Afternoon you lovely lot ;-) Sam is here and she has been super busy. She’s organised her pretty flowers, ohhhh and booked a videographer. But the bit i cannot wait to hear more about is that engagement shoot!! Ekkkk :-)) XOXO Lou

Hello! I hope you are all well and good. Really enjoying writing for WWW… the trouble is… there is so much to write about! My head is filled with wedding-ness, in fact I’m not sure what I will do when the wedding is all over haha. Start planning something else!

Last weekend me and Gary decided to tackle the newly renamed ‘wedding room’, AKA the box room that is too small for actual usage, so it often becomes a bit of a storage mecca. From months of accumulating bits and bobs for our big day… ebay being a HUGE source for most of it… we now had what resembled a jumble sale gone wrong. So both having the day off and no plans for once, we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in. First everything came out. I got an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction, in a squeeeeel kind of way, as I realised I had actually got more sorted than I thought. We had loads of bits and pieces I has forgotten about and it all seemed to sit really nicely together. We then started boxes labelled by area, this is just something to help the venue dressers on the day. Now I love a bit of organisation so this pleased me very much, it was like wedding filing haha! It felt great to check things of my never ending list.

So let’s back track a bit, to last November, after the venue, theme and fabulous photographer had been chosen… our inner wedding psyche started to think about flowers. At first the thought of spending hundreds of pounds on something that would in effect die after a week or so made me feel a bit sick… so I initially began looking at making a brooch bouquet, I started collecting brooches and soon realised that it wouldn’t be so easy. The vintage brooch bouquet craze had bumped the cost of decent vintage brooches right up, even on ebay brooches were selling for ridiculous prices. I kind of lost the will and decided it was not to be. My second thought in a bid to save money was silk flowers, this was short lived as I couldn’t find realistic ones and my patience was wearing a bit thin on the flower front. I bit the bullet decided we would have real flowers! After several visits with actual florists I was left in a state of despair. I had done my research and I knew what kind of flowers I wanted, got some pictures together and thought it would be relatively straight forward to book someone to do our wedding. It turns out most florists did not want to speak to us, as we were ‘too early’. Ok… I understand prices of flowers change, but all we wanted was someone to listen to our idea’s, give some advice, a rough quote and to potentially book them. Bangs head against brick wall. Madness. The thought of flowers were starting to make me crazy. I was just about to give up and grow my own when one of my married best friends (and bridesmaid) Laura recommended ‘About Flowers’ in Widnes, she had used them for her wedding. I made an appointment, took all my inspiration images and trundled off to meet Paula (lovely florist lady). Boy I’m glad I did! We were met with such enthusiasm for our idea’s, we weren’t shunned or told to come back nearer the time, I wasn’t talked out of my idea’s… she just rolled with them and suggested idea’s to make them better. Perfect!! It was like a whole new outlook on flowers, we could of chatted all day. I left feeling amazing, and that’s how GOOD suppliers should make you feel! Can’t wait for our next appointment.

My knowledge of flowers is not great… My fondest flower memories come from what I remember in my Nan’s garden when I was little. Peonies are my favourite flowers, I used to pull the heads off them as a child and get told off, but I loved them so much because they were so big and fluffy… like tutu’s. So straight off, I had to have those. I’d also seen Ranunculus on a blog somewhere, they are like little pretty mini roses, so they were in too. My fave filler is gypsy grass (some people call it ‘babies breath’ but I think that sounds well weird and makes me cringe a bit), I like it because its airy fairy… like fairies :-) The next thing to go in was hydrangea, basically because we needed something blue… and it’s blue. Not sure what the overall look will be, I’m hoping something like this, I’m sure Paula will make it look fab…

Credits: 1. Love My Dress by Chris Barber Photography. 2 + 3 About Flowers. 4 + 5 + 6 Wedding Flowers and Reception Ideas. 7. Natalie Franke Photography. 8. George Mackay Flowers. 9. Passion for Flowers.

The invitations were always going to be a homemade project as Gary’s Mum Carol (aka Mother-in-law-to-be) is a whizz with all things crafty. With her boxes of card in every colour and really cool paper punches in all kinds of shapes… we set about designing our invite template. The main issue for the daytime invitations is that we needed to fit a lot of info on them, venue/times/hotel information. We also wanted to give the guests zero excuse not to RSVP, so we added in a fool proof ‘yes/no… tick a box please’ RSVP slip and a stamped addressed envelope. It should be simple, here’s hoping! We are planning to send them out early about 3 months before (February time) to give people chance to get back to us before we have to let the caterers know how many mouths they need to feed. Here’s a few pictures of our invites in progress… it’s fun to make a mess :-)

I’ve had a really wedding’y week actually. Some weeks are completely wedding free, but this one has been packed to the rafters with wedding-ness. On Tuesday evening we visited a videographer. Now wedding videography is something I was avoiding, I was only aware of bad old fashioned wedding video’s and to be honest thought they were a bit naff… but after loads of our married friends told us that their wedding video was the best investment they made, we kind of felt the need to look into it. I spent a whole afternoon looking for local videographers and watching their show reels. After sifting out the cheese I discovered something… modern wedding video’s can be amazing if done by the right person! It was a revelation! I remember ringing Gary like ‘You know we said we weren’t having a video… welllll… look at this!’ BOOM. They were emotional, beautiful… almost like movie trailers. We watched loads of sample video’s and become more and more intrigued. It was during our wedding video watching marathon that we discovered Tom from Silk Wedding video’s, we literally could not stop watching his sample films, I actually shed a tear on one of them… emotion over load (you can see them on his blog http://silkweddingvideos.co.uk/blog/) . I just had to contact him. Luckily for us he was free on our wedding date – huraay! We popped round to his lovely house to meet him and discuss our day. He made us feel so welcome and at ease, we even watched a few of his new films… amazing. We left feeling happy-happy-joy-joy that we had found such an amazing talented chap to film our wedding. Nice wedding suppliers ROCK!

My second instalment of wedding happiness was delivered during a meeting with our photographer, the lovely Andrea Ellison. It involved giggling, wine, lot’s of pretty magazine tears and mood boards (my mood board fetish has reached a whole new level, I have one for everything). We were mainly discussing our engagement shoot which is coming up in October…. eeeeeeeeeek! We had some fab idea’s, nothing concrete yet, but all will be revealed.

One of the most important things to sort was obviously THE DRESS, it come quite high up in my priority list… but as the search was long and a bit epic I will save it until next time and do a wedding dress special. Oooh little teaser!

How have you found your suppliers? Are they all nice, or have you had problems? How do you feel about wedding videography? I’d love to hear from you!

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