Polka Dot Bride!

I just felt the need to pop back here and do one final post to say 'we're on Polka Dot Bride!'. Pure awesomeness :)

You can check it out here.

Farewell!

I started writing up my first recap post and I just couldn’t do it.  It felt like effort, which blogging has never felt like before. I guess it reminds me a bit of English class in high school. I just remember this one moment where my English teacher sat down with me after reading a short story I had written and with disappointment in his voice told me that when he starting reading it he thought it was absolutely brilliant. He was really getting into it and then he turned to what should have been the last half of the story to find only one page remaining. Little Amy had got bored of writing the story halfway through and killed off the main character to end the story. 

Not that anyone is getting killed, but I guess I’m kind of doing that here. I just can’t find the enthusiasm to write about our wedding that was. Don’t get me wrong – it was the best day of my freakin’ life. I’m like a little kid at Christmas with our wedding… but in reverse. I think about it all the time and I still get exciting thinking about it. Sometimes I just want to jump up and down (which I may have done when I saw my hubby for the first time on our wedding day… shhhh… don’t tell anyone). 

I will leave you with some photos from our brilliant photographer, Angela Higgins. I wish I could post all of her photos here. She captured the day so beautifully. Looking through some of the photos I was think ‘how on earth did she capture that without me noticing’. She’s like a ninja! There are a few more photos up on Angela’s blog here if you are interested. 

 

If you’re planning your own wedding and have anything you want to ask me, feel free to leave comments all over the place and I will answer (I promise)!  

Thanks for reading, 

Amy 

xxx 

P.S. I’ve become a little attached to the blogging world and have started up a new blog. You can find me over at From the Bottom of the Teacup.

 

Married!

Yesterday we got married. It was awesome! I will probably do some recaps when we get back from our honeymoon, but for now I will leave you with this;

This month in pictures..

I think that if there was a 'slackest blogger' award, I would win it hands down. I haven't posted since the 5th of October! Naughty me. It's because I've been so busy actually putting this whole wedding thing together. I think that's a pretty good excuse right?
On that note, it's almost time to start getting ready for my hens night so I can't hang around typing away for too long. I hereby present to you, (some of) the last month in pictures;

Justin making the blackboards for our photobooth

Blackboards drying off

Table numbers all made.

A sample of the flowers and hearts for our wedding cake.

Lolly bonboneirre (tags aren't finished), wrapped in the same fabric as my dress :D

Some of the plant bonboneirre ready and waiting to be wrapped up like the lolly bonboneirre at the last minute (so that I can continue to water them).

'Aisle Walking 101' shirt from my two lovely ladies for our rehearsal which was last night.

Hens' Night Invite - Excited!

Today I got home to a little black envelope in the mail. The lovely calligraphy of my maid of honour and the little 'kiss' sticker on the back could only mean one thing - hens' night invite!

My lovely bridesmaids did such a good job at making the invites. I love the wording too;

Amy L____ R_____

is getting tied up... we mean tied down!

So bring your furry handcuffs and silk ribbons, and help us celebrate Amy's last few days as a single girl with her:

Burlesque Hens' Night

*details of when and where *

Dress: Sexy... think lace, silk, leather, feathers, and fishnets!

*more details*

There is plenty of street parking; please don't come down the driveway or you risk the wrath of Lydia's riding crop...

Lots of room to stay over, just let us know in advance.

Kisses, Demure Dani and Luscious Lydia

I have to say that I am now very excited about my Hens' night. Should be good fun!

Who else is looking forward to their Hens' night? Any ideas what your bridesmaids are arranging?

Pinwheels

Pinwheels scream fun right?

I think they do, and that is why we are going to line our aisle with them! As we aren't having many chairs, and I'm not into the whole red carpet thing,  we were a bit stuck for a while on how to create an aisle. It actually hit me one day while I was searching for cake toppers and came across an Etsy store that had mini pinwheels for the tops of cupcakes (which by the way, is a totally awesome idea and I may have to do next time I make cupcakes).

