Four Modern-Age Inventions I Couldn’t Live Happily Ever After Without
T hank God Martha Stewart! I am so lucky to be a bride during this very moment and time. It’s like somehow I landed in a perfect storm for DIY wedding planning. I don’t know what I would do without these four amazing websites and applications:
Etsy
If you don’t know Etsy, you should. It’s an e-commerce website where you can buy handmade and vintage items. Etsy is addicting enough when you aren’t getting married but even more so when you are. I have purchased a majority of the items for my wedding on Etsy: cake topper, flowers for bridesmaids sashes, flowers for my sash, bridesmaids gifts, flower girl/junior bridesmaids gifts, accessories for my shoes, a beautiful hanger for my wedding gown, and even gumpaste flowers for the wedding cake. I’ts truly incredible what the shop owners on Etsy have to offer. The choices are limitless, and if you look hard enough you can find items for much cheaper than you would anywhere else. Plus, you are supporting small businesses; it can’t get better than that.
If you don’t know Pinterest, you definitely should. Pinterest is another website that is incredibly fun for other things besides weddings but I can’t think of a better use of it than exclusively for weddings. When Justin and I were first engaged, I went to Target and bought a huge bulletin board so I could cut things out of my wedding magazines and make a visual representation of our wedding look. How old fashioned of me. Just a couple months later I was turned on to Pinterest which is an online version of a bulletin board.
Say you are looking at a wedding blog and see a picture of a hairdo you love, well, just pin it to Pinterest. Say you found instructions on how to handmake wedding invitations, just pin it to Pinterest. Say you find the perfect wedding gown, just pin it to Pinterest. The wonderful thing is you can create boards for every different part of your wedding: hair, bridal party, décor, cakes, flowers, and invitations. And the best part? When you click on the picture you pinned, it takes you back to the original website where you found it. Pinterest is an organizer’s dream come true.
Spotify
If you don’t know Spotify, you most definitely should. Spotify is a digital rights managed music streaming service that you download on your computer. And guess what? You can stream any song you want for FREE. Again, great application for any old day and it may seem like an odd choice for a wedding planning tool but it’s not.
Don’t know what song to use for your first dance? Look up a list of first dance songs on the internet and listen to them all on Spotify. Need to figure out what classical piece of music you will be walking down the aisle to? Search for a wedding playlist on Spotify and listen to your heart’s content until you find something just perfect.
I’ve used Spotify to listen to first dance and ceremony music options and it has been tremendously helpful. I can’t imagine what I would have done if I had to purchase all the songs first, especially that classical ceremony music, it’s not my cup of tea. Believe me, I will be using it to find other music for my wedding as well.
Google Calendar
If you don’t know Google Calendar, you most certainly and definitely should. It’s not any old calendar, Google Calendar allows you to share your calendar with other people (like your fiancé). That means no forgotten cake tasting, venue searching, or flower appointments. That means no excuses. All you have to do is setup a Google email address for you and your fiancé (if you don’t have one already), create a shared calendar for the two of you, and personalize some settings and voilà you will be on the road to wedding planning bliss. Plus, if you use Dooster to set up your wedding tasks you can set it to automatically sync with your shared Google calendar. Here’s another tip, I created a special wedding Gmail email address so I wouldn’t get ghastly amounts of wedding spam in my regular email account and then used that to hook up to my shared wedding calendar with Justin. Oh, and I’m sure Google Calendar will be very helpful when we have kids too.
How about you? Are you using a website or application that you just couldn’t imagine planning your wedding without? Come on, share the wedding planning love.
