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.

 

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!

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!

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: 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

Pre Ceremony Photos, 'First Looks' and Why They Rock!

Over at Getting Hitched there is talk about photographers at the moment as they have just booked theirs! In the post, it mentions that they will be having photos before the ceremony so that they can spend more time with their guests. This has me excited because it is what we are doing also! I couldn’t express my excitement enough in one little comment so I thought I would do an entire post about pre-ceremony photos… this also allows me to digress and share my excitement about what they call a ‘first look’.

Before meeting with photographers my fiancé and I had talked about the idea of doing pre-ceremony photos to allow us to spend more time with our guests. In our opinion our wedding day is really a celebration with our family and friends and well, you can’t celebrate with them while you’re off elsewhere having photos taken. We weren’t too sure about it though because we didn’t really want to see each other before the wedding. We decided that we’d at least discuss it with our photographer and see what her opinion was on the matter. Once we’d talked to her, I was sold (and my fiancé was too after a day to think about it)!

She explained to us the concept of a ‘first look’. It goes a little something like this:

• The groom meets the photographer at the location at an agreed time (his groomsmen can hang out in the car drinking or something until it’s bridal party photos time).
• The bride rocks up a little bit later and meets up with the photographer around the corner (the bridesmaids can sit around sipping champagne).
• The photographer makes sure the groom has his back turned and gets the bride to walk up behind the groom.
• The photographer tells the groom to turn around… and there you have it, the first look.

I am so very excited about this for many reasons:

• As previously mentioned, the guests don’t have to hang around or start the party without us after the ceremony.
• The first time we see each other will be a much more intimate moment. It’ll just be me, him and the photographer.
• We can take our time to enjoy the moment because I won’t be walking down the aisle trying not to trip over.
• We can express how we feel with words because we will be close, not at opposite ends of the aisle.
• We will have time to really let it all sink in!
• It provides the opportunity for some amazing photos with raw emotion showing through.

I think it’s something that every bride and groom should at least consider. I know some people wouldn’t want to do it this way, but there’s so many benefits that it’s at least worth a thought!