Purple and Pearls

….ahem…

Apparently today!

Check me out!!

The sun is shining, the temperature is high and we’re sitting outside enjoying what can only be described as a rare summers day in England.

“Does weather like this make you regret choosing to get married in November?” ….Rather smugly I reply “Not at all”

We have a few reasons for choosing November as the month we get married in and the English climate only played a small part in our decision.

Has and I don’t really cope very well in the heat.  I have sun allergies and end up with an unsightly rash if I sit out in the sun too long and Has can’t stand the heat and gets very flustered.  We have been to weddings before where the temperatures inside the venue have been stifling.  The majority of the guests spend most of the evening outside in the cooler night air and the dance floor stays empty.

Then there’s the flip side.  You can never predict what the weather will be like in summer, one weekend you could have glorious sunshine without a drop of rain and then the next could see monsoon storms unleashed on your wedding day.

By choosing November we feel like we have cheated the weather a little.  We know it will be cold and we know it may very well rain.  However one of our requirements for our venue was for it to be both beautiful on the inside as well as the outside, so hopefully getting gorgeous photos won’t be a problem.  We know in November our guests aren’t going to be suffering with heat stroke, or be forced to stand in the rain in strappy sandals and summer dresses.  At least we can be prepared for cold, wet weather and if someone is smiling down on us and we have the beautiful clear, sunny and crisp day I see in my head then that’s a bonus.

Our second and main reason is simple…

The day we decided to make our relationship official was the 8th November 2001.  So it seemed logical to us to get married around that date, as it’s obviously special to us.  Years before marriage was on the cards we would often talk about how we would love to be married in November, I just remember thinking “Well the next 8th November that falls on a Saturday is 2014, and I don’t want to wait that long!”

We always celebrate or at least acknowledge the 8th November every year and we didn’t want to give that up, so when we did get engaged we just knew that our wedding date would fall in early November.

Plus I happen to think that winter weddings are super romantic!

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Sounds like a fab idea huh!?

Yeah I thought so, in fact I wish these were around when I had just started out.  Entering into the world of weddings is scary, so many options, so many opinions, so much to think about! The Wedding Genie, Julie knows exactly how confusing and overwhelming it can be for a new bride so has set up the Bridal Planning Workshops.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Julie and I can honestly say she is so enthusiastic about weddings and helping brides that I just know these workshops will be invaluable.

I’ve asked Julie to tell us a little more about the brand new Bridal Planning Workshops and here is what she had to say, also read below to see how you can win a pair of tickets to one of these fabulous workshops!

Well I am super excited my Bridal Planning Workshops are here and ready to go!  I cant wait to start and help newly engaged brides to be to plan and create a fantastic wedding day which is true to them and on budget!

I was being asked so many questions about wedding planning, things like how do we set our budget?  What do we book first? What should we do tackle first? That I thought why not create a special course where you can come and spend a fun and practical morning or afternoon with me learning how to plan your perfect day.
Weddings are a huge investment (the average being £20,000!).  For an investment that size my course is an affordable, fun easy way, to gain expert help and guidance.

You’ll learn to create the wedding of your dreams, which is personal to you and your budget.  If you are a follower of The Wedding Genie you know it’s not the amount of money you spend it’s how you spend it!  It’s creating a wedding that has your stamp all over it without stress or anxiety.

I definitely believe that you can save at least three times the money you paid to come on our course. Once you know the inside tips and tricks to saving your budget will stretch further than you thought.

Here is a list of what’s included:

• Choosing your Venue – so important to your dream day.
• Theme and Styling – lots of brides are really daunted by this. We make it simple.
• Money saving tips! – Insider tricks to help get what you really want.
• Choosing and Managing Suppliers – wow the paper work! Lets make it simple.
• Negotiating to make savings and add more value to your package or service.
• Wedding Etiquette – Many people have parents who are divorced and don’t know how to handle this.
• Top tips for a stress free wedding day – Brief your bridal team to help your day run like a dream.
• Q&A session. Ask me anything you like and chat to other brides just like you.

On top of all that I guarantee it will be fun, not a stuffy boring seminar but an inspirational few hours spent talking about what you love the most – Your Wedding Plans!

Take Home a Wedding Genie Goody Bag which includes:

• A CD that with everything we talk about. It’s a mini wedding planning software package.
• An Interactive Budget Planning Spreadsheet.
• The Wedding Genie, insider tried and tested supplier list.
• Top Ten Wedding Planning Tips.
• Inspirational Web Sites for great ideas.
• Handbag planner to use to check you are on track with your all important tasks.

The first course is on the 24th October from 10am till 2pm at The Ramada Hotel Birmingham North.   Afternoon tea and refreshments are provided as part of the price too, so bring your Mum, bridesmaid’s or best friend.   Hey your groom might even want to come! More men are helping out with the planning these days.

