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Photo by B&W Photography.

I don't know if you've noticed, but we have a special tag called Steal This Idea! Which means, clearly, we love offering up great wedding ideas for you to take, run with, and make your own. But, apart from noticing them in real wedding profiles, we never really get to know how many of you actually DO steal those ideas.

That's why it was so awesome to read this "thank you" note from Australian Tribesmaid Jass…

Thanks to Offbeat Bride and the Tribe, I have found:

An activity book for the kids. I've twisted this one to my theme and have gotten my own kids involved in making it.

The idea of getting all (36) invited kids involved in the ceremony. The idea was that all the kids would start the ceremony by ringing bells. But I was concerned that this would mean bells would be going off during the entire ceremony (although the original bride said this wasn't a problem). Instead, one of the activities in the book is for the kids to make and decorate themselves a paper basket which we will fill with dried flower petals. They will then start the ceremony by scattering (read throwing about) petals up the aisle.

My wedding dress. A Tribe member posted a picture of a beautiful Anarkali, which had me hunting down Indian stores in Australia, which had me taking a trip to Melbourne, which had me buying the dress!

My wedding veil. Ariel put me onto this idea, as I wanted to twist the Indian dress into something a little closer to Tribal style.

The two readings for the ceremony (one Christian, one secular). This was hard because I'm not Christian, although my future husband is, so finding one which didn't feel hypocritical was a challenge.

Ideas for what games we are going to play during the war. We're having a Nerf war before the ceremony, so a bunch of zombie, LARP and historical-types offered to do what they do best. The main idea is that my future husband and I will try to "kidnap" each other, with help from all the guests.

Listed like that, it sounds like a bunch of short and sweet things, but each was the result of days or weeks of searching, mulling, twisting around, deleting and starting again and so on.

I was just going through my notes and noticed how much had come from Offbeat Bride. So I wanted to say thanks to you all, I really appreciate the help.

Which Offbeat Bride ideas are YOU integrating in YOUR wedding? Bonus points for including a link to the article that inspired your idea!

Last month I was interviewed for an article in an Irish magazine called U Magazine about women proposing to their boyfriends as part of Leap Day. Granted, I didn't propose to Andreas on a Leap Day — I had no idea women needed a special day to propose. I proposed to him on New Year's, when I felt like it.

Anyway, for a look at the whole "proposing to your boyfriend" phenomenon (and some revealing truths about how it worked out for me), you can read the article here.

After five years of limping along with Feedburner to serve up our RSS feeds and RSS newsletter, last week I switched all of the Empire sites over to using Feedblitz. Ideally, there's nothing any of you need to do as part of this switch. The 11,000 of you who were subscribed to our RSS feed should keep on seeing it in your readers, same as you were before (although you might notice that now each post has a link to live comments at the end!). The 3500 of you who'd signed up for our email newsletter should keep right on receiving it (although you might notice that it looks way better now).

If you love to read over stats, or if you just want to get to know your fellow Offbeat Bride readers, here are some crunchy numbers to pour over…

Offbeat Bride recently got a shout-out by Mercury News writer BARBARA ORTUTAY in her article, Google Docs, the perfect bridesmaid…

Our darling Offbeat Mama managing editor Stephanie is moving from Alabama to Oregon and she's taking her camera with her. What does this mean? Well, aside from the fact that she'll be a LOT closer to me and Ariel, she'll also be able to shoot your west coast weddings! And there's even better news for you Pacific North Westerners. Keep reading to take advantage…

Yesterday marked five years since the day that I launched offbeatbride.com! I wrote a whole big looooong rambling post about it over on the Offbeat Empire business blog yesterday, but to celebrate here on Offbeat Bride, I thought I'd just do a round-up of some of my very favorite shots of Offbeat Brides and their books…

So, part of the fun of events at Urban Light Studios They ♥ OBB; we ♥ them is that fact that they have a built-in photo booth. I know, right!? The Offbeat Empire staff decided to warm things up, and then the rest of the night was open to whatever kind of silliness ensued. Silliness that include: amazing hair, burlesque dancers in sexy poses, lightsabers, kisses and kinky cupcake eating.