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.

 

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.

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.

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);

When Plastic Seats Might Not Be Enough

I don’t know what we should do in terms of decorating for the ceremony.

With no pictorial influence this is how I feel:  

We are getting married at Amanda’s Garden, which in my opinion is already beautiful enough. They have about ten seats that we can use for older guests. I think they are green plastic ones, but this is cool with me. I would prefer it if everyone could have a seat but hiring them isn’t that cheap & is an unnecessary expense. Anyhow, I’m sure that people can suck it up and stand for the ceremony because it should only be a short one.

Above: Amanda's Garden

But then I google and I see all these beautifully decorated ceremonies and I get ceremony envy. I worry that green plastic seats aren’t classy enough. I worry that people will get shitty if they can’t sit down. I think that maybe we should create a beautiful aisle.

If you’re having a garden ceremony, what are you doing for decorations and seating?

Top Picture: From Erin Browne Photography

Insert Picture: From The Knot

Bottom Picture: From Elizabeth Anne Designs

Bubbles!

I want bubbles at our ceremony. I think they are completely awesome… but maybe that’s just my inner child talking.

"And if you were a kiss, I know I'd be a hug"

Pretty much the first thing wedding related that we did was start picking ceremony music because we love music and it was so damn fun picking it!

Here is what we came up with – I’m sure it’s not to everyone’s taste but I for one am going to have to try extremely hard not to dance/sing my way through the ceremony. I’m sure more songs will get added along the way and some of these might not end up fitting in anywhere…. But if they don’t we can make sure we put them on the reception play list.

Barry Louis Polisar – All I Want Is You
Bright Eyes – First Day of My Life
Cat Power - Sea of Love
The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You
My Friend the Chocolate Cake – Television Theme #47
Old Man River - The Wedding Song

Half of the songs are actually off the Juno soundtrack. It’s such a great movie and has an epic soundtrack!

 “In my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you; the right person will still think the sun shines out your arse. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with.” .

Ceremony Elements

I was flicking through my emails earlier and saw the email from our celebrant from a while ago which has a huge word document of ceremony examples attached to help us in creating our own.
Prior to meeting with our celebrant I always figured the ceremony bit of the wedding would be flat out standard, unless of course we wrote our own vows, which just isn’t going to happen. I’ve realised now that even without being good with words it is possible to create a unique ceremony by ‘borrowing’ pieces of others ceremonies that do it for you.

Here are a few elements that I love the idea of:

Rose giving ceremony. 

Basically goes a little something like this:

"Your gift to each other for your wedding today has been your wedding rings. This shall always be an outward demonstration of your vows of love, and respect, and a public showing of your commitment to each other. You now have what remains the most honourable title which may exist between a man and a woman - the title of “husband” and “wife“.

For your first gift as husband and wife, that gift will be a single rose.

In the past, the rose was considered a symbol of love and a single rose always meant only one thing - it meant the words “I love you”. So it is appropriate that for your first gift - as husband and wife - that the gift would be a single rose.

Please exchange your first gift as husband and wife.

In some ways it seems like you have not done anything at all. Just a moment ago you were holding one small rose, just as you are now. In some ways, a marriage ceremony is like this. In some ways, tomorrow is going to seem no different than yesterday. But in fact today just now, you both have given and received one of the most valuable and precious gifts of life - one I hope you always remember - the gift of true and abiding love within the devotion of marriage."

I like the last bit where it talks about how in some ways it seems that you have done nothing at all… I think this is a great way to acknowledge that even though a couple may already essentially live like a married couple, the actual act of marriage is still special.
 

Non-standard vows.  

As I mentioned, we aren’t good enough with words to write our own. I personally feel that it can be just as special if you incorporate non-standard vows that have been written by others – as long as it touches a cord with you.  Here’s an example of one I like:

"I call upon the persons here present to witness that I, John Smith, take you Jane Doe to be my lawful wedded wife.
I, John choose you Jane, as my best friend for life. Together, we can accomplish anything. Through the good and bad, I want you to always know that I will be by your side. When you need someone to encourage you, I want it to be me. When you need a helping hand, I want it to be mine. When you long for someone to smile at, turn to me. I will always love you and this is my promise to you."

Involving your guests by inviting them to recommit to a loved one. 

I saw this on Offbeat Bride the other day and think it’s a beautiful idea.

"When we got ready to do our vows Victor, our officiant, surprised us by asking our family and friends to also take the opportunity, should they choose, to quietly recommit to a loved one by holding their hand and joining in on the vows with us. It was a sweet way to share our day with the people we love and so many of them told us how much they appreciated being able to participate in that way."