The venue is the biggest challenge, it will set the mood for the event and also set your budget in many ways.  We wanted to find a venue that was outdoors, had space for both ceremony & reception (to save $ and stress over having two spaces), had a flexible policy on food and didn't require certain caterers, and also didn't break the bank.  Not a very easy task, but this is the thing I probably put the most time into researching and it really paid off for us.


We found an amazing venue that was just a bit outside of the city, so it was much more affordable than most of the other venues we looked at & it also had a special amount of charm that I really wanted. I also loved that it was a B&B so our families and friends could spend the night and celebrate our first day as a married couple the next day.   As an added bonus, it came with all the tables and chairs we would need for the reception which probably saved me hundreds in rental costs.


As an added bonus: there were llamas.

Invitations
My husband is an artist, so I asked him to design our save the dates.  He made these amazing little cards and I scored a groupon for vistaprint, so we decided to just turn them into magnets so our friends could just toss them on the fridge and really save the date.  With the groupon, we got 100 of these for $20.


I learned a very important lesson - if you have a friend who is amazing at something, let them help!  For our invitations, I enlisted the help of one of my talented friends.  I told her that instead of a gift, all I wanted was for her awesome creativity to be part of our day.  She designed our invites and printed them onto simple and inexpensive cardstock and they were lovely.  We skipped the RSVP cards in favor of an RSVP on our wedding website which saved some postage and some sanity.

Ceremony
For the ceremony, we kept it really simple.  I lined the isles with cute little pinwheels to add color and a bit of playfulness.  At each seat, was a "goodie bag" - complete with a hand drawn comic/program, candy, bubbles, and a drink ticket.


We aren't religious, so instead of paying a few hundred dollars to hire a stranger to be our officiant, we asked a friend to get ordained online and do it for free.  It was more special that way because I felt so surrounded with people I adored when I said "I do."

Dinner
This is a huge part of any party budget and it was important to us.  We knew we didn't want to pay $30 per person for a boring plate of chicken and we wanted the food to be really special to us.

We live in Portland, a city known for the food cart scene and that is something we both really love, so the answer was pretty obvious to us.  We choose one of my favorite food carts, Koi Fusion, to serve dinner.  It was a really fun treat for our guests to be able to customize and order whatever they wanted and it also took care of all the special food needs (vegan, gluten-free, my picky eater of sister, etc) & gave the guests an activity and allowed them to serve themselves.  The best part was that we got our costs down from the traditional catering cost of $30+ per person down to less than $7 per person while still having an amazing meal.

To keep the line in check, we had them make up a bunch of tacos & a bowl of kimchi, so that our guests could grab and eat right away (which ended up being inadvertently great for the budget because the tacos were so much cheaper than other menu items and many guests just got hooked on those). We also DIY-ed some appetizers and snacks. We got an amazing cheese selection from Trader Joes for less than $20. Also from Trader Joes, we got a few packages of broccoli slaw mix and just added their peanut sauce dressing and some raisins & peanuts to make a fresh side dish for $10. Chips & salsa are an easy super cheap addition.

Dessert
For dessert, we didn't get a fancy $500 cake, instead we opted for cupcakes from my favorite cupcake shop because a) they are amazing and I'm really into cupcakes and b) they don't require any cake cutting service or extra plates.   We did have the cupcake shop make a small cake just so we could show off our cute manatee cake topper made for us by a talented friend and get the whole "cutting the cake experience".  I like dessert a lot, so in addition to the cupcakes, we added some variety to create more of a dessert buffet.  We ordered several dozen of Portland's famous Voodoo Doughnuts in all of their amazing & weird varieties.  They even let us special order a bride and groom and custom heart doughnut.  A little outside the box perhaps, but every one of our guests loved, it felt like us, it and it saved us a bunch over traditional wedding cake.



Drinks
We struggled with the bar a little. I wanted our guests to feel treated and like they were able to party down, but I also wanted to stick the my budget. In the end, we decided to do drink tickets, but to make them really special and cute. We got tiny key charms and attached a note about it being the "key to your first drink on us" & then got a little nerdy by putting a T.A.R.D.I.S. on the bar for our guests to put their key into. We also went with beer & wine only because it was less expensive for set up.  I worried a lot about this, but in the end everyone had a good time and my friends ponied up a few bucks (or did some pre-gaming in the parking lot, who am I to judge?) to get drunk and understood that we had a budget and we all had a good time.
For non-booze, we had 3 kinds of beverages (cucumber water, lavender lemonade, and iced tea) in big self serve pitchers and had some metal ice buckets full of water and cute sodas to match our wedding colors.

Attire

I really thought this would not be an area I would splurge on.  I really like cute clothes, but I am really frugal - pretty much all of my clothes come from thrift stores and I generally hate to spend more than $20 on any one thing.  I looked and looked for used dress and I did not find the perfect one, so in the end I spent $500 + some altering on a new dress that I fell in love with that really fit my style and the feel of the wedding.  I know $500 is on the low end of the world of wedding dresses, but it seemed insane to me.  I am really glad I went a bit out of my comfort zone on this one though because as a plus sized woman with some body issues, it was really amazing to find the exact right thing that made me feel beautiful and I never once worried about the way I looked or posing for photos.  Money well spent.

We didn't pay for much of our wedding party attire, instead we kept an open mind and let go of the need to have the matchy matchy styles...or even the even wedding parties for that matter (I had 5, he had 3) and we were really supported with that choice. We asked his groomsmen to wear grey parts with a white button-down (figuring they all had at least one of both of those things anyway) and we bought matching ties and suspenders online for all of them.  I wanted my bridesmaids to feel comfortable and to be themselves, so I let them pick whatever they wanted to wear.  I told them to pick something teal and they all choose things that fit their style and their budget.


Along the same lines, I had two of my gorgeous friends take care of hair and makeup.  They both did amazing things with their own style, so I asked them if they might consider doing the same for my big day.  I had a pre-wedding wine and hang out session with each of them to test some things out so we were ready and then on my wedding day I felt so lucky to be so absolutely surrounded with people I loved and trusted so much.


...stay tuned for part 2 tomorrow! <3