Manolo for the Brides

How cute are these itty-bitty bottles of soda with custom labels? Mike 78 recently posted an easy-peasy DIY pop bottle tutorial – with pics! – over at 100 Layer Cake. She suggests using them as reception seating cards, but brides and grooms could bottle just about anything (juice, cider, champagne, local water, etc.), slap labels on them per her instructions, and give them away as wedding favors. Maybe not for a chilly wintertime wedding, but imagine how grateful your guests would be to find themselves in possession of an ice cold drink custom made by you at your outdoor summer wedding or unseasonably warm springtime affair!

Here at Manolo for the Brides, we are not shy of DIY. Our attitude is more or less ‘if you really think you can do it, why not do it?’ If you know how to sew, we see no reason you couldn’t consider making your own gown. If you can cook, we can absolutely see you doing self-catering. If you’re good at design, we think it’s a great idea to design and print your own invitations. We don’t often give instructions, but we encourage considering your own talents in creating your own wedding.

Me? I love to bake, and I’m really good at it. All the same, I never considered making a tiered wedding cake and decorating it myself. Why? Because while my cakes taste amazingly good, they are not ever pretty. I put the effort into the flavor. Decoration doesn’t come easy to me. I’m not good at prettying up my plates. If I competed on Top Chef, they’d throw me out for my sloppy plates about challenge two. I would never dream of giving you instructions on constructing and decorating a wedding cake…but there are plenty of sites out there with everything you need if you want to try making your own wedding cake.
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Brides-to-be have yet another tool in their wedding planning arsenal these days, provided that they have an iPhone or an iPod Touch. That’s right, I’m talking apps, and serious ones at that.

Wedding planning apps for the iPhone can do everything from inspire you as you shop to help you create your reception seating plan to keep track of your favorite wedding gowns. Here are some of my favorites:

Wedding Envi
For a mere $1.99, Wedding Envi catalogs images of wedding gowns, tuxedos for the groom, bouquets, wedding rings, invitations, and more. Just choose a category and it will play a slideshow of pics. Use it for creative wedding planning inspiration or, f you like what you see, you can click to be taken to a page with retail info.

iBridal Gown
For $3.99, iBridal Gown gives you a convenient place to jot down notes about the wedding dresses you see while shopping for your perfect gown. Info about favorite wedding dresses is stored in an easy-to-navigate list that includes details, pictures, and the bridal salon where you saw them.

iWedding
Thhe heavy hitter among the wedding planning apps, iWedding keeps track of just about everything on a bride’s to-do list. Input your guest list, your vendors, your RSVPs, seating arrangements, timetable, budget, money spent, inspiration, wedding registry info, etc. as you go and this app will make sure you don’t forget a single detail or responsibility. It costs $7.99, which is reasonable when you think about how much those fancy wedding planning binders go for. Note: For $2.99, you can get Wedding List, the less functional version.

My Wedding
Is $3.99 too much to spend on what amounts to a basic checklist? My Wedding is a checklist for brides on the go. It includes a could-be-fun feature known as the “wedding decider,” which makes your wedding planning decisions for you in a pinch.

Wedding Budget, Etc.
A mere $.99 will get you Wedding Budget, an app that does exactly what you think it ought to do. There’s also Wedding Tips, which again should be self-explanatory. Then there’s Wedding Registor, an app that helps brides and grooms set up a wedding registry.

There are a ton of other wedding planning iPhone apps out there, though the usefulness of most of them is dubious at best. Some are just for fun, like iRomantic and Wedding Dash. Just don’t go so app crazy that you find yourself inspired to order an iPhone wedding cake (unless you truly want one) or *quelle horreur* propose to that special someone with iPropose.

If you’re a bridesmaid looking to insure that people attending a bachelorette party or shower actually talk to one another or a bride who wants to be sure that no one will be bored at the reception, wedding-themed scratch-off tickets may be the answer. These scratch-off game cards are like lottery tickets, but instead of revealing that, no, you didn’t win any cash, they reveal trivia questions about the couple to be married meant to inspire discussion among bridal shower guests or wedding guests sitting at the same table.

It’s a cute idea for those with extra cash to spread around on useless-but-fun favors, but won’t be everyone’s cup of tea… especially since they can cost up to $1 per card, money perhaps better spent on a truly conversation-worthy cake. But that’s all right, since Mitsy at ArtMind has posted DIY instructions for scratch-off tickets you can customize any which way.

It looks easy enough to personalize with your own text and wedding colors — the hardest part would probably be coming up with and printing out the different cards.

This cheeky wedding reception table number idea favored by Debi Lilly of A Perfect Event in Chicago has earned my undying love, if only because it’s such a great option for DIY brides. All it takes is some printed table numbers and some craft kit snow globes, and you’re all set.

What say you? Cute or cheesy?

Experience has taught me that y’all like wedding book reviews and wedding product reviews less than you like, say, posts about trainwreck wedding shows or unusual proposals. Nonetheless, I do like to post the occasional review when something really strikes my fancy, and today it’s the Epson Artisan 800 that’s really striking my fancy. (And I’m not just saying that because Epson hooked me up.)

You see, in all my life I’ve never had a new printer — every printer I’ve had has been second hand, older than dirt, and crappy as hell. The Beard and I briefly, and I mean very briefly, tossed around the idea of whipping up our own save-the-date cards, wedding invitations, and ceremony programs, but one look at our crap printer negated that idea. In fact, I’d just about started to believe that DIY wedding stationery was doomed to be crap. (I know that’s not true now, but back in the day it’s what I believed.)

It was only after my wedding when I decided that my wedding photographers did a subpar job with my wedding album that I started looking into printers, specifically photo printers. I figured that even though I didn’t DIY much for the wedding, there was no reason I couldn’t start DIYing afterward, and I picked up a no-frills secondhand Epson PictureMate. Long story short, I loved it, and put together my own wedding album that was just a gazillion times better than what my photogs had put together for me at premium prices. Lesson learned!

Naturally, when the Epson people got in touch with their offer, I said “Bring it on,” and then I said “I know, I’ll whip up a bunch of stuff with it to see what all it can do.” That explains why I’ve had the printer forever and haven’t gotten around to posting the review until now. Creating stationery and other stuff for a fictitious wedding wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities! But this morning, the baby in my belly woke me up at 4 a.m., so I figured I might as well get the whole Epson thing out of the way.

Above, you see some of what I created, from a sepia cover image for my wedding album to a framed picture of my grandparents’ wedding day (including my first warped try) to a table number in a lovely robin’s egg blue to a somewhat tardy save-the-date card for my 2007 wedding. I made other things, too, including a custom wedding invitation and bookmark wedding favors, but those didn’t photograph as well. Trust me when I say they came out pretty darned good.

My verdict? Other than the paper being somewhat hard to load — once you figure out where it goes, it takes a little tweaking to get everything aligned right — the Epson Artisan 800 seems like it would be a great resource for the DIY bride. The photo quality is awesome, it prints really fast, you can scan and that’s fast, too, and you can print right on blank-label CDs/DVDs. I’m thinking mix CD wedding favors? Reception menus? Wedding programs using the two-sided printing capability? Wedding favor tags? Custom candy wrappers?

So there I am laughing at the New York Times for jumping on the DIY wedding music bandwagon so late — it’s 2009, jeez, and even I had an “iPod wedding” — when I decided to search this blog to see what I or my counterpart had written about it. As it turns out, a whole lot of nothing. The closest I came to writing about DIY wedding music was a post about how to organize a wedding playlist in which I totally spaced on replying to a commenter who asked me to share some of my own wedding playlist. Sorry, Nadia!

To make sure we don’t have any massively jarring gaps here at Manolo for the Brides, I’m going to excerpt some of iDo, since I spend a number of pages in Chapter 14 discussing DIY wedding music and it’s Friday and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel. Note: More and more people are calling this the iPod wedding, though you can DIY your wedding music with any mp3 player or a laptop.

Search for “iPod wedding” and you’ll come across hundreds of DJs on the warpath. The moment a bride-to-be brings up her choice to ditch the traditional disk jockey in favor of some digital alternative, pro DJs start weighing in. It’s a bad idea, they say. You can’t anticipate what people will want to listen to or read the energy of the room like a real live DJ. Guests will mess around with your playlist when you’re not looking, and the rented sound system will fall over and injure someone who will then slap you with a hefty lawsuit. Your wedding will be an colossal failure!

But there’s really no reason for professional entertainers to get so defensive, because no one is trying to permanently replace DJs and bands with iTunes playlists. The fact is that some people can’t afford either or would rather budget money elsewhere, some people have tastes that are way too eclectic, and some people just don’t care overmuch for the two standard options.

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The Beard sent me this photo from a wedding photo booth, and I absolutely love it.

If I could go back and re-plan my wedding, I’d definitely set up a makeshift photo booth. Sure, I could rent one, but that can get expensive when you factor in delivery and pick-up of the photo booth itself, the insurance, and the fact that some photo booth rental companies put limits on the number of photos wedding guests can take. Limits? The whole point of having a photo booth at the reception is that it gives guests, the wedding party, and the bride and groom a chance to cut loose in front of the camera after everyone is thoroughly boozicated. How loose can you get when you’re worried about running out of photo paper?

Knowing zip about photography in general, I went looking for a makeshift photo booth tutorial and, zowie, did I ever find one. The lovely people at the things we think but do not say have created an amazing DIY photo booth tutorial for weddings that is about a gazillion words long and uses words like “sync cables.” That said, it’s easy to understand and looks doable for the non-photog, provided you can borrow or buy or jury-rig the equipment.

I summarize the instructions under the cut, but I definitely recommend checking out the full tutorial.

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