Our wedding florist Lee Farmer has been shortlisted in this year’s Hitched.co.uk’s Breakthrough Awards!
A quite brilliant floral designer, Lee made Nat’s bouquet, the flowergirl and bridesmaid’s bouquets, the buttonholes and Nat’s amazing hair-piece. You can vote for Lee at the following link, as well as your pick of cake designer and photographer too; all that’s required is an e-mail address! Simple!
Guests from the States, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, cake toppers from Spain, decoration from America: we had a wedding with several international flavours! Click the post title to see a Google Map of where different elements came from. It might not mean very much to the casual viewer, but for us it’s a great reminder of where in the world it all came from!
It’s our first anniversary today!
For our paper anniversary, both Natalie and I chose literary-themed gifts for one another. Nat bought me The Steampunk Bible, an absolutely gorgeous compendium of all things steampunk, one of my favourite sci-fi sub-genres, whilst I bought her a Kindle e-reader. We’ve recently moved house and have been agonising about where we’ll be able to put all the books we currently have - hopefully the Kindle will help!
Our wedding made it to Offbeat Bride!
OB is an amazing wedding resource, especially if you’re open to some more non-traditional ideas for your wedding, and they point you to some amazing services from around the globe.
We’re very proud to have been featured and to get such lovely comments too! Here’s our link.
Haha, how fun does this look! And it would certainly save you a penny or two if you used it!
We haven’t had much to talk about since…well, since we got married! But that’s a poor excuse for not blogging! And what with all this talk of weddings of late (trees? We did that first, Wills and Kate!), what better time to bring you up to speed.
So what have we been up to? House-hunting really! We’ve found a place that suits us both and are in the latter stages of moving, just waiting to cross some T’s and dot some I’s. We’re so looking forward to moving and spending our gift vouchers we received as wedding gifts! We asked our guests to provide us with vouchers, as we knew we’d want to use them to furnish a place once we had one to move into together; that way, we can make sure that people’s contributions go towards something we both love and will use.
And for wedding stuff, Nat is still planning on blogging about her fabulous custom made wedding flowers and headpiece!
We received the final parts of our wedding photo package this week: our wedding photo book and our selected 8” x 10” framed print!
Part of the package that James Keates offers is that we got to choose a hundred of the 550+ photos that James and Katharine took on the day to go into a leather-bound book, by My Publisher. In fact, we had actually received the book last week, but it wasn’t perfect - there was a quite sightly scratch on the first page and due to the fact that FedEx had tried to deliver it FIVE times before we finally got to take it, and in that time the box had obviously been left sitting in some wet conditions, the pages had become warped by the damp. So Nat sent James an e-mail telling him, and he was straight onto My Publisher to get us a new replacement copy (at no extra cost), which arrived soon after in pristine condition.
We also got to choose a picture that would be framed, and we both loved the one of us by the car (that we also had used on our Hitched entry!) that we chose to have that printed and framed. It’s a silly picture, and we’re both playing up, but it really summed up the playfulness of the day for us.
We’ve been so impressed with the quality of not only the pictures that James and Katharine took but the overall service that they provided. We really can’t recommend them enough if you’re looking for a good wedding photographer, and as we mentioned before, we’re so glad that we spent what we did on getting some great pictures to remind us of our wonderful day.
Now we just need to find some wall space to hang our picture…
We received a brilliant e-mail today: our wedding has been added to the online annals of Hitched.co.uk!
Hitched is a great wedding resource site, most specifically for UK couples, but also a good source for inspiration of many different types of weddings. Nat has been in communication with Lorraine at Hitched, who sent her a VERY detailed questionnaire; Lorraine has then edited down and insert the relevant text into the different sections…sounds complicated, but it makes sense when you see it!
We’re very proud of our wedding, and very proud to be featured on Hitched too!
UPDATE: Our wedding was Hitched.co.uk’s Featured Wedding from the week of 20th December!
Hitched’s homepage has had a bit of a facelift recently too, and as part of their Inspiration series’ for brides (and grooms), they’ve categorised weddings by colours. Obviously with the amount of greens that featured in ours, a number of our pictures appear in that section. We’ve already seen our Order Of Service, our placeholders and our table planner!
So with our official wedding pictures DVD through, we’re able to use the pictures to make up some thankyou cards!
