Clearwater Cottage: Wedding Binder

It is my opinion that being organized is your biggest stress reliever when wedding planning. That is why right after I got engaged I spent many hours researching other people's ideas/suggestions for wedding binders and compiled my own.

Things that I included in my binder were:

Pencil pouch complete with pencils, pens and sticky-notes
Hole puncher
Divider tabs
Clear page holders
Business card holders
Calendar leading up to the wedding
Schedule of when to do things
Surveys for Bakery, Cater, DJ, and Venue (I didn't make a photographer one, because I knew exactly who I wanted my photographer to be)
Print outs of all visual things I needed references for (gown, hair, flowers, etc)
Extra lined paper

Here is what it all looked like:
After we chose our wedding venue I used a picture of the ceremony site as the image for my cover.

The left side pocket ended up stuffed full of random things. On the right you can see my hole puncher, pencil pouch and the tabs dividers down the side.

A close-up view of the right side.

I highly recommend getting several business card holder pages, they are very useful for holding the copious quantity of cards you will inevitably collect.

I also purchased three sets of divider tabs, and added more sections as I needed them.

In the first section was my calendar. I used Microsoft Publisher to create a calendar page for each month leading up to the wedding.

There were many options for wedding timelines available, so I compiled all the things I thought that I would need into one document and embellished it the way I liked it. I even had a "You Are Here" sticky that I moved, although things must have gotten busy because it looks like I forgot to move it.

I was married before the days of Pinterest, so I had to compile all of my favorite ideas manually. I again used Publisher to copy and paste several pictures of bridal gowns I liked and then made a short description of what I was looking for. This greatly helped as I went to different shops, because I could simply show my page to the assistants and they could help me narrow down my gown search. On the right you can see the gown I ended up with, LOVE!

I also compiled similar pages for my hair and makeup people. Showing them what I liked and also what I didn't like.

We planned a day to go out bridesmaid dress shopping, therefore planning ahead I Googled all the nearby dress shops so that we would have lots of choices to go to.

I had a whole section dedicated to surveys from venues I had visited. After making our choice I threw away the ones we had excluded, only keeping our chosen venue. I also had surveys for the bakery, DJ and caterer, but I didn't want to bore you with pictures of all of those...

I also had a map of the venue with locations of everything labeled.

After we completed our registry I added it to the binder too, making it easy to consult.

Having extra clear pages was really handy, in one of my bridal magazines I found and article on getting the perfect wedding cake and another one on changing your name. Clip clip, snip snip into the binder it went!