Judging by the rapid increase of professional wedding planners offering their services to brides in recent years, it’s not too far off to assume that perhaps there’s a lot of brides out there who aren’t into the planning of their wedding.  That’s fine, nothing wrong with that at all!  But if you are into the idea of planning your own wedding, you might be a little unsure where exactly to begin the whole process.  That’s where we come in, with a little bit of wedding planning advice.

In our opinion, selecting the date, or even just the month or season, of the wedding should probably be first on your To Do list of wedding planning.   You don’t necessarily have to have a firm date and time squared away within 72 hours of that engagement ring going on your finger, that’s definitely not in any wedding etiquette or planning guides, but a general idea of how much time you’ll have to plan this wedding is a handy thing to have, both for you and for your family and other members of your wedding party. Have you always dreamed of a spring wedding? Or perhaps the thought of a Christmas wedding gets your heart racing. These are the kinds of date-setting we’re talking about. From there, you can go on to pick locations for both ceremony and reception, wedding gowns, flowers, and bridesmaid dresses. But without the date, you can’t make very many firm plans.

Much like airline tickets and hotel reservations, remember that many wedding-related items must be ordered months in advance, such as the gowns and the wedding invitations. Factor in that wedding etiquette also advises that it’s best to send invitations out anywhere between one to two months before the wedding, and you’ll quickly see that there’s a lot more planning involved than you might have originally thought.