I've found a whole pile of scrapbooking paper in our wedding colours and got some dowel from Bunnings, so making them should be a super simple task to do. All we have to do it a little bit of assembly and voilà, we have an aisle! Maybe we can even take a few up to the reception for photobooth props!

Only bummer is that I don't think there will be any children at our ceremony  :(
Hope the young at heart appreciate them!

Any ideas for any post ceremony uses for the pinwheels, other than photobooth props? Would hate to let them go to waste.

How hot are we?

On Friday Angela put our engagement photos up on her blog!! I am in love. I think I may have squealed a little when I first saw them. They are just… beautiful….  AND we somehow even look attractive (nothing like a little bit of modesty). 

 

They are a bit hard to see because blogger is a pain and you can't fit big photos on, but if you want, head over to Angela's blog where there a lot more of our awesome photos!

I was going to write a big post on our engagement session and how much fun it was, but I think I can sum it all up by just saying: *sigh* I am in love (with both Justin and Angela).

One final note: I really like my make up a lot better this time around too. My make up lady did my eyes a lot darker. What do you think? Better than before?

P.S. Two months and one day until our wedding! Holy fudge balls!

A little bit of magic

Our honeymoon is gonna rock! For two nights of it, we get to stay at this romantic little place;

Magic Cottage, Takau River, Kerikeri 

Bath on the balcony overlooking the river = serious levels of awesomeness. Cannot wait to get into it!

For the rest of the three weeks we will be staying in either the back of this;

 or this;

Much less romantic and classy, but a hell of a lot more fun!

Calm

This week a massive feeling of calm has washed over me. I think it’s the result of a few things that have happened.

Invites and Ceremony Draft
Firstly, on the weekend we got our round one reception invitations out (Yay!). Best of all, I know that they have got to people, despite us posting them with insufficient postage on them. We also have managed to put together the draft of our ceremony and send it through to our celebrant. It feels so good having that done because, you know, I’ve heard that the ceremony is a fairly important bit of the whole getting married thing.

Holidays!
Flights and leave for our honeymoon have been booked. This makes me so happy. You know when you get to that point where you are just plodding through work and life thinking ‘just put one foot in front of the other and don’t stop’? I’m there. Just having the leave booked has given me the drive to keep on plodding on. I can almost see the finish line. The last holiday we had was in April, and that was only for one week. The last holiday I took that was more than one week was in November 2008! One month off is going to be bliss (even if one week of that is prior to the wedding so I’ll be busy)!

Makeup
Anyone that’s been reading this blog for a while will know how worried I was about make-up. I had my original trial a while back and felt okay about it after that. Recently I’ve started worrying about it again though. If I went back to the start of this whole wedding planning thing, I would make the decision just to not wear makeup I think. It’s causing me so much stress because I never ever ever wear makeup so I look so different with it. Anyhow, the day of our engagement shoot I had another trial. This time my makeup lady went for a bit of a different ‘look’ and did my eyes darker. And you know what? I loved it. There wasn’t even that moment where I needed to get used to it. I just looked damn good, if I may say so myself. So that has left me feeling nice and calm too. I’ll double check I’m happy with it when I see what it looks like in the photos…  but I’m guessing I’ll still be happy so I’ll make sure that she does it with the darker eyes on the day!

Engagement Session
Everyone should have an engagement photo shoot. Seriously. Best thing ever. Before it, I was nervous and more than a little apprehensive about having a camera pointed at me while I got cosy with my hubby to be. I’m guessing the first photos that were taken look more like photos of two rabbits caught in headlights rather than of two people being all in love and stuff. As the arvo went on we found that we relaxed a lot more and ended up having a blast. We also found that it was really nice to be able to spend some time together. As in proper time together - no distractions, no to-do lists, nothing… just us (and Angela of course). I kinda feel like I feel in love all over again.
After the arvo we had, I’m really happy that we have chosen to do a first look. If we get that feeling again, you’re not going to be able to wipe the smiles off our faces. The only risk is that if we end up so relaxed that we have a nana nap at the alter.

Here's hoping this beautiful calmness stays around for a while!

