This post is a wee bit overdue, but let’s just say that wedding crunch time is in full swing and I’ve been busy making paper flowers and cake stands, and designing invitations 24/7 for the past few weeks months. Back in June we had reached our six month mark which meant it was time to start registering for gifts! We’ve both been very excited about this part because we’re finally going to have items in our home that are 100% ours, rather than leftover college dishes mixed with thrifted bowls, and a mismatched silverware set with 4,700 spoons because we just love cereal and ice cream that much. We finally get to choose what we’ll be cooking with, eating on, serving on, sleeping in, drying off with, and passing down to our children. No pressure!

Needless to say it was also a little overwhelming. We knew all of the basics that we needed: cookware, bakeware, dishes, flatware, glasses, stemware, towels, sheets, china, etc. But when I started looking at the several different checklists floating around the internets I realized there was a LOT of stuff we hadn’t even thought about. So after looking at all of these checklists and sort of editing them down to what we really needed I came up with our own list.

You can download our list here to use as a jumping off point for your own registry, if you would like. As people who have lived on our own for a while, we’ve accumulated a lot of kitchenware, some of which we’ll use and some we needed to upgrade. As people who love to cook we wanted to cross this part off our list first! So we headed to the greatest place in the world: Crate & Barrel! We’ve both always loved how clean and classic all of their pieces are, so we knew we would be able to get a lot taken care of there.

As soon as that little laser gun was in my hand and I felt it’s power, we were on a roll! We were able to find our everyday dishes, glasses, serving bowls, some of our appliances, and misc. kitchen gadgets like food scales, tongs, salt cellars, a butcher block, etc. Everyone was so nice to us there and other customers were congratulating us like crazy, it was such a fun experience. Plus to our surprise we received a gift for registering with them! Yay!

For the rest of our registry we did a little online research at our favorite stores to sort of see who had most of the items we were looking for. So of course we headed to Macy’s. Unfortunately that weekend they were having a huge sale so a lot of things were picked over. But we were able to scan in what was there and then added the rest online. According to this photo, I was a little distraught.

Our registry consultant Henry was so wonderful to work with, and he informed us that they were having a registry event later that week and assured the inventory would be restocked, so of course we came back to have some delicious treats and finish off the Macy’s portion of our registry.

He also let us play around with different china patterns before settling on our own place settings.

After Macy’s we stopped by Sur la Table and William Sonoma to see which place we preferred and definitely decided to go with Sur la Table because they had Derek’s dream knives. And you don’t get between a man and his knives. Literally.. it probably wouldn’t end well. And while there we picked out a few other items like cookie cutters, cake decorating tools, and giant fancy ice cubes that Derek’s favorite bar serves.

After Sur la Table we had a few remaining pieces left that were only available at Bed Bath & Beyond including our Kate Spade bath towels, our cookware, storage containers, some bakeware, wine glasses, and a couple serving pieces for our china. Once we got home we realized there were still a lot of things that we couldn’t find exactly what we wanted at the stores that allow for Wedding Registries. After googling a little though I came across MyRegistry.com where you can literally register for anything that has a website, and keeps it all in one place for your guests to easily shop online or even print it out and take it to the store with them. The only downside to it though is it doesn’t automatically mark off what has been purchased so your guests have to remember to go back and say that they’ve purchased it, to avoid duplicates. It even has a little bookmark you can click while on another website to easily add things to your MyRegistry [kind of like Pinterest].

This way we were able to add things to our registry from places that don’t offer that service like West Elm, World Market, Kate Spade, Jonathan Adler, etc. We also took a few pieces from Amazon [even though you CAN register there] because we didn’t want have 500 places we registered at with only one or two items at each place. So MyRegistry.com helped us keep everything a little more organized for our guests.

After all was said and done, here are some of our favorite pieces that we’ve registered for, but to view everything on our lists just go here.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

After hitting up all of our favorite stores, our checklist quickly turned into this:

There are still a few items we need to find like placemats, casserole dishes, and table linens, but because those items are usually seasonal we have to wait until closer to the season when our guests will be shopping otherwise we risk items being sold out. It’s a tricky balance! There are already a few items that have sold out so we’ll have to revamp our registries right before we send out our invitations in September. Where did you register? Have we left off any items you think are crucial to starting a home together? Do tell!