Bridesmaids' Dresses

We've chosen black for our bridesmaids dresses, since our colours are black, cream and red, but one of my bridesmaids doesn't suit red, and I didn't want them wearing cream. They're doing such an honour by being my bridesmaids, and the last thing I want to do is make them look anything less than beautiful, so if it doesn't compliment them; I'll find something that does.

But black is nice too, and although many people banish black from their weddings; it's becoming increasingly popular. It's sophisticated, smart and sexy too. I've promised them that they can change into something else in the afternoon anyway, so if they feel they look too boring or lacklustre, they can wear something more colourful after the ceremony.

We're hoping to find them something knee-length, or something slightly shorter. The style doesn't matter so much to me; I want them to be as comfortable and beautiful as possible. It's also going to be impossible getting them together, as one lives a few miles from me, but is really busy, and the other lives in Ireland and has a gruelling study schedule, so can't take time off to fly over, and with the honeymoon later this year, I can't spare the leave to fly over to her. I've therefore said I will give them money for a dress when they find one they like. so my bridesmaids won't look the same, but they're different girls and I love them each for very different reasons. I'm happy to celebrate their differences! I'm thinking they will look something like this:

Jewellery

I always wanted to wear pearls on my wedding day. Someone asked me why I'm not wearing dangly earrings, or diamante etc, and I told them it's because I want my look to be simple and understated. I think pearls are really elegant, and perfect for a wedding. But I have to admit, it's been hard to find tiaras that have both pearls and diamante (my dress has diamante)


This is a bracelet I got from Westwood Rocks, made of freshwater pearls threaded onto cream organza ribbon. The bracelet is quite long, meaning I can wrap it around my wrist twice before tying it in a bow. This is the only item I will be wearing on my wrists, and I wanted it to be as feminine and non-clumpy as possible:

Hairstyles

I will be wearing my hair down for the wedding, since I spend so much time with it up. My hair falls in small curls, so I've been looking around for hairstyles that might work with my hair:


And I will be particularly concentrating on this one:


I had a meeting with a stylist, telling her my horrible problem with frizz (eek!), and this was the end result:


It's nice, but within 10 minutes it had frizzed up. I don't think she took me seriously when I said I had a frizz problem... I'm booking another appointment with a different stylist in the hope of getting it a little closer to the example (photos to follow).

This was the tiara I had bought, but I've since decided against using it. It was the only one I could find that used both pearls (which I'm using in my jewellery) and diamante (which is on my dress). I found it in Accessorize, and it was a snip at £8:


And these hair jewels (which I am still intending to add) will be put in my hair:

Wax Seal

We ordered a wax seal online, with our initials. We used them with red wax on our invitations.



This was a piece of blu tack I was experimenting with, and I made it look more like ceramic in Photoshop. Unfortunately I don't have a better image of it:

The Wedding Night

We will be staying at my dad's house for our wedding night, but we have been given what we think is the nicest guest bedroom. The room is painted in pastel pink, with a huge window that overlooks the street, as well as having a dressing table and a beautiful window seat where you can just sit and watch the world go by. If I could spend all my time there, I would!

Reception Venue

We are having our wedding reception at my dad's house, which is only 5 minutes drive from the ceremony venue. We will be given pretty much free reign over the house, and there will be a marquee in the garden, in which we will have a band playing, along with a buffet and hog roast

Ceremony Venue

This is where we will be getting married. It's only small inside, so we will be having family and a couple of friends only. Thankfully (in my opinion) they've re-decorated since these photos were taken. The room is now more subtle in tones, and the "altar" as such is now in front of the stained glass window, instead of at the other end, as shown below.

RSVP

These are the RSVP cards we sent out to our guests. Unfortunately when I sent out the invitations, I forgot to specify a return by date, so now I have to spend time calling round everyone. Never mind!

Invitations

Figuring it was about time I got to grips with Adobe Photoshop, I designed our invitations myself at home. It took me a few hours to get it just right, and I uploaded my design to Vistaprint, and had 100 of them printed onto "Oversized Postcards". The design was very simple and straightforward; I just put a red border around one of our engagement photos, then had them printed.