Invites!

Well, the weekend just gone was the weekend that we wanted to get our wedding invites out by. It was also the weekend that we finally got around to doing a mock-up invite. Even though we've completely missed the 'invites go out' date that we set ourselves, I'm counting it as a win.

 It took us so long to finally do this mock-up. I spent an entire f-ing day looking at fonts... fonts! Seriously... why has a wedding turned me into an insane 'must find perfect font or the world will end person'? Then there was the time spent trying to find a nice yellow paper for the outer pocket-fold.. which we just ended up making white anyhow. There was even a moment where I considered trying to convince Justin that paying $5-10 per invite to get someone else to do it for us would be worthwhile.  But then, like magic, it suddenly worked. I am in love with them. They might not be up to the DIY standards of the DIY goddesses out there, but for two people that quite clearly don't understand the concept of a colour scheme (you'd agree if you saw our house), I am damn impressed.

Ignoring the smudged stamp (whooops), the poor grammar on the 'gifts' card (which my lovely maid of honour thankfully picked up on) and the way too long ribbon, what do you think?

My first Etsy purchase!

I have finally made my first Etsy purchase!!! Well, kind of. I say kind of because I found the lady through Etsy.. but she’s Australian so uses a different site for Australian transactions. Anyhow, that is all beside the point. The point is that Etsy + Cake Topper was always going to equal brilliance... and it did not disappoint.

Topper made by, and photo taken by, Sarah from Enchanted Belles.

Seriously, see that photo on this post? That is our cake topper. You can’t see very well in this photo, but I even sent her some of the hail spot tulle from my dress and she has made the little cake toppers dress out of it! Pretty neat huh? It’s really good too because now rather than trying to explain to people what we will be wearing etc for our wedding when they ask I can just go ‘if we were turned into wooden pegs on our wedding day, this is exactly what we would look like.’

Can’t wait until I get it in the mail! (The photo was taken by Sarah to show me before she sent it).

Life priorities and the new honeymoon plan…

I am still super dooper busy, but thought I’d take half an hour out to give my blog some loving. Sorry I’m a such a sucky blogger lately!  We're about to enter the no internet period of moving.. but hopefully that will only be for two weeks or so!

When I last posted about our honeymoon we wanted to go for a short and cheap break. One reason for this was because we really want to take unpaid leave and do a 3 month or so trip of Europe sometime next year. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while now and, to be honest, I get a little bit jealous with all my friends buggering off to Europe all the time. I guess that’s where life priorities come in though. I may get jealous, but really, we could quite easily do our holiday if we chose to but we always think things through and make the best decision for us at that particular point in time. I think it really is a case of the grass is always greener on the other side because if we were to set our priorities differently, I know that I would be even more jealous of the people that have what we have now. Anyhow, I digress. Honeymoon….

A few months ago my Grandad called to let me know that he and Nan wouldn’t be able to make it to the wedding. They live in New Zealand and are getting very old so I never expected them to come, but I was quite surprised how much effort it sounded like they had put into looking at ways they might be able to come (Grandad can’t fly that far anymore for various reasons and Nan is blind which makes things hard). I know that my other Nana would like to come too, but is getting too old to handle the flight now.

The last time I went back to New Zealand was in 2002 and it occasionally crosses my mind that I should go back and visit… but I always end up deciding that it would be better to go somewhere else instead. We are 99% decided that for our honeymoon we will head back to NZ for 2-3 weeks and spend some of the time visiting my family (it’s awful to say, but if I don’t go back soon it may be too late) and the rest on a camping adventure.

Unfortunately this will delay Europe by another year or so because we'll use a fair bit of leave doing this because it seems silly to just go for one week. I think it would be a good decision though - we’ll see my family and I can show Justin where I grew up. I go on about how our wedding is all about celebrating with our friends and family, so why not extend that to those that can’t make it and at least let my family meet my new husband! It’s definitely one of those situations where you have to sit down and get your priorities right…. and I think that we’ve managed to get them 100% spot on this time.

