5 Great Wedding Blogs to Follow

As you plan your wedding, you may find yourself in need of a little inspiration. When you’re searching for the perfect centerpieces for your tables, or a truly knockout bridal dress, or a whimsical wedding theme, wedding blogs can be a great source of ideas. Many of them can serve as the hub for planning your entire wedding, in fact. Here are a few of our favorites:

The Knot

This is the grand dame of wedding blogs, a massive site with years of blog content, calculators, planners, listings of local vendors, you name it. They even have budgeting tools and checklists to keep you organized. In terms of sheer size and utility, The Knot is definitely a must-bookmark site for wedding planning. The only downside is the site is seriously huge, so there’s a lot of material to look through. Oh, and they’ll keep bugging you to log in until you break down and give them your email address.

A Practical Wedding

These guys have a similar mission statement to the Knot--provide a one-stop destination for wedding budgeting, planning, and ideas--but they’re a little more down-to-earth. Our favorite is the section devoted to DIY wedding projects. For your basic middle-class wedding without every conceivable bell and whistle, these guys have great ideas for making a beautiful wedding happen on a budget.

Offbeat Bride

If the previous two are a little too staid for your sensibilities, the name says it all with Offbeat Bride. They have a lot of solid info, but it’s served up with a side of humor and irreverence that’s refreshing. There’s a section called “Wedding Porn,” if that’s any indication. Want to have a rockabilly wedding and wondering what to serve at the reception? Are you wondering how to dye your bridesmaid’s Mohawks to match their dresses? Want the latest in Steampunk wedding accessories? Look no further. What’s more, Offbeat Bride works with mywedding.com to produce wedding website templates for offbeat couples.

The Broke-ass Bride

We’ll give you one guess what the main focus of this blog is--and no, it’s not about donkeys in need of repair. This site focuses on planning a frugal wedding, with articles about finding great deals on bridal and bridesmaids dresses, tips for cutting down the budget, and interviews with real broke-ass brides to see how they pulled it off. This blog is definitely a “must-read” for couples looking to cut the budget without the wedding feeling cheap.

The Anti-Bride

The Anti-Bride’s credo is “tying the knot outside of the box.” While that’s a little geometrically confusing, it’s not a bad way to approach planning the big day. From punk rock wedding dresses to budget tips to the latest in reception desserts, the Anti-Bride’s seriously cool. Plus, they have a great iPhone app.

When the wedding planning process hits a wall, you can use these great wedding blogs to give you inspiration. As you compile your own thoughts and ideas, consider starting your own wedding blog that chronicles your journey and documents the entire planning process. Whether you’re planning a huge fairy-tale wedding or an intimate bohemian get-together, sharing your own experiences on a wedding blog can help make someone else’s wedding a whole lot better. And who knows; maybe your wedding blog will be on a list just like this one someday.

Four Romantic books for Pre-Wedding Inspiration

As you prepare for your wedding, take some time to immerse yourself in romance and really get into the spirit of your upcoming nuptials. Reading thoughts on love from the great writers of the ages is a wonderful way to get into the mindset. Here are a few of the most wonderful works about love that we know; complete with an excerpt to get you started.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The Little Prince is a lovely and strange little book, with plenty of astute observations about youth, old age, humanity, and the nature of imagination and creativity. There are plenty of enlightening thoughts about love in the mix as well.

Excerpt:

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

Brontë’s titular heroine suffers much throughout the course of her novel, but by the end she finds comfort in the arms of the only man she ever truly loved: the dark and brooding Rochester. By the end of the novel, the two have been happily married for ten years.

Excerpt:

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”

Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

It’s difficult to sum up Pasternak’s sprawling epic--just a summary of the events involved could run over a thousand words. But central to the plot is Dr. Zhivago’s love for Lara, a spark that burns when they first meet, and drives them to be together when they meet again years later.

Excerpt:

““They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.”

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There is plenty of loss and yearning in Love in the Time of Cholera; it’s composed mainly of the main character’s aching after the woman he loves but can never be with. He waits fifty years to be with her, until finally they have a chance to find happiness together. Make sure you keep the tissues handy when you get to the final chapter.

Excerpt:

“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”