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.

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).

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

Natures Bonbonniere

I used to love gardening but I find that I never have time these days and the worse the garden looks the less I am inspired to go out there and make it beautiful. Occasionally we are forced into action by big, bad, ugly rent inspections. This weekend just gone we found ourselves once more forced into action and pruned, de-weeded and swept our little patch of nature. Seeing the garden looking nice-ish (apart from all the barren spots) has got me wanting to pop down to Waldecks and once more take on the gardening world.

Now, as much as I’m sure you’d all love to hear me drone on about my not-so-green thumb some more, I’ll get to the actual wedding part of this - bonbonniere. I hate bonbonniere in general. They are usual stupid little things that you put money and/or effort into that no-one really appreciates, or they say they do and then just shove them in a drawer for all eternity. Having said that, I would like our guests to take home something from our wedding (other than good memories of course...lol). So what can we do? I like the idea of lolly buffets… people will eat them, if they don’t I will. My fiancé isn’t really keen on this though and that is totally fair enough. When I take off my giddy bride-to-be hat on put on my sensible Engineer hat I completely agree with him, the cost to benefit ratio is crap.

So how about bonbonniere that also double as something else? Ages ago when we booked our reception venue we talked about having live plants as our centrepieces (This thought is back in my head now after all the gardening on the weekend). We aren’t extravagant people so simple decorations are right up our alley, plus our reception venue doesn’t need too much decoration. We were also thinking of maybe rather than one plant at each table, have little seedlings and these can double as bonbonniere. I really love this idea because it has a dual purpose and they won’t go to waste because if people leave them behind we’ll plant them out ourselves.

My only issues with this idea are; 

1. The centrepieces wouldn’t be the flowering kind.
2. Some people wouldn’t want them.
3. Some guests will be from out of town and a seedling would just be a pain in the bum.

My current thought to resolve these few issues is to do the centrepieces/bonbonniere like so (I haven’t discussed this one with my fiancé but he reads this… so let me know what you think of this Justin!);

• Have a potted flowering plant in the centre of the table. Yellow daylilies I think would work well - and they are hardy and easy to grow (plus I want more in my garden so I’ll be planting out those afterwards).
• Have little seedlings of different varieties around the main plant. For a table of ten, we would have five seedling pots.
• Have either in seedling pots (clean ones obviously), or in other little containers/boxes lollies. So for a table of ten we would have five of these also.

This way people get to pick their bonbonniere and because they are doubling as centrepieces the cost to benefit ratio makes it completely justifiable (well, other than the lollies)!

As a guest what would you think of this? 

 Yellow Daylily

Too Cute!

"Too cute". I never thought I would say that about a cake topper but hell, this wedding planning has had me getting excited about things I never would have cared about in the past - fabric, flowers... make-up.
We haven't actually even got cake quotes yet so a cake topper is miles down on the to-do list but started looking at them after me lovely fiancé asked me the other day how much a cake topper that we saw at an expo cost. I love that he has something in mind that he wants and so we'll probably just go with that... but I still had to have a bit of a google and a look on Etsy to see what was out there.
Here are four of my favourites (including the one from the expo - bottom left hand corner).

Top left: Made by Etsy seller, maderasytrapos.
Top right: Every cake topper store seems to sell this one. I just like it because my fiancé rides a motorbike.
Bottom left: From minikinmania. You send them a photo and they put your faces on the cake topper.
Bottom right: Made by qtiff, another Etsy seller. This one is way too expensive for us but still adorable and worth sharing.