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At last! I am nearing the half-way point of the Great Tissue Paper Pom Project, so now seems a suitable time for an update on this, my biggest DIY. Thanks to fabulous Bridesmaid, C, and various other friends and helper-elves, Friday evenings are now known as “Flower Ball Fridays” and we WILL complete this monster project in time for the wedding… somehow! Please excuse the use of mirrors in the following pictures – it makes me feel though I’ve made twice as many (it’s good for morale) 
Just a few of the tissue poms and their glass candle-stick holders
Lately I’ve been trying to decide what we should give our guests as a favor to thank them all for making the time to share in our celebrations… I was eager to incorporate a fusion between the Mister’s Mexican heritage and my own Italian heritage by baking and packaging “Mexican wedding cookies” – a variation of which are also commonly served at Italian weddings. I just love this idea for how to package them, courtesy of Martha Stewart Weddings:
However, adding baking dozens of cookies in the week before the wedding just seems like the potential straw which might brake the proverbial camels back (a view given by my Mum, and given the longer-than-my-arm list of other DIY projects for the wedding, I can see what she means!). So with that view, I decided to fall back on my other favourite idea – the candy buffet! Read the rest of this entry »
Howdy folks, I know, long time no postie… I have an excuse honest! The Mister and I have been taking some well-deserved time off, my lovely folks took us away for a holiday in beautiful Yorkshire!
Mr and not-quite-Mrs tramping around the countryside…
Besides gallivanting around the Dales National Park, and eating lots of cheese, I also made some progress on a few of the DIY projects for our reception. Our fingerprint tree Guest Book, and more tissue poms for our centrepieces. But today I want to talk about colours – and our wedding day palette in particular. Read the rest of this entry »
Geddit? Centrepiece-inspiration! Although I am worried the title of this post sounds somehow, um, ‘sweaty’ but nevermind! On with the pictureliciousness!
Remember waaaay back when we found our blank canvas venue, and how I mentioned my idea for table-decor? Well, the great bargain vintage candlestick hunt of 2010 is officially OVER! Back when I was first searching for inspiration, I fell in love with this:
source – why yes, you’ve seen this before!
Talls ones, short ones, simple ones, extravagant ones. Nope, I’m not talking about men (heh) but centrepieces! Our venue comes with 18 6x2ft trestle tables which we will be using for our wedding breakfast. The question is, how to lay out and decorate these tables to turn a plain old village hall into a fantastic reception space? The answer? Approx 60 feet of polka-dot cotton, 24 cut-glass candlesticks and the mother of all tissue paper pom-pom projects!
Let’s rewind…
Shortly after we booked our reception venue, and while I was searching for inspiration to help me ‘let go’ of my visions for a rustic barn-styled event, I came across this image:
Yesterday we had a meeting with our potential caterers. They’ve come up with some awesome ideas for our wedding breakfast menu (but that’s a story for another day). One of the questions they asked was when are we planning to have the ‘toasts’ – before, during or after the meal. My instinct is to save them until after the food; people will be hungry by the time they’ve spent an hour milling about on arrival at our reception so why make them wait longer than necessary to chow down? As I thought about it I suggested that perhaps once people were seated with cups of tea and coffee after dessert would probably be the best time for speeches – until I realised people would have cups of tea and coffee to ‘toast’ with and not glasses of champagne! This is where my mum jokingly said, “well you can have tea and toast then!”.
Well who says you have to serve champagne in order for people to make a toast? Who actually LIKES champagne anyway? Sure people will drink it if it’s there, but actually is there any other reason to buy/serve it than because tradition dictates you should? Heck, people can raise their teacups to us if they like, and if they don’t have a drink to hand they can applaud us can’t they?!
Is champagne really necessary at a wedding?
Having relinquished the rustic barn styled venue I was feeling a little bit down and well, miserable! So I went back to look for some new inspiration to get myself ‘pumped’ about our chosen venue. Financially, I knew we’d made the right choice – mentally I was still in need of some enthusiasm.
personal photo – our “blank canvas” venue
So, once boy-meets-girl is done and the deal is sealed, what’s next? In our case, we were faced with the decision of not only where to get married, but which CONTINENT to do it on! Ultimately we decided to marry in the UK, where we’ve chosen to live for the foreseeable future.
In the end, it didn’t take all that long for us to settle on a reception venue (finding a ceremony venue was simple, but more on our awesome church later). I’d be secretly (or not-so-secretly) dreaming about what our wedding might be like for a good long time before we actually got engaged, so I had a pretty good idea of what I thought I wanted. Or so I thought. At that point in time only three words could do: Rustic. Vintage. Barn.
I was in love – capital L.O.V.E with the idea of a rustic styled barn reception to follow our church ceremony. I even found a few suitable venues…
