A cheerful wedding can come cheap (well, cheap-ish)

The months May and June may herald holidays and vacations for some, but for others sunny afternoons and warmer evenings announce the arrival of the wedding season. Spring and summer are no longer the only time to tie the knot these days, but many people still hope to hold spring or summer nuptials. In fact, I had the priviledge of being an attendent in a close friend's wedding just this past weekend.

--Which brings me to today's link: Off Beat Bride . While the site may not have an exclusively "cheap and cheerful" focus, many of the weddings featured highlight couples who were on a budget, stuck to it, and hosted a lovely occasion through creativity, doing some things themselves, and the help of their supportive personal circles (check the wedding-porn section and you'll see that "budget wedding" is a very popular tag).

I'm not due to be wed anytime soon that I can see, but I've always really enjoyed browsing this site. Like many others, I find the level of consumption encouraged by the wedding industrial complex to be flippin' outrageous these days. Still, I don't see why anyone should be begrudged a special day and I think it's extra lovely how the couples come together with the other important people in their lives to plan a ceremony and reception that suits them. Off Beat Bride well demonstrates that a "budget wedding" does not have to mean a depressingly "cheap" wedding. Regardless of what the bridge and groom's (or groom and groom's or bride and bride's) budget may be, every couple featured emphasizes quality and uniqueness through creativity, community and the D.I.Y. ethos.

So if you're planning a wedding some day, check it out. They do wonderful pictorials of real weddings, with commentary from the brides on how they put their one-of-a-kind matrimony-ceremony together. Additionally, the site offers articles that range from tutorials on making your own centerpieces and bouquets, to the ethical condrumn on where to draw the lines with do-(or duplicate)-it-yourself.