Nat’s found a service that Tesco provides for making your own A6-sized cards; you can get 40 cards printed up with an image of your own choosing for £24. There are lots of other services around, but this was one of the more affordable options for us. Tesco’s setup is really straightforward and very easy to follow. You’re very limited to what you can do in terms of personalising the card - for example, you can’t add any text, either to the front or inside of the card - but you can still manipulate the image a little, including changing the colours to black & white or sepia. Still, if you have a strong enough image that speaks for itself, you don’t need to add text. Of course, Nat and I have the somewhat arduous task of writing out a whole thank you message inside each card! The turnaround time with Tesco was about two weeks, which seems quite long, but their communication is brilliant - you get e-mails for almost every step of the process: a notification when the order’s been received and dispatched. You get plain white envelopes included within the price too, which we thought was really good value.
We’ve chosen the above photo as the image on the front. We thought it said the most about us and about our day - it’s out of the ordinary and it’s quite clearly us! We had such a fun day, and we thought that this picture summed it all up for us.
Our wedding cake toppers featured in this week’s Monday Montage set on Offbeat Bride! We’ve both spent many an hour looking over the amazing weddings that get featured on the OB site - if, like us, you’re planning on doing any aspect of the wedding yourself, it’s a great resource for DIY ideas and well worth bookmarking.
It also goes to prove that no matter how crazy, off-the-wall or weird your ideas many seem to some, it can be done. A very inspiring site.
We knew that we’d be so exhausted after the wedding that we didn’t want to dash straight away on a honeymoon. We also needed some time to try and catch up with some of our visiting guests, a couple of whom had jetted in from New York just for our wedding; so instead we chose to take a ‘mini-moon’, a short three-day break over the weekend after the wedding.
That meant that wherever we went, it’d have to be somewhere in the UK and relatively close to get to - we didn’t really want to spend half a day driving to somewhere and not having the time and energy to appreciate it!
I managed to find a cottage for rent in Bourton-On-The-Water in The Cotswolds and as it was off-season, we were able to get the house at a reduced rate. We chose to take a cottage rather than a hotel or bed-and-breakfast as it would give us a bit more freedom to come and go as we pleased. The cottage itself was basic but had all the amenities you could ask for but it was more its positioning within not just the village but the general area that made it as much of an appeal. It was perfectly placed in the village, literally a few seconds walk from the main street of the village between a restaurant/coffee shop and a traditional sweet shop and less than 30 seconds stroll to the pub!
Bourton is famous for (amongst other things) its shallow river that runs right through the heart of the village that you can wade through (on a warm day, otherwise the water is freezing!). It’s also home to Birdland, a great bird park, just a short walk from the village that made for a great Saturday out, to watch the penguins being fed. Bourton is also filled with restaurants, pubs and tea shops, so there was no shortage of places to go out to eat and drink at. Hey, all those coach-loads of Japanese tourists can’t be wrong, right? There were dozens of sightsee-rs around, especially on the Sunday when it was really sunny. It could’ve been at the height of summer!
We’ll save for a proper holiday away later, but the mini-moon was a perfect break away and an ideal way to start our wedded life together. The only downside was having to leave such a beautiful and picturesque place to come back home and back into the routine of things!
Here’s just one of the amazing pictures that James and Katharine took at the wedding. We’ve spent this morning going through the 500+ images, trying to pick out a hundred that James will put into a coffee table-style hardcover book for us, as part of the wedding package that they offer. It’s a lot tougher than it sounds!
We went through the whole set - James has already provided us with a DVD of all of the pictures, that are now ours to do with as we choose - and managed to trim it to about 170 pictures, then to 120, then to 105 and had to make some really tough choices about exactly which ones we want. In the end, it came down to the fact that this book is for us, not necessarily family or friends, so those other pictures can always go in books we can produce ourselves, using a service like Blurb.
We really can’t thank James and Katharine enough for their outstanding work and professionalism; they captured the day so perfectly, and more importantly captured so many parts of the day that we just didn’t see whilst caught up in the whirlwind of the event. The cost of a good photographer can make up a big chunk of your wedding budget, but we’ve heard of so many couples regretting that they didn’t spend more on their photography. If you’re looking for a wedding photographer, our advice is to save up and find a good one: James and Katharine come highly recommended!
