I wanted to start a running list of green wedding resources I find as I hunt, as a service to others who may be interested in planning a more sustainable event:

Flowers: 

Find local flowers: Local Harvest

Order organic online: Organic Bouquet 

Dresses/Attire: 

Preowned Wedding Dresses 

Adele Wechsler 

Deborah Lindquist 

Olivia Luca 

Handmade Items:

Green Wedding Information:

Great Green Weddings

Inhabitat's Green Wedding Guide 

Invitations: 

Smock Paper

Delphine Press

Botanical Paperworks

Oslo Press (uses industrial scrap and waste wood veneer for invites)

After nailing down our location and finding local flowers, my latest focus has been on finding the perfect eco-friendly wedding dress. Shopping for wedding dresses is one of the most fun parts of planning a wedding (at least for anyone who likes to shop like I do), and I've been enjoying checking out a number of different types of options. I'm on a fairly limited budget, but luckily I am also open to a broad array of options. I've found a few I'm interested in pursuing. One fantastic resource I found is a site that offers hundreds of gorgeous reused wedding dresses: www.preownedweddingdresses.com. This site is amazing—designer dresses for literally 75 percent off in some cases! It's also light on the environment to reuse.

I've also been looking into a few places that will design a dress for you using whatever materials you want. I found this Kansas City custom dress maker via her Etsy site. Etsy—an online marketplace where artisans sell handcrafted items—is also a fantastic resource to search for dresses, veils or other items, especially if you're looking for something very unique. I'm planning to get these wedding cake toppers I found there. I'm also looking at some more traditional dresses available through eco-friendly designers. Adele Wechsler offers absolutely beautiful eco-friendly gowns and I'm trying to track down some locations to try on some of her styles.

Please give me any other tips you might have for finding an eco-friendly dress, and I will keep you updated as my hunt continues.

This past weekend, I finally nailed down a flower supplier who is local, chemical-free AND who will have flowers blooming in mid-May—my wedding time. It showed me that you sometimes have to go through quite a bit to find the suppliers you are looking for, but it pays off in the end. To find this person, I started by searching for organic flowers in Lawrence, Kansas. That led me to Lynn Byczynski, the local author of the book The Flower Farmer: An Organic Grower's Guide to Raising and Selling Cut Flowers. Lynn doesn't grow flowers for weddings, but she was able to get me in contact with Jozzy Schimke from Earth Flowers in LeCompton, Kansas...just a hop, skip and a jump from Lawrence. They grow flowers in hoop houses, so they have blooms earlier in the year than the other, exlusively outdoor flowers farms. Earth Flowers lets customers come out and choose their own flowers and arrange bouquets on their own—something I wanted to do with some friends of mine who are good at that sort of thing. Now I will be able to afford the type and kind of flowers I want, and I will know that they have not been treated with chemicals and shipped halfway across the country! Anyone looking for local farms in their area can also rely on Local Harvest, which offers a searchable database of food and flower farms across the U.S. I will be adding as many green wedding resources as I can find to this blog, so keep checking back.