The Boston Bride is now married!

It’s been rather quiet on this blog, hasn’t it? Well, that’s because the Boston Bride just had her wedding! Stay tuned for details on what the Boston Bride picked for her special day!

Save big money by DJing yourself

After hearing someone tell me $2,000 was a reasonable amount to pay for a good DJ, I decided we were going to DJ this wedding ourselves. First of all, we’re music junkies and have tons of digital music. Second, I used to occasionally DJ in a bar. Third, I’ve been to tons of weddings where I don’t remember the DJ saying much more than the wedding party intros and some general events through the night. So our plan of attack is to use the piped in stereo system our reception center has to offer. It sounds easy at first, but there are many considerations to this approach:

• Developing a dinner playlist and a dancing playlist. This is the fun part – getting to choose all your songs! We really can’t predict the exact moment our dancing will begin, so the playlists we are creating are large enough to cover the time. I suppose we could also loop a playlist as well.
• MCing reception activities. We’re recruiting an outgoing friend to announce our entrance to the reception. We’re hoping he won’t mind performing other MC duties, like “And now ladies and gentlemen, the cutting of the cake…” kinds of stuff.
• Switching music. We do plan to have an entrance song, a first dance, and then mother/son, father/daughter dances. In order to do this, we’re creating a 3rd special songs playlist which our MC will switch to when we’re ready.
• Test run. We will listen to our playlists in full before the wedding to ensure the music is issue-free. We will also get into our reception site beforehand to test our iPod docking and playing skills.
• Backup. What to do if the iPod croaks night of? Luckily the reception site also has a 5 disc changer which means we’ll be prepping those in advance as well!

So, it is a lot of work, but in the end it saves us $2000 and that is fabulous. Plus, we plan to use the music to make CD favors for our guests with personalized messages! Well worth it I think!

Buying an Engagement Ring?

SmartMoney posted some tips on how to get the most sparkle for you buck. Here’s the full article on buying diamonds online and some of the key tips.

1. Buy shy. Diamond prices jump at the one- and half-carat marks, says John Baird, diamond and jewelry expert at BlueNile. You can save hundreds of dollars if you find a diamond that’s just shy of that mark — say 0.95 carat rather than a one-carat, or a 2.44 rather than a 2.5 — while the difference in size is imperceptible. (If you’re spending $10,000, you can save around $200 or $300, Baird says.)

2. Leave some color. Find a near-colorless diamond (G or H on the color scale) rather than a colorless (D, E or F on the color scale). Very few people are able to tell the difference in color — even though the price difference is significant.

3. Be clear about clarity. The rarest and most expensive diamonds — and those highest on the clarity scale, are “flawless” and “internally flawless.” They’re followed by “very, very slightly included” (VVS1 and VVS2); “very slightly included” (VS1 and VS2); “slightly included” (SI1 to SI3) and finally, “included diamonds” (I1 to I3). (The term “included” means imperfections.) The best value is in VS2 stones, which have slight inclusions visible only under 10X magnification. Once you get in the SI range, you may be able to see those cracks, and with I1 and lower, you’ll likely see your ring’s inclusions every time you look at it, Benowitz says.

4. Avoid ranges. Some retailers, like Overstock.com, list a range for a particular stone’s measurements. For example, we recently pulled up a $3,599 diamond and were told it might range from 0.95 to 1.10 carats in size, have G-H color and I1-I2 clarity. Needless to say, getting the 0.95 H I2 stone will be a bummer compared to the 1.10 G I1, not to mention the difference in actual value.