Once printed, I purchased 90gsm vellum, which is similar to tracing paper you used at school. I bought the vellum from Craft Paper & Card on Ebay, and printed the invitation text onto it, ensuring I had time to press them under a heavy book for a day or so (as when printed on, vellum seems to react to the heat by curling).

Once the vellum was pressed, I used a regular hole punch and punched two holes at the top of both the postcards and the vellum sheet, fastening them together with a red ribbon, also purchased from Ebay. Voila!

Fonts

The font we used on our wedding stationery was Chopin Script (pictured below). Since Microsoft doesn't come with this font as standard, I downloaded it from Dafont, which is a free site, requiring no sign up process, and really easy to use.

Wedding Cake

This is a photo of a cake design we found in a magazine. Hubby's stepdad has offered to make the cake for us, which is saving us so much stress and money. He's made three wedding cakes in the past, and they've all been really good. The cake we want is basically this design, except the colours will be red and white, and the lillies will be substituted for roses. The bottom layer will be fruit cake, which, although we're not fans ourselves, it's a tradition in the UK to have a fruit wedding cake. The top layer will be lemon sponge, which is a tried and tested recipe by Delia Smith, which tastes absolutely incredible.

Shoes

I have these shoes in black and white, and they're the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn, and feminine too! I'm not good with breaking in new shoes, and since I have a high arch, my feet often feel strained from the lack of support in heels, so I prefer to wear flats like these. In the summer months, I'll be wearing these shoes around 80% of the time, so well worth the investment.

Unfortunately, they don't make them in ivory or cream, and the white clashes with my dress, so, continuing with our red theme, I am choosing to be a little mischievous and wearing red patent shoes! The colour fades to darker towards the back of the shoe.

Garter

I've actually had this garter for about 6 years. Hubby said I was jumping the gun, but I saw this in La Senza and absolutely loved it, so I bought it. I'm glad now, because so many of the garters I've seen have either been really expensive or really rough to the touch.

We won't be doing the garter toss, so I only have one of these. However, I have bought a second garter; for our joint stag and hen night (details on this page)

Honeymoon # 2

We will spend 2 nights in San Francisco, staying at The Handlery in Union Square; which happens to be right next to Saks! While we're there we hope to visit Alcatraz, see the Golden Gate Bridge, sample some fish at Fisherman's Wharf and experience the Californian way of life. It will be the first time either of us have been to the States, so we're really excited.


We then fly out to Honolulu. We will be staying in at the New Otani Kaimana on Waikiki Beach on Oahu for 7 nights. We're told Waikiki has everything, so we hope to have a varied week going on various excursions, including a visit to Pearl Harbor.

We will then take the "hopper" over to Kauai, where we will be staying at the Resort Quest Islander, which is situated beside a coconut plantation for a further 7 nights. We're told Kauai is much quieter, so we will be looking forward to a week of relaxation on the beach, as well as exploring the local area.

We will have a couple of days together after getting back home, to get over the jet lag and to do all the laundry before heading back to work!

Honeymoon # 1

Immediately after the wedding, we will be taking a few days out to go to Bath in Wiltshire. My dad has a holiday house there, and he's letting us stay there for a few days before we head back to work.

Our official honeymoon doesn't start until late August 2009. We booked with Thomas Cook, who were absolutely incredible, and I highly recommend them. We always wanted our honeymoon to be the most incredible trip, to the most incredible location; and we've found it! We will be going to San Francisco and Hawaii. The quote for the honeymoon surprised us both; coming in UNDER budget, and what's more; it was a twin centre holiday, staying in both Oahu and Kauai, with an amazing stop-off in San Francisco. The advisor was so helpful, and she put in so many hours finding flights and hotels for us.

Collecting My Dress

This is the day I collected my wedding dress. It's been a bit of a nightmare with sizing, since I bought it when I was at an all time high weight-wise. I assured them I was going to lose, but they have to order based on your current measurements, so they ordered me a size 18.

Four months later I'm a size 10/12, which means it's literally hanging off me - which is why I look like I'm struggling to keep it around my boobs in some of these photos! I've got another couple of months until my fitting, so I've been told to stop losing weight, otherwise they can't guarantee they will be able to take it in enough!

