Centrepiece trial run.

So.. this is a trial run of our centrepieces. The pencils in the pots will be cake pops btw ;) Haha! We're not sure quite how we'll end up attaching the pinwheels to the sticks as we HATE the look of them just glued onto the stick. They look so ugly from the back like that. We're also not sure if we're going to keep the bamboo sticks natural or spray paint them a metallic silver. I kind of like the natural bamboo but not 100% sure yet.

The white star shaped thing next to it is a light. We have 2 of those per table, too. We're also going to have a couple of toadstool tea lights (cutting the wicks off so they can't be lit), blue polka dot menus, red polka dot napkins with a blue pom pom napkin ring, tiny wee bottles with pinwheels on sticks and a tag with each name on for the place names, a few ultra mini versions of the pinwheel you can see in the back on my wall (in place of scatter crystals), some lit tea lights and blue chair sashes with red pom poms hanging down from the bow at the back. We want to have quite a busy look to the middle of the table as the setup we're going for leaves a LOT of space in the middle.

All of the pinwheels have been cut, they just have to be assembled and placed on sticks. But that'll need to wait until we've decided how we're going to do the sticks and how we're going to attach them. And for a time when it's not after 4am! I have my sister and nephew over tomorrow (well, today!) and we want to get some photos of the baby so I should probably clean up the resulting mess and get some sleep... Colin and the puppy have been in bed for hours.

A good night & a well spent day.

One bridesmaids bouquet is done! This was quite a challenge but I got there in the end. Trying to keep this post short and sweet as I'm exhausted but once a few wee hitches were resolved, it went great and I think it looks amazing.

And today was a good wedding day! Venue had an open day where everywhere is set up how it'll be on the day and it. is. stunning! The room where we're having our meal had the exact amount of tables with the exact amount of chairs around them we'll need! And it just looked so fab. Remember I told you all about the top table backdrop I wanted but it turns out the other wedding reception in the same venue had put their deposit down on it? I don't know if I told you but I got an email a couple of days ago saying they'd pulled out and it was now available. Guess what? Our room had the exact backdrop (from the supplier I was talking to) and my god, it is beautiful! It's very pricey though... £345! I showed it to my mum on the website and she scoffed at the price. She saw it in the venue this morning and couldn't stop going on about how beautiful it is. So she's told us if it's still available, she'll put a desposit down and pay for it for us! I'm so lucky! After that, it was a trip to hobbycraft and I now have all the bits needed for my bouquet :D

Bouquet supplies:

Buttonholes, table names and menus.

I finally put the boys' buttonholes together this afternoon!  I made 2 of the different combinations and let Colin pick which one he wanted. The other boys will be in the other one except the wee ringbearer; he'll be in the same as Colin.

This is the one Colin picked.

And this is the one the other boys, minus the ring bearer, will be in. Only him, his best man, my brother (who's walking me down the aisle), my male bridesmaid and my nephew, the ringbear will be wearing them.

And a photo on me to show the size!

Next, I designed the menus. These'll be printed on cardstock and placed where the plates will go on the tables as we don't want the plates out until dinner is served! I designed the first two and a lady on the Quirky British Brides facebook group I started up suggested a change. That's the 3rd one. We're going to go for that, but with a red-dominant one too so we can still alternate.

Then I moved on to the table names! We got these frames from Ikea. They're doubled sided and cost just 49p each in the sale so these will have set us back just £3.92! These are the backs of them. The front will have a really simple design in our colours (red and blue if you hadn't guessed!) with a frame for the table name itself. We're naming our tables after The Smith's songs.

That's it for today. Some good progress is being made but I'd definitely still rather be working on my bouquet! I'm hoping to get out to hobbycraft withing the next few days for more felt. Saturday was looking good until I realised it's my birthday! I have a bridal fair, tattoo time and a meal taking up the entire day so no time for shopping.

I think the bridesmaids bouquet bits will arrive tomorrow. Well, the key component to making it at least! So I'll have that to do tomorrow. I'll need to look at the to do list I wrote up to see if there's anything else that can be done now!

