it from demolition, to a city park. It is just gorgeous itself and on a sunny day it just lights up something fierce outside. The only problem is that, being a city park structure, we wouldn't be able to reserve it until November of 2013 for our August 2014 wedding. We also would have to decorate Saturday morning (WHAT?) and have everything out by a certain time. City structures and nature parks have an appeal because of their pricing, but clearly some downsides.

There also was no way to set up a reception in the unfinished basement used for storage that not only contained the only bathrooms in the building as well but was not ADA accessible. As a spoonie inviting other spoonies (and secretly worried about my condition that day - helloooo stress!), I couldn't do it. So we began investigating other sites.

Some had the appeal of the outdoors, like a private park not too far out of town run by a family. But then we have no bathroom and need a porta potty trailer. I'm not even kidding, these things exist. Ew. Plus in August, an indoor venue is a better idea if not only for the cakes' sake.

We visited a gorgeous former church last week and as I walked in I knew right away this was where we were getting married. I'm sure it didn't help that the boys had it decorated with flowers along the aisle and music though. And it has everything we want.

The priest rooms to either side of the stage at the front of the church have been turned into the bride's and groom's ready rooms (with the latter having only one entrance and exit bwahahaha). The seats are pews, which will be great for the spoonies I invite and give room for any children to kind of have their own creative space for coloring if they get bored. There is also an elevator. The floor is also kind of squishy so standing however long in any shoes will be easier. And there is a basement complete with a bar and a dance floor, ready to go for the reception. The guys who run this place live on the grounds and will be there to help throughout our time. And we get it for Friday night, all day Saturday and until noon on Sunday. It's really a steal for the price!

DIY for the Fibro Bride: Save-the-Dates

Note: Hi, everyone! I'm so excited to be contributing to this blog! I'm doing a DIY wedding blog series right now on ChickOpinion.com/FibroTips4Chicks and thought I'd throw a few of my posts over to this one because it's the perfect venue. I will, however, definitely write a few specifically for "A Very Spoonie Wedding" in the near future. xoxo Kinsey

Congratulations! You're engaged! Once you've figured out when and where you're getting married, the first thing you need to do is get save-the-dates. I assume that the reason you're reading this is because you want to make them! A lot of fibromyalgia patients have part-time jobs or are unemployed, so this is an easy way that you can get great looking save-the-date postcards without spending a lot of money or having too much stress put on you.

The front of my Save-the-Date postcard.

Materials

• Card stock
• Printer
• Computer
• Powerpoint (or something like it)
• Scissors or paper-cutter
• Postcard stamps
• Pen
• Time

Instructions

• Go to WeddingChicks.com and find their "DIY Printable Wedding Template" section (the previous link is direct to this section).
• Choose a template you like. This can take a long time! I liked most of them and messed around with a lot of them.
• Input your information and your colors to the template.
• Play around with them! Don't print anything without being 100% sure it's exactly what you want. You can be as picky as you want--it's your wedding!
• "Create" your print.
• Download it.
• Save it. Save your work. lol
• Open Powerpoint.
• Review the USPS rules for postcards here to make sure you have the right size. If you don't have the legal size, they won't mail it and you won't be able to reuse it.
• Review the main points of your Save-the-Date. I used mine as an announcement, too, so I told people that we're getting married, I told them the date, what city it would be in, my email address, and that an invitation would follow. There isn't anything else that needs to be on there. There's also not much room for anything else on a postcard.

The back of my Save-the-Date postcard.

• Start with a rectangle that is the size of your postcard. You'll hide this later, but it's important to contain your objects.
• I made the back of the postcard monochromatic (the red lines are from the screenshot, letting me know that our names are misspelled!) because I didn't want to completely deplete my ink supply. Obviously, you'll need to choose your colors according to what you want.
• Try to match the font that you use on the back of your postcard with the one the template uses on the front. 
• You can play with what is in the foreground and background to make any "watermark"-type situations you want. You can also do this by messing around with the transparency of an object.
• Make sure you have your return address on your postcard. Mine is under the grey rectangle--don't need everybody knowing where I live! :-)
• Once the back is exactly how you like it, group it together.
• Save it.
• Copy it and paste the copy next to the original so that you have two postcard backs next do each other.
• Save.
• Get yourself a new slide in the same "presentation."
• Insert your previously downloaded front of the Save-the-Date on the new slide.
• Copy and paste it so you have two postcard fronts next to each other (see below).

Screen shot of the two slides.

• Make sure that they have the same margins, so when you print them they'll end up matching. This part can be tedious and very irritating. Be patient.
• Save. :-)
• Load your printer with card stock.
• Print only one of the slides first. Eg. 30 copies of the front of the postcard.
• Figure out how your printer works: do you need to flip the pages over or around or backwards to get the other side of the postcard to print where it needs to?
• Print the other side.
• Cut them out!
• Get your postcard stamps out and start stamping! Make sure you use postcard stamps and not regular ones; you'll save about 50% of your stamp money!
• Address them.
• Mail them! :-)

You're done! I received a fantastic response to mine--people loved them! They look so professional and, while they do take a few hours to make yourself, it's completely worth it.

When you DIY, Destiny Is Yours!