Cupcakes have come into vogue as a sweet alternative to the traditional wedding cake. No fussing with cutting the cake, and guests can choose from a variety of flavors. Besides that, a well-decorated cupcake is just plain adorable!

If you have a couple hundred guests, though, that's a couple hundred cupcakes, at least. Where on earth do you serve them? Cupcake stands are the norm, but generally these hold only a couple of dozen.

If you're an enterprising DIY bride, however, you might just want to craft a cupcake stand to beat all cupcake stands, and put a solid 375 cupcakes on the one, enormous tree! You could consider it the centerpiece to the reception hall!

It's getting close to your big day. You've done everything you can to keep your wedding plans simple and frugal. You've made your own invitations, created centerpieces yourself, made your bouquet and even your guest book.

Now, how will you thank your bridesmaids? In keeping with your frugal DIY wedding, a thoughtful and unique hand-made gift sounds perfect.

Spa products
Wouldn't it be fun to have a spa day with your bridesmaids? Since this is an expensive luxury, you could thank them with some homemade spa products instead. Try some of these:

• Facial products: Make a cleanser, scrub, mask, and moisturizer to pamper your bridesmaids.
• Foot products: Create a soak, scrub, and butter -- those feet will be worn out from dancing at the wedding!
• Body products: Make bath salts, body scrub, hand scrub, and body oil, so she can be soft all over.

You're so close to walking down the aisle... only a few finishing touches on your DIY wedding, and you'll be ready for the big day. You've made your invitations, your bouquet, and your centerpieces, but have you thought about your favors yet?

Back when I got married, in an attempt to keep my wedding super-simple, we bought personalized votive candles and stuck them on the tables. Pretty much done, but looking back, I could have done something nearly as easy that:

• showed our personality more as a couple
• had a creative touch
• fit the theme of our wedding
• really said "thank you" to our guests.

If I could do it all over again, I'd choose one of these three favors.

Chances are, despite careful planning and attention to detail, there will be something that doesn't go exactly as planned at a wedding. Weddings are human events, and we humans are known for making mistakes.

At my own wedding, the photographer was nearly an hour late and my veil got stuck in my mom's bracelet after I hugged her during the ceremony, leading to a five-minute pause to detangle ourselves. Neither one derailed my day or diminished my joy, but as a bride-to-be, it's hard to remember that in the stressful days leading up to the big day.

You can help your bride-to-be or groom-to-be relax by gifting them with a wedding day emergency kit. Just knowing that someone else has the small stuff covered will give them a little breathing room to focus on the bigger picture.

After the break, I'll share a few ideas for what to put into the kits.

Weddings... it is so easy to get caught up in the moment. After all, your big day is pretty important, right? Agreed, but instead of being stressed over the planning, it makes sense to me to keep it simple and enjoy every moment leading up to your wedding as well.

Zen Habits has thirteen tips to hep you do just that: keep your wedding plans as simple as possible. They make a disclaimer, though, stating that if you want a traditional wedding that you probably still will have some stress. Their sensible tips are to help alleviate some of the needless worrying, so after the break I'll share some of their ideas.

Real Simple has some great tips for making the most of your ceremony, including your vows to each other. They suggest that if you think you'll suffer from stage fright, or if you just need to have traditional words spoken during your ceremony, then you should probably go ahead and choose traditional vows appropriate to your beliefs.

But if you want to be unique, you can always write your own vows. Real Simple has a few recommendations for writing your own wedding vows, which I'll share with you after the break:

Inspire passion in your beloved gardener! Give him/her a living plant this Valentine's Day. When planted and tended with care, it's a gift that keeps on giving, beautifying the landscape for years to come. Here are two Valentine's Day-appropriate suggestions: the willow tree and the rose bush.

The Willow tree: an unexpected Valentine's Day surprise
For a dramatic gesture, how about a willow tree? Willows were traditionally associated with fertility and reproduction. The ancient Greeks, for example, believed willows increased a woman's chances of becoming pregnant and would lay branches from those trees in the beds of infertile women. (Sounds really uncomfortable!) Some Native American tribes also associated willow trees with fertility, laying willow branches in the beds of newly married couples. (Ditto!) Read more here about the willow tree's symbolic value.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I started cinching up quite a few important and final details before the big day came -- August 3, 2007. Among the areas I covered included wine and champagne amount calculations (yes, there's a formula for this), wedding program finalization and printing, deejay preparation and reception presentation picture scanning.

This week will feature a decent amount of wrap-up before I complete the Wedstravaganza series with next week's Part 8, which I hope to have to you on the ever-spooky day of Halloween. I hope you've enjoyed the ride thus far, and I hope you can appreciate the level of planning and detail that goes into a wedding and reception. I'll cover the honeymoon in next week's finale, as I've held off on that until now.

