I'm going to be throwing a huge party

A Practical Wedding: Creative Ideas for Planning a Beautiful, Affordable, and Meaningful Celebration - Meg Keene (Da Capo Press, 2012)

Offbeat Bride: Creative Alternatives for Independent Brides - Ariel Meadow Stallings (Seal Press, 2010)

Ladies, thank you for helping save my sanity (so far). The blogs A Practical Wedding and Offbeat Bride came across my radar pretty quickly after I succumbed and created a (private) wedding Pinterest board. They seemed chill, and interested in bumping up the parts of a wedding that I cared about, and savvy about how to help you downplay the parts that weren't important to me. (And also really awesome about the fact that everyone's going to have their individual lists of what is and isn't important.)

But there are also books! Stallings's book (well, the first edition) predated the blog, and Keene's came out of her blog. And I tried to get them both from the library, but when OB proved hard to get, I went to the store. And after reading my library copy of APW, I was back at the store to get my very own.

[Note to the universe: would LOVE LOVE LOVE more independent bookstores in my area]

I'm going to suck at reviewing these, and perhaps the most important reviews will come after the Big Event, but both were complementarily (a word?) so helpful. Keene's book made me weepy pretty much once a chapter, while Stallings was more likely to make me giggle. Both are filled with history and examples and ideas about how to navigate the path from getting engaged to getting hitched (or not). And both offered hugely practical advice. (Keene: cross out almost everything on those other sites' "to do" lists, which reminds me, the Offbeat Bride checklist has made me really really happy, even if still overwhelmed. Stallings: consider all the aspects about who will be your best wedding party members, if you have a wedding party.) There's tons of overlap, although Stallings is geared toward a decided more eclectic crowd.

I've set the books aside, as my December is filled up with non-wedding stuff, but you had better believe that come January, these babies will get all sorts of use.