Amanda Woodstock had planned out every last detail of her wedding, from the violinist that would play during the ceremony to the moment the mothers of the bride and groom would release butterflies into the air.

What she hadn't planned on were the fellow brides critiquing each of her careful choices, and cameras capturing it all for television.

Just two weeks before Woodstock's May 1 wedding, she and her fiancé, Eric Hunter, received a casting notice from The Spa at Norwich Inn, where the wedding would be held, for the TLC show "Four Weddings."

The show premiered in January, offering a new twist on the wide genre of wedding-related reality shows about choosing a dress, making wedding cakes and even choreographing a wedding dance.

In "Four Weddings," brides agree to attend each other's weddings and score them on the food, the dress, the venue, overall experience and uniqueness. The bride whose wedding rates the best wins a luxury honeymoon to a surprise destination.

Thinking their chances of being chosen were slim, the Moosup couple, who both grew up in Griswold, replied to the notice, and had an interview over Skype the next day before being selected.

"It was very strange," 23-year-old Woodstock says, though she wasn't too stressed out about the wedding itself. "It's more about what your friends and family are going to say on TV and if they're comfortable with it."

Woodstock, a guest receptionist at Mohegan Sun's hotel, is being promoted in tonight's episode as plotting every wedding detail in a thick, "fool-proof" binder.

"I was a little OCD on some things," Woodstock says with a laugh, but adds it was all for a reason.

Hunter lost his job a year ago when Cargill Animal Nutrition in Franklin closed.

"It was about making sure we didn't go over budget because we couldn't afford it," she says.

They had bought a house just before Hunter was laid off, and decided to use the $8,000 tax credit toward the wedding.

They made their own invitations, programs, and place cards, and Woodstock and her bridesmaids did their own flower arrangements, ordering the flowers wholesale online. They made favors out of Hershey kisses.

"The dress was the only thing I really splurged on," Woodstock says.

She had ordered one online that her bridesmaids hated on her. Although she "absolutely refused" to wear a strapless dress, her bridesmaids convinced her to try one on and she came to love it.

"I'm not too concerned about what people said about me or my wedding," Woodstock says of the critique she'll watch on TV tonight, acknowledging that each bride has her own tastes.

But she did have to get used to having a microphone and camera on her at all times as she attended the weddings of the three other brides in the episode, narrating the wedding for the audience and expressing her opinions.

"You don't want to offend anybody, but that's what the show's all about," she says.

For example, it was unfathomable to Woodstock, who planned her own wedding, that another bride, whose mother and mother-in-law did the planning for her, didn't know the colors of flowers right before the wedding.

"A lot of people like to see ideas brides have … and everybody's attracted to drama," Woodstock says. "Of course (some of the critiques) are funny. You can't take it too seriously."

k.warchut@theday.com