Now I just need to pray that none of my family have discovered this blog because we aren’t telling them our plans until it is 100% certain….

*Sings* I'm from the harbour, the Hokianga harbour.

As quite as a mouse

I just wanted to pop by and apologise for my lack of blogging of late. I am still alive and I will be back and blogging soon. Between planning a wedding, buying land, moving rental houses (finding somewhere, packing, cleaning, moving), keeping up my gym routine, working full time and still having a life I'm finding it a bit hard to fit blogging in at the moment. I'm still trying to keep up to date with reading all your blogs though. I promise I'll be back soon!
Amy
xxx

Handicraft Mania – Lovebirds

I've been so busy rambling on about other stuff lately that I haven't had time to post any of my Etsy finds.
I love this vase oh so very very much. It's adorable! I hope someone I'm close to gets engaged soon. I think it would make an awesome engagement present.

Lovebirdies Vase from Red Hot Pottery's Etsy store.

The groom has seen the dress *gasp*…

I am so fed-up of people saying ‘it’s your wedding, do what you want’ and then giving us looks when they find out what we are doing. Sometimes I just want to yell at them a little. But I don’t. Maybe I’ll just go all passive aggressive with the non-married ones and give them ‘oh, you can’t seriously be doing that looks’ when their turn comes around. Seriously though, there’s only so much judgement I can take before I start thinking that maybe we are doing this all wrong.

In particular, I get sick and tired of the looks people give us when they ask or realise that Justin knows what my wedding dress will look like. He helped me pick out the pattern for it. He went fabric shopping me. He pinned me into the mock-up and took photos for me. He pinned me into the lining when we did a fitting for it. Hell, he even helped pin some of the lining to the interfacing. I’m sure there will be many more times he will be involved in the making of the dress too.

I just don’t understand what is so wrong with all of this. I get why the groom usually wouldn’t see the dress, but at the same time I don’t get why people can’t be open minded enough to at least consider the way we are doing things before passing judgement.

We were talking about it the other night, and we both think it’s more fun that we are both involved. It is fun going over to his Mum’s house and lend a hand where we can. We also feel that it even makes it a bit more special that he has been helping out with it.

Am I the only one that thinks that this whole groom seeing the dress thing isn’t the biggest no-no in the world of weddings?

How to get people involved?

As I mentioned in my last post, we would love to have as many of our friends and family involved in the wedding on the day as we can. We think that way it just makes the day so much more personal and special. We just don’t know how to ask.

I know that if someone asked me if I wanted to help out with their wedding I would be delighted. I don’t want to assume that everyone else would be as delighted as I would to help out though. I know we can say “If you are interested in helping out with our wedding…”, but I think 90% of people would say yes even if they didn’t actually want to help out, and that’s not the idea of getting people involved.

We came straight out and asked our Dad’s if they would drive the cars and asked the best man if he would MC. Our best man thought about it for a few days before giving us a response, which I’m very happy about because I now know he’s not just doing it out of obligation, it’s something he decided he wanted to do. I just don’t think that everyone would do that if we straight out asked them though.

How would you get/have you got people involved?

What we want our wedding day to be…

Over the weekend we filled in a questionnaire for our photographer. One of the questions was regarding what we wanted out of our wedding day and what we were doing to make our wedding special to us. I thought that I might share with you what we wrote because I have realised that I have got so caught up in the details that I have never shared our overall ‘vision’. (Not that we have much vision.)

"The aim of our wedding, other than to get married of course, is to celebrate our love and our marriage with our family and friends. To us a celebration should be fun and this is what we want for our wedding. We really just want people to come along and have a really good time. If everyone isn’t up and dancing at the reception, whether they know how to or not, we will be very disappointed! It’s going to be a fairly intimate wedding with only about 50 people at the reception -we aren’t the type of people that have 200 close friends.