Maybe I'll spend tomorrow looking at more hair options? Or maybe I'll do that tonight. I want to design the invites, too. Well... I already have but I'm really not sure about them anymore so I'll see what I can get together as a comparison.

Wedding hair trial.

I have really quite short hair. It's incredibly fine but I have LOTS of it. It's more the length that would/wll cause me problems, though. At the start of planning the wedding, I knew immediately that I didn't want to fork out £100 (minimum) on a trial and then hair on the day. As our budget is just over £2k, that's too big of a portion to throw away. I knew I wanted height, though.

Here are some styles I looked at:

I emailed a couple of hair dressers with photos of me and my hair and asked if my hair was long enough for a style like these, especially the last one. I was told that my hair probably was long enough and that I'd just need to tease it a lot. Now when I was younger, I was quite madly in love with HUGE, messy crazy hair that required excessive teasing. I tried in vain for years as my hair just does not respond to that well. Plus, I'm not a huge fan of teasing... it can't be that great for your hair, surely? So after searching around for a bit, I came across a product called Hair Boostias. I was a bit dubious at first but I ordered a black set anyway to try them out... what's the worst that can happen, right?

They're basically little bits you stick in your hair and then drape your hair over it for as much or as little volume as you like.

Well, they arrived and I had a little play and I am in LOVE with them. They're so great! They come in a few different sized and for the amount of volume I wanted, the largest size was perfect. I had a little go with it and my hair was just to short to reach over right to the back. My hair grows incredibly irritatingly and the hair on top is a lot shorter than the rest! By the time the wedding rolls round, it'd be long enough to go right down but then I was left with just a little stub of a ponytail behind it that I could do literally nothing with. So my mum picked me up a set of cheap £5 hair extensions that come in 4 different widths wefts. In this trial, I placed the boostias where I wanted it on my head and then placed the smallest weft of hair right in front of that "backwards". So rather than the hair falling down the back of my head, it fell down the front. The boostias itself sits on top of the clips and hides them. Because the boostias is quite far back, I had enough hair at the front of the weft to clip that over and cover it. The extra length in the ponytail from the extensions was the perfect amount for me to create a flat, pinned up back but I'm not sure that's what I want. I'll give it a go another day with the wider width wefts so I have more hair to play with and see what I can do. So here it is! I put this up in about 5 minutes so it could look quite a lot neater but it was just to get the general idea!

I love the plaited headband! I'm really happy with how it turned out and how it looks, I'll just take my time next time to get it neater/sleeker. Although I am kinda digging the slightly disheveled look to it! So yes, this style is a definitely maybe! I'm still on the hunt but I do love this.

Adventures of a bouquet!

Well, I had a little play around tonight.

Oasis bouquet holder thing... Got the wet one. Only one they had! If it proves annoying/impossible, I'll order the dry one.

Lace trim.

Felt flowers.

Pinwheels.

As I said in a previous post, buttons will hopefully be ordered tomorrow. Until they arrive, I have lots more felt flowers to cut!

My bouquet.

My bouquet has been a bit of an ongoing battle so far. But here we are with the reduced budget and plans for a pinwheel bouquet that I'd make myself.

Then I went google image searching during an extreme case of boredom and fell in love with button bouquets all over again. Oh dear! But I think I've come up with a pretty good compromise; a pinwheel and button bouquet. It'll be mostly buttons with a few pinwheels dotted around. Red and blue buttons, some topped with novelty types. It'll be interesting, that's for sure! And I'd also decided to scale it down than what I'd originally wanted.

Anyway, my mum was heading out to Fort Kinnaird and invited me and Colin along. Of course, we couldn't pass hobbycraft without going in.

We came out with an oasis bouquet holder, lace trim, floral wire, some small artificial flowers to provide different texture, card stock and glue. We didn't have to pay a penny; she's far too good to us. Now all that's left is to order some buttons which she's coming round to do tomorrow. I've spent tonight picking out the ones I want.