Additionally, next week's finale will include a timeline, a cost breakdown and the ending of our special day to our chosen Honeymoon destination the very next morning after Marci and I were married. So, don't forget to check back! Until then, continue reading.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I took you through a virtual cornucopia of meal selections, RSVP count updates, cake styles and selections, reception ballroom pictures, and photographer choices. We're now at week six of the eight-part series, so I'm going to attempt to wind up many events in this edition, and prepare you for what my final wedding day looked like and how everything came together.

After deciding to rent a projection system from our chosen wedding place, Marci and I set ourselves on a mission to locate a bunch of old photographs. You know, those yellow, 1970s-era (oops, I let me age slip there, heh) Polaroids and crusty images found spread amongst photo albums from family members on both sides.

Marci's mom and dad obliged with over six albums full of pictures from infant age through college, and my parents did the same. In fact, we had so many pictures at our choosing that it was hard to pick out 150 images or so that would work for the final reception presentation.

If you've been paying attention to my weekly Westravaganza feature, you probably know how involved planning and executing a wedding can be. The list of details and the involvement of so many people would make the heads of some CEOs spin.

But it can be done -- it's a huge labor of love that can't be denied. To that end, a sister blog of DIY Life -- AisleDash -- launches today focused on, you guessed it, weddings!

If you're planning to toast some nuptials soon, have done so decades ago, or are thinking about proposing to your significant other sometime soon, you'd be wise to check out all the great content over at AisleDash. It's already amassed a huge smorgasbord of content. Spend a little time reading over there and you'll see why the name is what it is -- you'll be dashing for the wedding aisle in reality. Or, you can relive your special day with the husband or wife while huddled around the laptop this coming weekend.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered creation and use of the wedding website as a planning aid for those too-close wedding dates, visiting Target and Dillards for the wedding registries, creating the wedding program, choosing a place for the rehearsal dinner, and selection of a minister to perform the actual ceremony. Those were some pretty large projects to tackle and get finalized, but ya gotta do 'em, right?

This week, I'll tackle some pretty important projects that allowed my wife and I to really pull a nice wedding together in only five weeks. We wanted to make our day very special even with a severe planning time crunch, so with all the planning paying off by week three of the five-week period, we decided to find a nice frame at a local Hobby Lobby store and have a 5x7 insert cut out so we could eventually place a black & white wedding photo there.

Until that time, we planted a family image in there and planned on having the glass removed so that wedding invitees could sign the backer board (with the five-pack of Sharpies we invested in) with well wishes. The photo above contains only a few, but by the wedding night, the entire frame was covered with signatures and wishes for our new family. It was, in a word, one of the neatest treasures from that special evening. In one fell swoop, we had this project done, so we put it aside until the wedding night came. Date: July 18th, 2007.

In last week's edition of Wedstravaganza, I covered the very beginning of my recent 'race' to prepare and execute the perfect wedding in just five weeks. My wife and I ended up pulling everything off, much to the delight of our guests and ourselves. Our honeymoon included some much-needed relaxation time for seven days, but before we get ahead of ourselves, there are more -- much more -- basics to be covered. Well, basics may be a misnomer of sorts, as hardly anything in the preparation of a wedding could be described as 'basic.'

Starting off where I left off last week, our invitations went off within three days of ordering them, which ended up being perfectly timed. Alas, we gave our guests about four weeks notice of our wedding, which seemed an appropriate amount of time. Nobody -- at the time -- knew that we'd just began preparations for the wedding a few days earlier, but we weren't about to spill the beans just yet.

The next step in planning our wedding was squaring away the tuxedo rentals. With eight men to get measured and lined up, we headed to Tuxedo Junction at a location near our area. The tuxes were reserved on the day we ordered our invitations, so now was the time to notify all seven guys that they would have to drag, push and pull themselves to the tuxedo rental location to have measurements and show sizes taken.

We've come a long way since the days when eloping was a scandal and something couples did on the sly. Though most people still opt for a fancy wedding with all the trimmings, some couples want their Big Day to be, well, not quite so big.

There are lots of reasons to elope and many ways to do it without going to Las Vegas or upsetting your friends and family. If you want to say "I do" in this non-traditional but still romantic way, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

There are few things as stressful as planning a big wedding. With so many details and so many egos, feelings often get trampled and resentments easily arise. One of the most likely individuals to reach an emotional boiling point during wedding planning is the bride. So often a blushing bride turns into a ranting, raving woman desperate to get every detail perfect for her special day. Somewhere during the planning process she becomes a Bridezilla; a woman who many fear and go to great lengths to avoid.

So how can you stop from morphing into this angry woman? Below area few thoughts to keep in mind as you make plans for your special day. Keep in mind that they are not sure thing, but if followed they might bring you some peace during this hectic time.