Our wedding will be a fairly casual affair. The ceremony will take place in a garden, Amy will wear a ¾ length dress (it’s easier to dance in!) and Justin will be going for the suit jacket unbuttoned, no tie look. We haven’t written our ceremony yet, but it will probably be a fairly simple ceremony. We aren’t the most romantic people, least of all in front of a crowd, so we won’t be writing our own vows or anything like that. We have already picked out some our ceremony music. We have picked songs that we love, not traditional weddingy songs. Hopefully this will add to the fun of that day. Either that or it will give the parents and grandparents a heart attack.

We want our family and friends to be involved in our wedding where possible. We think that this makes it so much more personal and special. Justin’s Mum is making Amy’s dress, our Dad’s will be driving our wedding cars (if we can sort out hiring cars) and the best man will be MC at the reception. Hopefully we can get more people involved along the way.

To give you an idea of the way we want to make our wedding special to us, we’ve decided that the traditional guest book just doesn’t suit our style. Amy reads a lot of blogs and has found a lot about photo booths. We have decided we’d like to set one up, with our camera on a tripod, a simple backdrop and lots of props and blackboards so that people can have fun posing and at the same time leave their own personalised message to us. This will be our guest book. We’ve also got a digital photo frame so throughout the night we can load the photos from the camera onto the frame. That way people can see what others have done and also we can keep the frame afterwards to be our guestbook. We can see the messages people wrote every day, instead of only every 10 years when we think to drag out the guest book.

At the start, we mentioned that we wanted to celebrate with our family and friends. This is also one of the reasons that we have chosen to do a first look. You can’t celebrate with everyone if you are too busy off getting photos taken!"

This also seems like a semi-appropriate time to share a photo of us. I decided that if I was going to post a picture of us on the internet, I may as well make it a terrible one. So here we are, during the making of our save the dates, in all our weird glory (obviously this isn't the photo we used on the save the dates);

A weekend of achievement: florist booked!

This is my final ‘weekend of achievement’ post. I think we did pretty well getting so much done in two days!

We decided that we were going to take the advice of one commenter on my last florist post and ask the lady that we got a really cheap quote from to do us up a sample bouquet. This was the decision… until I got cold feet. We decided that I could just send an email off to another couple of florists to get a quote. We knew exactly what we wanted so we could just do it via email and thus wouldn’t take any extra time. The first lady was booked out for that day already.  The second lady called that afternoon and asked us if we could make an appointment to come and meet with her. Damn. I was in a rush on my way to an appointment so my brain wasn’t working fast enough to come up with an excuse. We locked in a date and time for the appointment. On the way home I called my fiancé to let him know and to apologise for my lack of quick thinking.

So last weekend was our appointment. We rocked up at her studio and I immediately liked her. She was my kind of lady. We showed her what we wanted and she said they were hothouse chrysanthemums – not news to us given how many florists we’ve seen. We discussed how many bouquets we needed. We said that we wanted the groom’s buttonhole to be the same flower. These flowers were huge so that wasn’t going to work. She said she could still do it though. Easy, she’d just pull a flower apart so we’d essentially end up with a ‘man-made’ buttonhole. She could also use the concept to make the groomsmen buttonholes and to do a few flowers for my hair.

The photo we showed her had black ribbon binding it. ‘Don’t worry about that’, I said, ‘white ribbon or something is fine’. Then she asked what colour the bridesmaids’ dresses were. We hadn’t officially picked them at that point but I told her that the ones that were currently a possibility were light pink and navy blue. She went and grabbed some of her ribbons and came back and described how she could wrap them to incorporate the colours. I could begin to see us actually having a colour scheme where everything tied in together. I kept telling myself to not get too excited because we didn’t know how much she was going to quote us.

Once all the details were written down she provided us with a quote - $367. $200 more than our cheap florist... but... this lady had ideas and opinions. Justin and I gave each other the look of ‘hell yes’. This was our florist. Yes, she is more expensive but with this lady doing our flowers I know I won’t worry about the flowers again (and the good news for you guys is that you won’t have to hear about our flowers again)!

A weekend of achievement: the photo guestbook

Okay, I am back from insanity…. for now.  Time to get back to the fun, exciting, yay we have actually achieved something stuff.

