Any soon-to-be or recent bride can sympathize with the mess that is my living room. My book shelf is overflowing with bridal magazines, our coffee table strewn with randomly torn out pictures of wedding cakes, flowers and Mom's dresses.

Amidst all of this wedding magazine mayhem, I have become an expert on which wedding magazines are good and which aren't.

After my first month of engagement (and buying pretty much every wedding magazine off the rack in my excitement) -- I had to become more particular about which magazines I was going to purchase going forward.

Martha Stewart Weddings is one of the magazines that has stuck around for me.

What's good about this magazine
One of the things I really appreciate about this magazine are the features they do on real weddings. Each issue, they also tend to pick a diverse group of couples and show photos and write up about their wedding.

Every wedding is different. One wedding will be a barefoot bride and groom on a beach in Maui, another wedding will be a black tie event at the Four Seasons in New York City.

With these real-life weddings, they also select things about the wedding that made it unique. In the most recent issue, they highlighted a couple who displayed a birdhouse at their wedding. Under the hole where the birds would normally fly in, they displayed a sign asking for donations for Habitat for Humanity -- something nice, unique and different.

Another wedding in Hawaii showed the bride and her bridal party rowing a crew boat over to a little island on the morning of the wedding -- to the island where the bride and groom would be taking their vows.

For table seating, one unique garden wedding had a clothes line strung, with clothes pins clipping to alphabetized place cards indicating where each guest was seated.

Also great about this magazine are the photos. I find that some of the wedding magazines have cheaper, poor quality photos -- this is not so in Martha Stewart weddings. The pictures are beautiful to look at.

Lastly, the magazine helps the bride to keep her own wedding planning organized. Several useful wedding planners and check-lists can be found throughout the pages.

What's bad about this magazine

There isn't really much in the way of complaint to say about this magazine.

Like any bridal magazine, there are a lot of advertisements. I actually appreciate ads in bridal magazines more than anywhere else, since I am actively shopping for all of these things.

So to me, this is not so bad in Martha Stewart Weddings, but I know plenty of brides that would love to find a wedding magazine that didn't have an advertisement every other page.


Other good wedding magazines
The other wedding magazines that I would recommend, of the same caliber as Martha Stewart Weddings, would be Elegant Weddings (local to Boston and Philadelphia), In Style's special wedding issues and Town and Country Weddings.


Recommended: Yes