I had a pretty different experience from theDame -- I thought Laura was really patient and helpful, and I didn't really have any qualms with putting down a deposit to reserve the date. Seems like standard practice to me...

I'm definitely not one of those girls who has played out her own wedding in her mind since childhood, so I started out not having much of a game plan at all. No theme, not even a strong sense of what my preferred colors were going to be. But by the end of our meeting (which was two hours, mind you, and entirely free of charge), Laura had guided us from vague likes and dislikes into a real vision for how our wedding would look and feel.

And her designs -- incredible, even within constraints. After my fiance and I expressed some initial hesitation at the budget, Laura came up with a bunch of great options to cut costs: reusing flowers where practical, scaling down the design a bit, renting glass pieces, or using alternate flowers. She truly listened and cared about making us happy, and we ended up really excited about the final proposal.

The process was straightforward and we couldn't be more pleased with the results. I thought that the invitations were a bit pricey, but the quality was high. As a graphic design enthusiast, invitations were something I was willing to spend a little extra money on and I was not disappointed -- Paper Source has a great color palette and their selection of papers and letterpress fonts is nice, too.

Be sure to check out their samples for inspiration, and you might want to come prepared with the text you'd like to see on your invitations and reply cards (written out but also already proofread by any inquiring minds) to save time.

We met with Jon a couple months back and he helped us walk through all the different pieces of the ceremony, drawing on his work with other couples to offer helpful perspective and advice. My fiance and I are not religious and I am keeping my last name, so we were a little bit concerned about working with asking a pastor to officiate, but Jon was extremely welcoming and totally non-judgmental. He also offers pre-marital counseling, and I would imagine that he would be great at it -- he's a very good listener.

I came to Trudy's because I heard good things about their selection of dresses -- in terms of their range of styles and price-ranges, they were excellent and I highly recommend going in as part of your comparison shopping as long as you set your expectations about what this place is and isn't. My sales consultant was fairly helpful, but a couple things conspired to make me dock them a few stars...

1) I arrived for my appointment on time and had to wait around nearly 20 minutes for someone to help me. Things just seemed very disorganized, and I could only spend so long checking out their selection of crystal jewelry and personalized ring pillows and knickknacks in the front...

2) I felt like I was being given the hard sell. I started by trying on a dress I had tried on elsewhere and liked, one that was well within my budget. I thought that setting that precedent would signal enough about where my budget was, so we didn't say anything about price range until the fourth or fifth dress. By the time I decided it was high time that I explicitly announce my (very reasonable) budget, before things got too carried away, I was met with an "OH! Well that changes EVERYTHING!" The next dress I tried on looked like a sack of potatoes and had this horrible petri dish lace pattern on it, even though one of the very first things I said was that I didn't want lace. I'm no expert on gowns but I also wasn't born yesterday, and I didn't appreciate being treated like a total sucker.