The cost is £75 or £120 for two. To book a place click here. If this date does not suit you then email or call me and I will update you with other dates in the pipeline.

♥ Competition! ♥

The Wedding Genie is always looking at ways to help, what better way than to give away a pair of tickets to our first workshop? Click on this link and send me your details and mention that you are interested in the workshop. If you are the lucky winner I will be sending you an exclusive invitation for you and your bridesmaid, Mum or best friend.

I look forward to hearing from you and if you want to ask me anything about the course just get in touch.

Yesterday me, my Mom, my personal make up artist and long time good friend Harriet and her Mom (my god mother) Dawn descended on the Bull Ring in Birmingham to shop for make up!

I had such a fun day mooching around the cosmetic counters of Channel, Dior, Nars, Estee Lauder and Mac.  A very lovely lady at the Estee Lauder counter applied the fabulous-can-not-recommend-enough Double Wear Light Foundation.  After a rather late night out the miracle liquid made me look human again and it wasn’t until she applied the Double Wear Concealer that I realised just how dark my eyes were!

Harriet already has a large make up kit so the only other thing we needed was my eyeshadow.  We chose 5 Couleurs Designer by Dior in Amber Design.

We then nipped quickly into boots to grab a pack of individual fake eye lashes to apply at the end of my own lashes for the extra flutter-factor.

Armed with our stash (of obscenely expensive make up!) it was off home again for tea and trials!

Harriet dusted my eyelids, brushed over my cheek bones and finally applied the lashes for a result that I love!

I love that it’s natural and dramatic at the same time.  I don’t look overly made over but my eyes still make a statement.  (I’m sorry the photos are dark, I tried to lighten them up a little)

Actually didn’t want to take the make up off last night and if I could have I would have slept in it!

Thank you Harriet, so much!! ♥

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Hello lovelies, how’s the week been for you?

I’ve had a lovely week celebrating Has’ birthday with cake and a trip to the cinema to see Toy Story 3 and also finally sending out our wedding invitations!

I also had some fab news today that made me squeal… I made the Top 100 UK Wedding Tweeters list! In at number 86 – woop woop!

Plan for this weekend include catching up on my sleep, shopping for wedding make up and hopefully trying it out!  We’re also going out tomorrow night with friends to celebrate Has’ birthday.

What are you getting up to?  If you have a few spare minutes check out this list of lovelies I’ve spotted over the last week.

• I love the relaxed gorgeousness of this wedding
• Purple flowers, purple streamers, purple shoes and purple toes!!!!
• Cute DIY bracelets
• Really elegant black and white wedding
• These cakes = perfection!
• The colours in this wedding are so bright and fun!
• I-scream, You-scream we all scream for Ice Cream
• Cupcakes + Lego = Wowzers!
• A to B
• Love, love, love the colourful details in this wedding
• Save it for a rainy day ♥
• If you haven’t seen this yet – you need to!
• You know how I feel about chalkboards… this makes me melt!
• Strawberry themed bridal shower
• Awesome weather photos from an engagement shoot

Have a good one xxx

Stayed the same boooo!

Definitely in a rut now, it seems like unless I eat a weight watcher meal every night for dinner I don’t get anywhere!

I’m going to be really strict with myself this week with the hope that if I lose at my next weigh in I’ll be encouraged again.

I did a few sit ups and crunches on Wednesday night and I’m paying for it now!  I can’t move without wincing.   In some weird way I like it though, lets me know I’ve worked out and have done a good job!  I’m also going to try and up my exercise this week.  I have my first dress fitting in September so I want to lose the bulk of my weight before I get measured up.

Anyone else in a weight loss rut?  Have any motivation tips?

Right from the word go I knew I wanted to make my own invitations.  For years I’d been making my own occasion cards and my job as a graphic designer made me feel like I was up to the job.

Let me tell you, it wasn’t plain sailing.  I struggled with my own standards and felt like our guests would be expecting something wondrous.  I put a lot of pressure on myself to create an invitation that wowed people.

With the number of brides undertaking the task of making their own invitations on the increase, I thought I’d share a few tips and words of wisdom I’ve picked up along the long road of DIY.

• You can never start early enough.

Seriously, I started my invitations over 18 months ago.  Sure I haven’t worked on them continuously but giving myself enough time to work on them has meant they haven’t been rushed and I’m happy with the way they have gone out.

• Trial and error

I created around 5 different versions of our invitation.  I designed, changed my mind, started again, tweeked and tweeked some more until I was happy.  I thought I was happy with the first design I came up with.  Looked at it again a week later and didn’t like it.  This goes hand in hand with my first point.  Start early and make sure you are 100% happy with your design before you place an order for 100 sheets of A4.

• Create a mock up

Sure you can picture it in your head but until you see it in the flesh, sitting in front of you you’ll never know how it will really look.  It will also give you the opportunity to see how easy your idea is to make.  Doing a mock up will show you the best way to create the vision you have in your head.  Before you place a bulk order buy a few test pieces first.  You’ll be able to see the quality of the product you’re ordering too.