The dress is now being stored at my mum's house wrapped up in a duvet cover in a bid to stop the cat getting to it! I just want to wear it every day...

Wedding Dress

I found my dress the first time I went dress shopping, and I found it at Pronuptia. We never intended to actually buy anything, but just to browse - I'd actually been considering RENTING my dress!

I've been trying to lose weight over the past year, without much success, so I thought if I could see myself in a few dresses, I could get the motivation to lose more. But speaking to the assistant in the boutique, we realised that we only have a six week window before the wedding rush begins in January.

Telling her my budget, I caught her look of uncertainty, but we managed to negotiate, and she pulled out a selection of dresses for me to try. She was very professional - I didn't even have to tell her my size or style; she just picked a few dresses that she knew would compliment my figure.

The first couple of dresses I tried on were okay, but nothing special. The fourth dress was amazing, and it was the one I chose. It's a style I've always loved, but never thought I could realistically have, so I was happy to find that it was in my price range. Well, my price range once I'd agreed to double my original budget!

I've heard of women trying on dozens of dresses and not finding "the one", so I hardly expected to find my dress the first time I looked, let alone within an hour of arriving there! They're happy for me to pay monthly for the dress, which is an additional weight off my mind. In May, the dress arrives into store and I begin meeting with the seamstress.

My dress is made by Sincerity, and it's called "Nepal", or style number 3331. It's a strapless A-line ivory satin gown with a sweetheart neck and a chapel train. You can find more details here. Looking it up on the internet, it doesn't really look like the dress I tried on, but perhaps my memory is different. The one pictured is white, and mine will be ivory. The one pictured also has the red trim, collar, straps and choker, which I won't be having.

I recently asked Hubby what sort of gown he thought I had got, and he found a photo on Google which was the spitting image of my dress. I guess he knows me better than I thought he did, even though he's always said he would love me to wear a completely red gown!





I maintain that the press photos look nothing like the dress itself, so here is a photo (that I took myself), of the material. The colour's a little darker than reality, but you get the picture.

Wedding Rings

We found our wedding rings at H. Samuel for the bargain price of £250. We had been on the look-out for rings for a few months, but our tastes differed so much that we had trouble agreeing on designs. Hubby wanted matching gold bands, but I wanted white gold, and I have a thing about thinking that the two golds clash when beside one another. For a while we thought we'd never agree, and it got a bit irritating, because Hubby kept demanding that the rings be matching.

On the way home from work one day, I passed H. Samuel and saw a pair of matching two-toned, yellow gold and white gold rings in the window, and strangely, they seemed perfect. When I showed Hubby, and he loved them too!

Engagement Ring

This is the engagement ring Hubby gave me. He bought it while we were living in Hubby's Homeland, and he managed to get "mates rates" as he knew the shop owner. We spoke about marriage in the past, and Hubby and I had discussed rings, and I'd always said I wanted a diamond discreet enough so the wedding ring would still be able to sit immediately beside the engagement ring. Because some diamonds are so huge, the wedding ring sits a way from the ring, which I don't like.

In the end, Hubby bought me this white gold 0.05 carat diamond ring, and it's perfect. However, after 4 years of being engaged, it's now looking less than perfect. I've asked H Samuel (the jeweller we bought our wedding rings from) to polish my engagement ring a couple of weeks before the wedding.

About The Wedding

You always hear about these women who have been dreaming about their wedding since they were a little girl, but that wasn't me. I never dreamt of my wedding, because I never thought I would be the marrying type. How things change!

Within a year we were talking about marriage, but at seventeen years old; I was still so young. When he proposed in 2004, we still knew the wedding would be a long time off - we both wanted to get some kind of career under our belts, and I was moving back to the UK after spending a year in Hubby's Homeland, and we wanted to make a commitment to stay together despite the distance, and engagement seemed the way to go.

When we finally started thinking about the wedding in 2008, we realised we had very similar ideas of what we wanted. I mean, I wanted to get married in somewhere like Loseley Park or Cain Manor, but we just couldn't afford it. So we settled for getting married at the register office and having a really simple reception. I wasn't prepared to compromise on the dress (but I was happy to rent) or the photography (but it turns out we got a good deal, for free!), but other than that; we were up for anything.