Lots of awkward, drunken toasts to mywedding.com for being Offbeat Bride’s sponsor for the month of August! I’ll be poking around mywedding.com this month and writing about my adventures, this week looking at their wedding blog.

I trawl a lot of sites on the web looking for the most interesting tid-bits about offbeat and authentic weddings — and mywedding.com’s wedding blog is one of the many in my RSS reader. While it’s not exclusively focused on nontraditional content, I’ve loved Nicole’s advice on non-rose wedding flowers and dealing with guest list woes. Plus, Nicole has a nice smile (that’s her over there to the right).

They also cover a fair amount of green/eco-wedding topics on the wedding blog, including tips for reducing the waste of your wedding shower and thoughts about responsible registries.

So go check out mywedding.com’s wedding blog and if you like it, add their RSS feed to your reader of choice.

Thanks again to mywedding.com for sponsoring this month. Offbeat Brides, please oh please show your support for offbeatbride.com by giving mywedding.com some lerv.

I’d like to reach up mywedding.com’s dress to fetch its garter, because they’re Offbeat Bride’s sponsor for the month of August! I’ll be poking around mywedding.com this month and writing about my adventures, this week looking at their local wedding planning guides.

The only problem with running a national/international wedding blog is that sometimes it all comes down to location, location, location. When someone emails me asking about help with venue ideas in Santa Barbara or an offbeat caterer in Houston, I have no idea what to say because, well, I live in Seattle and I don’t know shit about Houston. Or Santa Barbara.

But not so with mywedding.com! They have a local wedding planning guide for dozens of American cities, ranging from the biggies you might expect like a New York and Los Angeles, but also Kansas City and Raleigh.

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Special sloppy kisses and inappropriate reception dance floor fondlings to mywedding.com, Offbeat Bride’s sponsor for the month of August. I’ll be poking around mywedding.com this month and writing about my adventures, starting this week with their free wedding websites.

Most of us Bride 2.0 types make wedding websites (aka wedsites) packed with totally TMI for confused and curious guests. But let’s be fair here: just because you’re a geeky bride doesn’t necessarily mean you want to host and build a fucking website. Who has the time to muck around with CSS and javascript when you’re trying to put the beat down on pushy vendors who insist that no, no you simply MUST have cake: no one serves pie at a wedding? Enter mywedding.com.

Just because you’re a geeky bride doesn’t necessarily mean you want to host and build a fucking website

Now, there’s no shortage of wedsite options out there, but way too many of them are are grossly pink and frilly. The first thing I always look at is the templates — are they all roses and curly-qs and scary white ruffles? It gives me great pleasure to report that mywedding.com’s free wedding websites offer definitively non-sucky templates. I mean sure: I saw a couple floral themes and curly fonts. But as I was poking around with their tools making a test page, here are a few of the offbeat templates I found …

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For those uninterested in princess wedding dresses, prepare to have your head explode from the innovative gorgeousness that is indie-designer Chrissy Wai-Ching Leung’s dress line. Hailing from Seattle via Chicago, Hong Kong, and Nice, France, Chrissy specializes in making custom silk wedding dresses that fly (or in some cases float) in the face of over-brocaded poofy white wedding wear. Using hand-dyed silks, each dress is custom made to meet the needs of the bride’s tastes and curves, ensuring that your wedding dress is truly one of a kind.

Chrissy caters to brides all over the nation via her website, but if you happen to be looking for a Seattle wedding dress, you owe it to yourself to visit her cozy Pioneer Square loft studio where, if you’re like me, you’ll want to fondle the samples and pet the silk-ribboned pillows for a couple hours. Forget the “white blindness” so common at bridal boutiques — at Wai-Ching you bathe in rich blues and reds and greens.

Fiori Floral Designs, Seattle WA
“Our designers’ input can be as small as creating the perfect bouquet and boutonniere for you. We also offer full consultation-to-installation services, rental of containers and coordination of linen and chair rentals to provide a cohesive, unified look.”

Here’s a testimonial from a happy offbeat bride Dana:

Fiori supplied the flowers for my wedding last year and they were EFFING SPECTACULAR!!!! They were also super wonderful to work with. Highest recommendations if you need flowers that are unique and dazzling.

How unique and dazzling you ask? Check Fiori Floral Design’s site for more information.