Brides Share Their Tips to Avoid Turning the ‘Big Day' Inside Out

by KRISTEN ARMSTRONG, Staff Writer

(Tuesday, August 14, 2007 7:46 AM EDT)

Your wedding is the day many people deem the most important of your life, and it can be a tough event to coordinate.

Feeling nervous? Learn from two recent brides who shared tips and experiences about their big day with Middleburg Life.

Middleburg resident Jessie Mazzoni, who was married on May 13 at the Black Horse Inn in Warrenton, had some ups and downs in her wedding planning, but she said dependable local vendors and help from friends and family were keys to the event's success.

Planning a wedding “was stressful, but I learned the art of delegating tasks,” she said.

“For the details I used everyone around Middleburg - Saskia Paulussen as photographer and Blue Hair salon,” Mazzoni said. “My aunt did the invitations and my mom did the flowers. I didn't have to do a lot of the detail, which was helpful.”

“Dress shopping with my girlfriends and family” was her favorite part of the wedding planning, Mazzoni said.

“I'd recommend having an idea of what you want ahead of time,” she said. “I pretty much bought the first dress I tried on.”

You also have to keep your budget in mind, because it can get really expensive, Mazzoni said: “You can get a really beautiful dress for a good price.”

“I enlisted a ton of help. I had an over-arching idea of what was going on, but like I said, my aunt did the invitations and my mom did the flowers,” Mazzoni said. “We also hired a personal chef [Jane Nordstrom of Thyme Savor] for the catering and the cake, which turned out perfectly.”

Carrie White, who was married on May 19 also at the Black Horse Inn, turned to two sources for help with her wedding plans:

“There were two things that helped me the most,” she said. “The first was my ‘Martha Stewart Wedding Planner' that my maid-of-honor gave me. It was a complete ‘idiot's' guide to wedding planning,” White said.

“It had a really great timeline that helped me stay on schedule with the planning, all the way up to the day of,” White said. “It also had things like information on flower species, differences in dress fabrics and pictures of wedding processionals to help with the wedding lineup. I called it my bible and never left home without it!”

“The second item was a guest-list-manager feature on www.weddingchannel.com,” she said. “I put all my guest names and addresses in there. It sorted the guests and printed in a few different ways. It helped me keep an accurate guest count, which is really important.”

For White, it was Tupperware and a good photographer that made the day go smoother and more memorably.

“One thing I would advise is that the bride get large boxes or Tupperware storage containers to keep wedding items in. It really helped me stay organized and helped keep everything safe,” she said. “When the time came for the wedding, it was as easy as grabbing the ‘wedding boxes' and bringing them with us.”

“The most important thing to spend money on is a good photographer. The pictures are the only things you walk away with after that day,” White said. “It is worth it to get a great photographer, so that your memories are saved just as you want to remember them.”

Kaitlin Hartnett contributed to this report.

Jessie Mazzoni and her husband, Silvio, were married in May at the Black Horse Inn in Warrenton. They mostly used vendors from Middleburg.

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