My fiancee and I found Caitlin through the San Antonio Bridal Guide and decided to schedule an interview with her. Her prices are very reasonable and she is very professional. She also offers a wide variety of creative albums, image designs, scrapbooks, etc. We decided to book her and will be using her for our engagements, bridals, as well as our wedding day photography. We are also looking forward to working with her because if she turns out to be as fantastic as we expect, she also has some great packages for pregnancy and newborn pictures, as well as a discount package that covers the whole first year of the babies life. We have been very impressed with her easy accessibility, communication, and flexibility with our ideas.

Since our venue already has a natural garden setting, we don't need many flowers. We decided to use roses in our table centerpieces as well as make rose bouqets for the bridesmaids and boutineers for the groomsmen. We found a bulk package on this website. We have ordered 500 red roses for only $295.00. So far they have been very communicative and from what I have heard from other couples who have used this company, the roses arrive very nice. We have also looked into other different types of flowers to order and they have a great variety to choose from.

We found the Garden of Cranesbury View at the bridal extravaganza and instantly thought that it would be great choice for us. It is an indoor/outdoor location with a really nice Italian garden. It works out great because with all the natural flowers we will save a lot of money on flowers for the ceremony and reception. So far, Amy (the owner/coordinator) has been very helpful and supportive while helping us with our limited budget.

When I decided to ask her to marry me, I thought the hardest part would be picking out the engagement ring. When I took her one day to get her hair cut, we passed a Gordon's Jewelers and we casually went in to look around. She decided to try on a couple of rings and she found one that she really liked. I acted like I wasn’t paying much attention and then a couple weeks later I went back and the sales lady helped me figure out which one it was. It was being sold as a set with the wedding band and it was a bit out of my price range so they were willing to separate the set so I could just buy the engagement ring and then come back and purchase the wedding band later. My fiancee loved the ring and I really appreciate the great customer service that enabled me to buy her such a beautiful ring. Since the proposal, my grandmother offered to have the diamonds on her wedding band put into my fiancee's and Gordon's is willing to do that for us as well.

You can't beat free! My fiancee has her own scrapbooking business in addition to her full-time job and gets most of her promotional items from vistaprint.com. A few weeks after we went to the bridal show, she was browsing options for save the date cards and received an email from vistaprint.com offering a promotion of 100 free postcards. She went online, designed a save the date, and only paid for shipping and a small fee to upload our picture on the the card. We received them within a week and they looked really nice! We have gotten many compliments on them and in addition to the money we saved (we only paid $12 total!) we also saved money on postage because postcard stamps are less expensive than standard postage. I highly recommend this company.

The extravaganza was very helpful in kick-starting our planning. I proposed in December and some friends on my fiancee's got us tickets to the event in January so timing was perfect for us. We were able to go and get lots of ideas as to what exactly we wanted to do for our wedding and came home with tons of vendor information such as venues, caterers, videographers, photographers, honeymoon locations, place settings, linens, dresses, tuxes, accessories… and the list goes on forever. It was very organized and set up so that the event would accommodate the large crowd of people there. I really enjoyed all of the food that was provided in order to sample all the different caterers. In addition to just liking to eat, it was a great way to decide what kind of food we wanted and give us some great options of caterers to start interviewing. We have some friends that are also getting married that went as well and they won a free photography session. Overall, it was a great event that gave us the insight we needed to start planning.

We decided to order our dresses from David's Bridal. The plus to ordering from this store is that they have a great variety of colors, styles and sizes and are also less expensive than most bridesmaid dress shops. They took down all of our bridesmaids names, sizes, and contact information and did all of the work for us! They called them in to try on dresses, and made sure that they would be ordered in time for our special day. Even though two of our 8 bridesmaids were out of town, they made sure to get in touch with the girl's local store and schedule their appointments to get fitted. It saved us lots of time and kept my fiancee from the added stress of having keep in contact with everyone and make sure that they were all on track for ordering the dresses. The only downfall to shopping here is that it tends to be very crowded. Granted, we were always there on a Saturday. We were still helped in a timely manner, even when the store was crowded though and they always seemed to have enough staff on hand to accommodate the crowd.

My fiancee tried on dresses at lots of different shops and eventually found her dream dress. We are on a limited budget with our wedding and even though the dress was reasonably priced, we were trying to save money wherever we could. We found the same dress she loved on a website (www.scarlettscloset.com) for about $200 less. Right before she was going to purchase the dress, we realized that this same store posted it on ebay as "make an offer" and she offered $100 less than the posted site and they accepted! It is very exciting to get such a fantastic deal. This store takes sample dresses that are in new/excellent condition and sells them for hundreds less than in the store! It is perfect for the budget bride/couple.