Skirt love. Part one.

So I mentioned in one of my last posts that I am on the hunt for the PERFECT wedding dress skirt for my own wedding dress.

I know I want ‘puffy and fluffy’ (at my age you can get away with it!), but there’s a lot of different types of ‘puff and fluff’ to choose from. Yes, its a bit over the top and princessy, but I couldn’t imagine wearing anything else!!

Here are a few of my inspiration photos (don’t forget to ignore the bodices)..

I don’t know whether to go for a straight but fluffy skirt (like the last two photos), or to have a ruffly fluffy skirt (like the first two). Decisions…

I love my wedding planning scrapbook!!

I have to say, I LOVE my wedding planning scrapbook! Well, its not so much a scrapbook anymore, but a full on ring binder!

I keep everything in there, and I constantly add cuttings from magazines into it. I’ve found it really helpful when trying to ‘put together’ the theme for our wedding; with my folder I can keep all my millions of ideas in one place and refer to them instantly without having to trawl through hundreds of magazines looking for something.

I know its quite geeky, but I’ve divided everything into sections to keep it tidy. This also helps when speaking to the wedding party, your wedding coordinator at the venue and other suppliers.

Its also a great keepsake. I’m sure once Mr M and I are happily settled down into married life I’ll look back through it and laugh at my crazy ideas or scoff at how fashions have changed over the years. But most of all, it’ll be a fab reminder of the love and effort that has gone into planning our special day.

Here are just a few photos of my wedding planning scrapbook…

One of the things I’m really glad I’ve done through the wedding process, is creating a ‘wedding style brainstorm’ (see 4 photos above). I sat down and really thought about all the different elements I imagined would be included in our wedding day, and put them onto paper. That way, I could gather ideas really easy as I always had something to remind me of the foundations of our theme.

However, what you see above isn’t the final stage of completing my wedding planning scrapbook. Oh no – this is only the beginning. We have another 569 days to go until we get married..this is just the start!

Custom-made wedding dress

My wedding dress decision has been a bit of a backwards and forwards battle.

When I first got engaged (and when I was completely naive about our wedding budget), I thought I’d be spending upwards of £1000 on my dress. I’d still love to spend that much on a dress, but it is NOT going to be possible.

Soon after that initial naivety, I came across a wedding dress listed on a wedding forum that I really liked. After some consideration, I bought it for the bargainous price of £100! Then I made the mistake of going into a wedding dress shop with my Mum and found two different dresses that I REALLY liked.

I knew I couldn’t afford the prices they were asking, so contacted local dressmakers to see what they’d charge. The result? Approximately 60% less than the price the dress shop was asking for!! Brilliant, I thought! Much more affordable!

But now, we’ve just bought a house and all my wedding savings (including the dress fund) has gone on paying for that, which means I probably don’t have any other choice than to wear my £100 dress. The problem? I really don’t like the skirt – its not my dream dress and I’m not happy or comfortable wearing it how it is at present. So, I’ve been back in contact with the local seamstress and asked her if changing the skirt is possible. AND IT IS!!!! For the grand cost of around £100!!! So I CAN have my dream dress for around £200!!!

Changing the dress won’t be happening till next year, when the wedding is nearer and the alterations can be done at the same time.

Just got to choose the perfect skirt now….

Wedding decoration shopping - thinking outside the box

Mr Mr and I popped into our local garden centre today because we didn’t have anything else to do (that’s a sign of getting old by the way!), and we found some FAB wedding decorations!

Okay, so they weren’t labeled as ‘wedding decorations’, but I could totally imagine then being part of someone’s special day! They were selling wicker hearts in all different sizes and colours, vases, martini glasses, pottery, gel beads, silk flowers, candles, bunting and all kinds of other lovely stuff!

It is definitely worth checking out what your local garden centre has to offer- especially as the price isn’t automatically bumped up with the mention of the W word there…

Budget woes

Errrggg. Budgets are horrible things!

Mr M and I were pretty much on top of our budget; we’d been saving money from our wages and it was adding up nicely. That was up until recently. Some of you may know that Mr M and I are in the process of buying our very first house. That in itself is AMAZING, but it has meant that I’ve had to use 99% of the wedding fund savings to pay the extra bits needed to get the house-buying process going.

We now have around £600 of the wedding fund left – with about another £9000 to pay. O.M.G.

Luckily, it would seem that having to postpone our wedding at the start of the year for an extra 12 months has been a bit of a godsend. Although we were really upset about having to re-arrange our wedding date for a whole year after our original date, it’d now seem it was fate. We now have 18 months to re-save the money, which theorectically is do-able, rather than 6 months if we had have kept our original date.

I’ve paid around £1500 to various different companies, and bought things for the wedding already, so that is definitely a help, but now being £5000 down, we’ve got to go back to really scrimping and saving to avoid putting the wedding on credit cards.

Inevitably, something will end up going on the credit card, which isn’t what we wanted to do. But hopefully it’ll just be something small, rather than a large chunk.

However, I am now even more determined to cut down on what we originally anticipated we’d spend by finding even more bargains and deals!

Earlier today, I made a list of areas we could possibly save on. They were:

Confetti

Groomsmen suits

Bridesmaid shoes

Bride’s underwear

Bride’s accessories

Hair and make-up

Wedding rings

Hotel for wedding night

This altogether, comes to over £1700, so realistically, I’d like to get it down by a few hundred pounds. The Groomsmen’s suits come to £600 on their own though!! Saving money on confetti should be easier; I could either make this myself using tissue paper, or buy pre-made paper confetti. Originally I was going to buy real petals which would have cost around £50-60, but I could cut this down to around £20 by buying paper confetti. And we don’t have to have a hotel room for our wedding night, we could just go home! That would save us another £100. I don’t really want to scrimp on the wedding rings though. Well, I don’t want to scrimp on mine! Mr M will only be wearing his when he’s not at work (he has a very manual job), so he’s already said he only wants a cheap one! I however, will wear mine everyday so I want something special.

I have a feeling that the calculator is going to be my best friend over the next few months…

Debenhams Bride and Bridesmaid knickers

Debenhams are now selling sequinned Bride and Bridesmaid knickers!

The Bride knickers are ivory, and the Bridesmais ones are pink!

They are £6 each, and if I remember correctly, they are part of the 3 for 2 deal! They’d make nice little extra presents if you were creating goodie bags for your girls as thank you gifts!

Heres the links for you….

Bride: http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prod_10001_10001_158010605285_-1?breadcrumb=Home%7EtxtBride+knickers

Bridesmaid: http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prod_10001_10001_158010605305_-1?breadcrumb=Home%7EtxtBridesmaid+knickers

Colour scheme mood boards for iPad, iPod touch and iPhone users!

So as I’ve recently mentioned, Mr M and I are in the process of buying a house, and yesterday I got a bit ahead of myself and started to plan the colour schemes for the different rooms (saddo, I know!). 

I was doing this on my iPad, after downloading a free app called Dulux Colour Concept, which is basically a digital scrapbook with access to all colours within their range of paints.

So what I was thinking, is that this’d be a PERFECT tool for planning and developing your colour scheme for your wedding!

You can add your own photos (i.e. you could put pictures of your venue, centrepieces etc) and then use their colour palette and find colours of paint that match your scheme! This would be a fab way of helping to decide which to go for if you were stuck between two different colour schemes!

Here’s an example of one of the ones I’ve made for our house..

And what’s better, is that you can create as many different ‘pages’ as you like, and then email them to your other half, venue or wedding planner!

Plus, as it is FREE you might as well have a go…