There are so many options for guestbooks out there. We eliminated most of the options by being fussy. We didn’t want a traditional guestbook because we knew we would stick it away and it would never get looked at. Given that reason, the next logical option would be a signature tree or a signature photo frame. We didn’t want a signature tree because we want messages, not just signatures. The signature frame was vetoed for similar reasons, plus even if we got one big enough for actual messages, I don’t really like the look of them. I googled heaps of options but none of them were quite right so I came used a few ideas together to come up with my own – which my fiancé loves too!

This is what I incorporated into our guestbook:

• My love of photobooths. The budget doesn’t stretch to a professional one though and I’m not sure how a DIY one would work because how small our reception venue is.
• My wish to have an ‘interactive’ guestbook that people might actually get excited about.
• Our wish to have a guestbook that we will have on display in our home after our wedding.
• Our wish to have a guestbook that will also be on display at the reception.

So this is what we will have (logistics of exactly how we’ll work it still need to be sorted);

• People will write their message to us on a blackboard (I will make up/buy some of these).
• They will take a photo of themselves holding up the message on the blackboard (we might not be able to have a nice backdrop though because of the size of the reception venue. We will see. Also not sure how we are going to go with lighting)
• There will be a digital photo frame on display.
• At intervals throughout the night we (well, probably someone else) will upload the photos off the camera to the frame.
• At the end of the night we will have photos of all our friends and family with their lovely messages in our photo frame that we will display in our house!

I’m pretty keen on the idea of funny props to get people more into it but we’re not sure on this one yet.

Anyhow, this idea we’ve had for a while so what did we achieve on the weekend? We bought a digital photo frame. It was easier said than done because I generally HATE digital photo frames. I hate the plastic, I hate the little sensors on the front. I don’t know why, I just do. We managed to find one (on sale) that has a wooden frame and no little sensor on the front – perfect! It’s nice and big (10.4 inches) so hopefully the messages will be big enough to read.

I’m excited! It should make for lots of fun on the night!

 

Image from The Nichols Blog

The Wedding Party Bus (aka Amy is going insane)

There are still 2 things left I need to post about under “A Weekend of Achievement” but I need to pause from that for a second and throw this post in because I AM GOING INSANE! Wedding cars are killing us.

Ages ago we got heap of quotes for wedding cars. We almost died when we saw the cost of them. Because we are doing a first look and also need transport between the ceremony and the reception, in total we need cars for 4.5 hours… which is expensive.

The solution we had was that we were going to book two Audi A4’s from Europcar. The Dad’s were going to drive them and then we were going to use our ‘contacts’ to try and leave them at a house up by the reception so that the Dad’s could drink. We were going to catch a taxi home and go back the next morning and pick them up. Perfect right? I wish.

So today I called up Europcar to ask a few questions before booking. The lady said straight up that she wouldn’t recommend booking through them for a wedding. She said in one instance there was couple that booked an Audi for their wedding and something happened (I think maybe someone crashed it the week before) and they ended up getting downgraded to a yellow Hyundai Getz because that was the only car available. There are also logistical issues. For starters the A4 is a ‘prestige’ vehicle so the driver needs TWO credit cards in their name to book it. I’m not sure about Justin’s parents, but I’m 99% sure that my parents only have one credit card. I asked if ours could be the second credit card and she said no, it had to be the driver. Next I asked about additional drivers. If we were to be additional drivers would be need to be there at the time of rental? The answer was a big fat yes. We can’t do it the day before or anything. That is an issue because I can not be at Europcar and at my house with the hairdresser at the same time. We could hire them for 2 days but that is starting to get expensive.

So with Europcar ruled out I started thinking of other ideas. Basically the only ones that I think are feasible are either;

• Use our own cars (we don’t know anyone with awesome cars)
• Hire a mini bus. Kinda like a limo… but lamer and cheaper.

So far in my mind the last option is winning. We could crank up some sweet tunes to get in the party mood and call it ‘The Wedding Party Bus’ (get it… it’d be like a party bus, but it would transport the bridal party too).Okay, I have officially gone insane. HELP! Any ideas/thoughts would be appreciated.