On my coffee table: Wedding Bible

On Sunday we got the champagne glasses out and celebrated one year of being engaged! How time flies...and less than 7 months to go!

After the initial excitement and thoughts about our ideal wedding, the actual planning soon kicked in, and has been non-stop since February. A lot has been achieved, from booking our venue to practicing making buttonhole flowers. And there's still loads to do yet...

The planning has been easier by reading wedding magazines (not to mention help from Mum!), but also I've found Sarah Haywood's Wedding Bible so useful.

Haywood gives advice and tips for most (if not all) aspects in preparing for your big day. Tips on narrowing down your ideas in the inital stages, through to a 'checklist' for your wedding day - she's got it covered. On a budget? - that's covered too.

The best thing is that the book is from an English point of view, so I could easily relate to it. Try Amazon for a reduced price on this book and you won't look back. I hear the Wedding Planner is also really useful.

Setting the date

We knew we wanted to have a summer wedding, but our date was mostly determined by the availability of our chosen venue and the varying prices of the seasons. June, July, August tend to be more pricy, which is why Spring and Autumn weddings are increasingly popular. This September I went to a beautifully sunny wedding that it could have been mid summer!

We found trying to secure both the venue and the church for the same date was a juggling act, but it's all worked out fine. I can see the advantage of having the ceremony and reception at the same place if you have the option!

It can be hard choosing somewhere so far in advance (for us it was 17 months), but once you've put a deposit down you have your wedding date! Then it's time to start planning and booking everything else!

Some useful wedding venue sites:

On the weddings site for South West Tourism you can search by type of wedding, amount of guests and as well as by area.

A National site with many search results weddingvenues.com has very detailed descriptions, lots of photos, and a contact form to request a brochure for each venue.

An extensive list of wedding venues with useful descriptions can be found at westcountryweddingguide.co.uk.

South West is best!

Welcome to my blog about South West Weddings! I am a bride-to-be living in Exeter, planning a wedding for June 2010, in East Devon.

Since getting engaged in November 2008, I've been scouring the internet for inspiration and advice for our special day. Most the of the wedding blogs I found were American and I couldn't find any brides blogging about my region of England so...I thought why not start one?

Here I will share my findings of all things wedding related in the South West, as well as online suppliers, and my own wedding plans. Hopefully this will be useful for couples getting married in this region (Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire).

Please share your ideas and recommendations with me too! You can email me via bridebug and follow me on Twitter.

We already have one big thing in common...getting married in the beautiful South West!