• Ask for help

If you’re lucky like me before you even open your mouth to ask for help you’re bridesmaids, Mom, aunts, friends and various other members of family will have offered their sticking/cutting/folding services.  My advice to you… take it!  I had the idea of sticking flat-backed pearls on to our invitations.  Thinking I had already taken up too much of my bridesmaids time, I decided to tackle the pearls myself.  No word of a lie it took me 20 minutes to finish 3 invitations.  It was at that point that I decided to stop being so silly and take them up on their offer of help and within an hour or so all of the invitations were sitting pretty adorned with beautiful pearls.

• Spell check…. now do it again.

Before printing anything off, run a spell check.  Once you’ve printed a copy, read through it again.  Now ask someone else to check it for you.  I can’t tell you how many times I have studied our invitations for errors but there, 4 days before we were due to send out our invitations, staring at me in the face was a spelling mistake.

• Always make more than you need

When you order your supplies make sure you order over what you will need, it takes away some of the pressure of messing up – which is inevitable!  If you do make a mistake that can’t be rectified at least you have more card/ribbon/embellishments to start over.  It’s also nice to be able to keep one for yourself too.  My other reason for making more invitations than I need is in case somebody from our day guest list declines.  That way we can look at our lists again and see who we can invite to the day to keep the numbers up.

• Number your RSVP’s

This was actually Suzie’s idea.  We didn’t write the names of our guests on our RSVP cards but have left a space for them to name of the people attending.  It’s bound to happen, so if anyone forgets to write on their name we have marked the back with a number which relates to the guest on a separate list allowing us to avoid any who-is-this-from-panics.

I have really, really enjoyed creating our invitations and I’m very proud of them.  Yes it’s been a lot of hard work and I’ve had quite a few strops and why-did-I-ever-start-this moments but I wouldn’t change a thing.  The feed back from our guests has been amazing!  So far everyone seems to really appreciate the time and effort we’ve put into them – so it really does make it all worth while.

My last tip for you would be to enjoy it.  If you do decide to make your own invitations you will be taking on a big task but as long as you give yourself enough time, have plenty of help and keep it simple you’ll have a blast and your guests really will appreciative this little bit of artwork you’ve put your heart in to.

With the wedding eating up most of our money we had decided not to buy each other birthday gifts, but I couldn’t let Has get nothing from me on his birthday!

So, I made him a cake.. a dinosaur cake!

Yes it looks like a 7 year old made it, but I spent hours on it!  The main things is, Has loved it and it tastes yummy!  Good job too because by the size of it we’ll be eating it for months!

Has and I are huge music fans (You may have already guessed!)  During the early years of our relationship, when we had more of a disposable income it wasn’t unusual for us to go to at least 1 live gig a week so as well as the cake I made Has a framed collection of some of our past gig tickets.

It doesn’t home all of our gig tickets, because unfortunately I couldn’t find a lot of our earlier tickets.  We used to keep them in albums and they seem to be hiding!  However Has loved his frame so much he’s now on a mission to find the other tickets and create a few more frames.

The last birthday as boyfriend and girlfriend! Eeeep!

Happy Birthday Huna!

Love you always xxx

A post I have been waiting to write for a long time!  Last night with the help of my Mom and two fabulous bridesmaids Suzie and Hayley the invitations were finished, address, and sealed.  Hooray!

The beginning of the end was last Thursday, even though we hit a stumbling block we were still able to address all of the invitations ready to be posted.

Waiting for the ink to dry meant we had to lie all of the invites out flat… they sort of took over the entire room!

Hayley made the majority of the belly bands last week and finished them off last night

We double and triple checked all of the invites to make sure they were perfect.  I decided to include a small self addressed envelope for our guests to be able to post back their RSVP’s.

Suzie also suggested we number the RSVP’s against a list of our guests in case somebody forgets to put their name on.  That way I’ll be able to cross reference the number to the list and know who has replied.

We set up a wonderful little production line.  I numbered all the RSVP’s, Suzie added the RSVP envelope and double checked all the information sheets were included in the pocket fold, Mom (nicest handwriting!) addressed all of the envelopes and Hayley slid the belly band around the invite and sealed the envelope.

So, here they are finished, completed, done and dusted!  I’m really pleased with how they look, after months of worrying and fretting I can safely say I’m happy with them.  I just hope everyone else likes them!

(Unfortunately the pictures have come out a little dark, by the time we had finished these bad boys it was getting pretty late!  Sorry!)

I want to say a massive, gushy thank you to Suzie, Hayley and Mommy.  You’ve all been super duper fabulous in helping me finish (and start) these invitations and also for putting up with my flaps when things didn’t quite go to plan.

Love you all immensely - you’re the best!