Offbeat Bride | Vendors & shopping

The average American wedding costs over $25,000 — which is completely insane. I encourage brides to find innovative, thoughtful ways to reduce their bridal budgets, and if you do choose to spend money, spend it on independent vendors and thoughtfully-made merch.

Etsy wedding tips —

A whole blog dedicated to using Etsy to shop for your wedding! Previously seen here on obb.com: Wedding shopping on Etsy.

How to buy a wedding dress on eBay —

A two-part series packed with tips for brides doing the eBay thang: Part 1 and Part 2.

Wooden wedding rings —

Handcrafted eco-friendly wooden wedding rings by Simply Wood Rings

Coming next week —

An offbeat sweepstakes from the folks at mywedding.com. Stay tuned!

Tony Schreiber wedding photography —

Natural wedding photography by Tony Schreiber, South Florida and nationwide
(more…)

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.

Nicole 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.

Obviously sashed wedding dresses are popular right now, but I’m a big fan of the double sash, as seen on Aimee here at her Wisconsin wedding.

The double sash is definitely the trademark of Chrissy Wai-Ching, who I’m about 99.9% sure made Aimee’s awesome dress. Yay for Seattle indie designers! Check out all the wonderful photos from Aimee and Jack’s wedding, all courtesy of M Gill Photography.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »