Tips on Tuesday- Don’t sweat it

This Tuesday’s tip comes from Katie from Katie and Matt. Katie says, “Don’t sweat the small stuff! Your venue could change at the last minute and end up even better than you originally planned!”

Well a venue change is a pretty big thing but Katie handled it beautifully. Two weeks before her wedding she got a call from her venue, “Pieces of the ceiling have fallen and we may be able to do the wedding here with scaffolding but here are some other venues to check out too.” Total freak out news…but Katie freaked for a second and said “ok, lets check out these other venues, there is nothing that can be done to change it now.” So, the Westin stepped up and gave her a fabulous day. Everything looked gorgeous! The food and the service was fabulous. Her florist, Petal Pushers, reworked the flower arrangements to fit the new space. Everyone really worked together to make sure the transition was smooth.

In order to not sweat the small stuff, you need to trust your vendors. How do you do this?

Feel comfortable with who you have hired for your wedding. Get to know them, Get to love them. We do this every weekend. We eat, sleep, drink our jobs. We study our specialty. We know what we are doing. We have seen it all. If you trust us and let us do our job, you will have a fabulous event. That is why you have done your research and hired the vendors you hired.

Get recommendations from friends, family, the different vendors you come across and the ones you have already hired.

Get a wedding planner. I mean, get a qualified planner who has worked many places, shows great ideas on their website and has good recommendations from their past clients as well as other vendors you like. A good wedding planner will help organize you, give great recommendations, bring your vision to fruition the best way possible. The planner will keep you on task, on budget and on time. They will also make sure everything runs smoothly. Flowers not delivered on time? The wedding planner can call and handle it. The lighting company doesn’t do all the pinspotting, the planner can call them to come back before the reception starts. The venue didn’t put the placecards out the way you wanted them- the planner can come in and oversee it. Planning from out of town- The planner can do all the legwork. Even if you can’t have one for the entire process at least do a week of or day of planner. Why should you worry about anything on your wedding day. Besides, hopefully you have never been married before and don’t know how to run a huge event where you are the center of it all.

Here are a few I love working with and are highly recommended in the industry.

Lindsay Landman Events– Lindsay Landman: She splits her time between New York and Philadelphia

Eclatante Design – Kendall Brown: she has the most beautiful image boards around on her blog

Evantine Design – Melissa Paul: They always have  fabulous looking events

Judith Campbell- Campbell Studios, Megan Kline Events,  Queen of Hearts- Mark Kingsdorf

I know I am forgetting some (you know I love you!) and there are a lot more to check out.

Learn from your friends. Ask your friends things they wish they had thought of or had done for their own wedding. Ask them things they really loved about their wedding, their vendors and their venue. 

Designate friends and family to be point people, if you don’t have a planner. Have a trusted friend be the one who holds the cell phone and fields any last minute phone calls. Have someone else make sure grandma is getting picked up. Have someone else deal with final payments and tips. Do not give yourself or your groom tasks to do. Your only job is to look pretty and show up.

Go with the flow. Know that the day of your wedding, even the week of your wedding, maybe even the month, the ball is in motion. No amount of micro managing, stressing out or spazzing out will help or change anything. Your guests know and love you. They are coming to support you in this new adventure called marriage. They don’t care that the placecards were in a circle instead of a square, they don’t care that your 20 minutes late for the ceremony, they don’t care that your venue was changed at the last minute as long as they know where to go. Sometimes guest may moan, or something gets screwed up but it is all in how it is handled. If you freak out so will everyone else. Let me tell you, when you have great vendors working together they handle  so many things that you will never know about. 

Anything super majorly wrong can always be handled after the honeymoon. That is when it can be dealt with anyway; not at the moment it is happening.

All that is important is that the two of you show up and get married.