As for the bridesmaids bouquets, I think I'm going to get them the same bouquet holder but without the lace trim and use florists wire for putting the pom poms on. God knows when we'll get an opening in the budget for that, though!

I'm off to look at more button and pinwheel bouquets and read more tutorials.

Starting up a business.

I've always been very creative. I've been making and creating things for as long as I was physically able to and, since starting the wedding planning, I've realised there's so much I could do with this. As part of a forum of lovely ladies, each creative post made by me was constantly followed up with the advice to get myself out there and make some money from it. I've always been the type to want an etsy shop. I've always been the type who constantly needs to create and do something. But before last night, I was of the impression that literally all that was needed was a few products for inital to start up to show what I can do and a shop name. How wrong was I?! It turns out there is, in fact, a whole legal side to it that needs to be taken care of. Whilst I have every faith in me being able to do, we can't afford to be playing about with what little money we have coming in whilst still planning our wedding. So from here until November, I'm going to research research research, find the best advice I can and get my creative hat on to produce some examples and things like shop names so that I'm literally ready to go as soon as the wedding is over. Excited? Very much so. My plan? Wedding stationery.

I was lying in bed at stupid o'clock this morning unable to sleep and dawdling about the world wide web when I decided to see if I could make a go of something. I'd already pretty much decided that I didn't want to stop at just weddings but wasn't sure if I'd be able to come up with anything else. This is what I produced: A baby shower invite.

I'm actually really proud of it! It's something that I would buy. It's a little different. A little bit quirky, I think. Which is exactly what I want from my business. Anyone could design the super simplistic, modern wedding invitations you see around the place a lot but these are so much better in my opinion. I definitely feel if I carry on like above, I'd be a good rival to a lot of those sellers on etsy! I suppose it helps that I'm in Britain; I haven't come across many more "quirky" stationery suppliers so far. I'm sure they're out there! I just haven't found many. In fact, I can only think of one off of the top of my head and she's very well known in the Rock n Roll Bride blog world. Not that I can remember her name!

The sweetie table.

Got out all the jars and things we've collected for the sweetie table this morning to try out a few wee layout ideas and came across one we both like. When you view the photos, our cupcake tower will be on the blue box at the back :)

The little teapots in the front there will hold things like powdered sugar should our guests wish to dust a little something on their cupcakes.

We still have one jar to the left of the box to fill. It's currently holding some paper stars Colin and I have made. Also have the jug to fill! We're debating over whether to have those edible straws in their or to use it to hold the red and white and blue and white paper straws for the drinks.

We'll have a couple of these, decorated in our colours with a pinwheel where the bow is, on the table to. We're thinking the right hand side as you look at the photo, at the back. They're for cake pops!

These will go on the same side of the table but at the front. They're just polystyrene cones. We'll be using those swizzlers double lollies though and will completely cover the cone with them! There will be 2 of them.

See that blue box at the back of what will be the sweetie table? We're going to make another 2 of those but rectangular, thinner and shorter. They'll be placed either side of the box holding the cakes right at the very back of the table and will hold pink lemonade in bottles like these. We're going to order personalised stickers to place where the ones in the photo are. They'll also be used on sweetie bags.

To the left of the sweetie table as you look at the first photo, we'll be having this! We were debating over whether to have it alcoholic or not but we think we've decided against that. There will be kids at the reception and we want them to be able to buy it too! So we may make a sign to put next to it, recommending the adults pour themselves one then head up to the bar and stir in a shot of vodka!

These cups and sweetie bags will be placed just in front of the machine. Although I've since found cups that are the same as the kind you get from McDonalds but are a pale blue and white stripe! They're more expensive, though so we'll have to check the budget before working those in!

We plan on having all of this on one table with, hopefully, a baby blue table cloth. We're hoping to have as many pinwheels, toadstools and POM POMS(!!) all over the place as possible and have just stumbled across this image which looks to be incredibly easy to make and cheap, too! We have a few months with a little bit of money left over so we should be able to do this quite easily! We're not allowed to hang anything from the walls, though so this will go right at the back of the table and leaning against the wall as a sort of backdrop.