You’re Engaged. Now What?

Along with the excitement comes a long list of todo’s and responsibilities. I’m always hearing people talking about how stressful wedding planning is.  I’m not sure if its my passion for event planning or my type A personality but I think wedding planning is what you make it.

Whether you want a long  or short engagement, elaborate or simple wedding, most of the time you can find a way for it to not be stressful.  Now, I’m not saying it’s NEVER stressful but most can be eliminated.

One thing you have to accept from the beginning is that you can’t control others. You could eliminate *most* of this by ditching the wedding party but you’re always going to have the family to deal with. No matter how easy you try to make it on everyone else, there’s always going to be something.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. He asked. You said Yes. You told your immediate family and….cue the chaos….

Before I got engaged I was one of those girls who said I was going to have a small destination wedding. Who was I kidding? I love planning parties and this is my chance to go big. Our first step was to figure out a rough guest list.  This way we could determine what we needed to look for and what kind of wedding we wanted to have.

Well, my FH and I ended up with a list of about 270…yikes!! We went through and determined an “A, B and C” list and it was about 240. Not much better but we tried. 

So I started thinking. Can we do something for a reasonable price that would suit our personalities? What WOULD fit US?

I’m sure we’ve all explored Pinterest endlessly and have ideas for our dream wedding but I wasn’t someone who knew exactly what I wanted. -Heck, I went from a small destination to a guest list of 240 within a week of planning.

After searching through my pins and seeing what I liked, we decided to do a carnival/festival theme.  

Living in Columbus, we have so many opportunities to go to different festivals and fairs so it seemed perfect. We’re also big foodies so what better to serve at our wedding than greasy, salty, sugary carnival foods?

So here’s the mission. A carnival/festival wedding for 240 people thats within 15k.  Let’s see if we can do it.

We decided to “brand” our wedding as my mother would say and call it #HendricksFest2016

Food.

If you know me, you know I love to bake & cook.

Mark is lucky enough to average about 4 homemade meals a week. – Oh if only the roles were switched.

That being said, I should have plenty of goodness coming for your bellies.

I’m always adding extra ingredients and changing recipes up to suit our tastebuds so I hope you guys enjoy the deliciousness to come as much as we do.

 

Welcome.

 

*All Wedding & Engagement Photos are by ENV Photography*

My Fiancé proposed on Christmas Eve of 2014 and we’ve been planning our September 2016 wedding ever since.

We decided on a carnival/festival inspired wedding since we are always going to different festivals, fairs and concerts. Most of our wedding is DIY and I have been meaning to create a blog ever since. – Here we are a year later and I’m just now getting around to it. I know I know, procrastination at it’s finest.

Wedding planning is one area that we have not been procrastinating in. Meaning  I have LOTS of projects to catch you up on.

I wanted to come here  to document our DIY processes as best as possible so future brides are able to see how its done without clicking through several websites to often times never find instructions.

I wont only focus on DIY posts but I also want to talk about the decisions and chaos that come along with it!