Project: Priceless--The Ground Rules Established

Okay. So Brian and I, Jordan, the happily engaged couple, have come up with the ground rules for our crazy free wedding project.

The mission: to plan and put on a wedding for ourselves that is (ideally) free-of-charge.

The method: to invite family, friends, and community to provide the elements that will create the wedding. Ideally, everything from dress to wedding favours will be begged, borrowed, or donated. We are also allowed to utilize trade, whether we trade something we have for something you have, or if we can offer a good or service of our own to trade with yours.

Why contribute: Aside from the fact that we are an adorable couple who needs your support to have their special day? Aside from the fact that this is going to be a really cool experiment? Aside from the fact that you will, if you haven't already, fall in love with us? Okay, aside from that, we will:
-give you a shout-out on our blog (even if we do not use your good or service in the end)
-promote you via word-of-mouth (the best advertising out there)
-include a shout-out to you in the programs at the wedding.

While some of those bulleted incentives may not seem that important to the non-businesses out there (the regular folk, strangers, friends, and family) who contribute, WE want to give you the same kudos to you as to any business that contributes, because you're awesome, too.

To maintain sanity: we stipulate the following to maintain some sanity in this process...

1.Bri and J maintain veto rights. There is lots of room for creativity in this wedding, because Brian and I are not married (haha) to one specific look or feel. But it is our big day, and if we decide something isn't working for us that has been offered, we maintain the right to decline or go with a different offer. We still love you and we will still give you a shout-out.

2.We encourage multiple offers for one good or service. We're very shortly going to be offering a few basic ideas around what we'd like to have at the wedding. Other than a colour scheme, a commitment to being funky-not-stuffy, and a few other preferences, the planning is very open to interpretation. We think that it'd be amazing if we had, say, three or five wedding cake offers of donation, and we can see what different people come up with as ideas for the same wedding. As we choose each element, we will post on our blog what your ideas are. We will have final say in which one we choose, but the world will still get to see/hear your ideas and your work.

3. We may purchase elements for the wedding if the purchase is under $10. I'm a crafty person, and to think that I may manage to get through this whole process without buying some beads to decorate my shoes, or buying some mushroom birds to add to boutonnieres, is not realistic. The commitment is, though, to keep any purchase under $10.00. (There is one exception to this rule: if we are not receiving offers on a particular good or service, or if the offers are simply not right for our taste, we may end up purchasing that element. I really hope we can avoid this, though.)

4.We're keeping it simple, because we're stupid. Neither Brian nor I have ever been involved in the planning of a wedding. So we are going to try to keep it fairly clean and simple. We're going to come up with a list of the bare essentials that we'd like to see happen; anything extra is gravy. The reason you're all not getting this list right away is that I have to read a little further past page 8 in the wedding manual (where I began to hyperventilate from the enormity of the task at hand) to fully understand all the elements of a wedding. But we are, of course, open to offers for the project right away.

Alright, that is about it for ground rules. Next post will either just be some back history to give any strangers out there an idea of who we are...or we'll actually tackle the manual tonight and have a checklist to share. It depends on how my deep breathing techniques work against the rising sense of panic every time I open the cover.