Wedding Update: 12 Weeks To Go!

Oh my god, where has the time gone?! I feel like it was only yesterday when I was sending out my Save the Dates and we had aaages to plan everything! Now, there's only 12 weeks left and I feel like there is still so much to sort!

A quick rundown of things that I have managed to tick off my checklist so far are:

Dress, shoes, suits, bridal gifts, chair covers, DJ, photographer, reception venue, church, table centres and transport and the total for all these is around £2300.

There's still rings, hair accessories, cufflinks, church and reception decorations, place cards and table plan among other things that I can't think of off the top of my head.

There are some obvious things that aren't on either list like cake and food and that's because we have booked them but don't have final costs yet. The food is definitely the most expensive item and the suits have actually come to more than my dress!!

I have finished pearling my shoes and I will get a post up about how to do it yourself very soon! I recorded me pearling a section of one of the shoes as it's hard to show what to do with pictures but I'm not sure if I'm confident enough to actually put it up! We'll see!!

DIY Message in an Egg

 

I got the idea for this from Lindy Tsang, better known as BubzBeauty when she told Tim she was pregnant. I thought it was such a good idea and that it would be a brilliant way for me to ask my cousins to be my bridesmaids!

You will need:

Eggs

Paints

Paper

Pen

A small sharp object (A drawing pin or something similar would be best)

Bowl

Scissors

Ribbon (Optional)

Method:

1. Take your eggs and your sharp object (in my case I used a sewing stitch picker) and VERY carefully poke a small hole in both ends of the eggs. At this point, I didn’t actually think this would work so didn’t take any pictures!

2. Get your bowl and blow into one of the holes so that the insides of the egg come out of the other hole and into the bowl. This takes a little bit of time to build up the right technique and for all of the yolk to come out. After I had done it, I ran my eggs under the tap to get some water inside them and then blew it out again to make sure they were clean inside.

3. You will need to leave your eggs in a warm room for a few hours (preferably overnight) to make sure that the insides have completely dried out.

4. You can now paint your eggs in whatever pattern and colours you want

 

 

5. Get your paper and cut it into a small thin strip. Write on whatever message you want, I went with “Will you be my bridesmaid <3” and role it up as small as you can get it and poke it through one of the holes. You can tie some ribbon around the eggs if you want to pretty it up a little bit more. In the picture below I left the notes half poking out of the hole so that you could see them. You will want to push these all the way in before you give them to the recipient.

 

6. All that’s left to do now is to give them to whoever you have made them for! I only have 3 eggs because I asked my Maid of Honour whilst I was visiting her in Bournemouth and she is the oldest so didn’t really think she needed one! I visited all 3 of my cousins to give them their eggs and watched as they cracked them open to read their message. They all absolutely loved it!

 

 

Would you use this method to ask your bridesmaids? Please let me know if you try it out!

DIY Wedding Invitations

 

How much do you think it cost me to make 70 invitations? Go on, guess!

Whatever you guessed, you’re probably way too high! It cost me £4 to make my invitations!

I am very lucky as my Mom got the card/paper and envelopes for free from where she works and my friend designed the layout that I wanted into a PDF file for us to print. The only thing we had to buy was ribbon.

Now I know that a lot of you won’t have the luxury of being able to get free things from work but you’ll still be able to save a lot of money by doing your invitations yourself. I’m so happy with how professional mine came out. You would never guess they were handmade!

If you want to give these a go yourself then keep reading.

Things you’ll need:

Card

Matching Paper

Envelopes

Ribbon

Printer

Scoring Board (Optional)

Sticky Tape

Double Sided Sticky Tape

Craft Guillotine (Optional)

Scissors

 

Method:

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is to design the layout of your invitation. Mine was all one sided so could have easily been done in Microsoft Word. Once you’re happy with the layout and have printed a test piece to make sure it’s right, go ahead and print all the outers for the invites. Mine simply had “Wedding Invitation” our initials, names and date of the wedding.

 

2. Once you’ve got them printed, you can either use a scoring board to make the folding a little bit easier and to make sure that you are folding them in the exact same place every time or you can just go ahead and fold them if you don’t have access to a scoring board.

 

3. Now you have them folded you need to cut the ribbon into strips. Once these have been cut, you need to position them where you want them and then stick them down using normal sticky tape.

4. Using the double sided stick tape you now need to fold over the left hand third (as looking at it from the middle picture above) to cover the ribbon and to make it into a card. I used the double sided sticky tape on the top, bottom and down the side in order to make sure that it was securely stuck down.

5. As you can see from the above picture, we toyed with the idea of having a bow on the front but we preferred the simplicity of the invite without it. You now need to print out the inners of the invites. I wanted every persons name to be typed out rather than putting a space for each name to be hand written but if you would prefer to hand write the names inside then that’s fine. I did this is Microsoft Word and had to print out a couple of test sheets to make sure I got the alignment right. Don’t forget to do two different inners – one for the day guests and one for the evening guests. Unfortunately, I forgot to get a picture of them before I stuck them in!

6. If you have a craft guillotine then you can use this to cut your inners to size and to make sure that you have straight lines. My cutting skills are really not that great so I used the guillotine option. If you don’t have a guillotine, then you can use a pair of scissors.

7. Finally, you just need to stick the inners into the outers using a strip of double sided sticky tape and then that’s the invitations done!

I haven’t posted a picture of the inners for privacy reasons but the wording we used is as follows:

Together with their families

Jacob John Warrilow & Stacy Bates

would like to invite

………………………….

to celebrate their marriage

at

………………………

reception to follow at

……………………..

Please RSVP by April 30th 2015

 

If anybody gives these a go, please let me know, I would LOVE to see!

50 Facts About Me

Lets kick start the New Year by letting you know a little bit about me!

1. I wriggle my toes ALL the time
2. I have had laser eye surgery
3. I don’t like the taste of water
4. I broke my leg when I was 5
5. I am terrified of spiders
6. I am also scared of the dark
7. I love watching cartoons
8. I met my husband to be at a dance class
9. Zoella inspired me to start my blog
10. I panic if I don’t have my phone on me
11. My favourite colour changes with my mood but mostly it’s lime green
12. I prefer bare feet to socks, but hate it when they’re cold
13. I dropped out of 6th form after my first year
14. I get freckles on my lips when I’m out in the sun
15. I have heterochromia
16. I can solve a rubix cube
17. I can juggle – badly
18. I’m a decent drawer
19. I met Jake when I was 16
20. I will listen to a song on repeat for days if I like it
21. I go “clubbing” about 2-3 times a year
22. I have never smoked a cigarette
23. I cry when I’m angry
24. I really regret not sticking up for myself more in school
25. I have a younger brother
26. I have my belly button pierced
27. I don’t have any tattoos
28. I’m an Aquarius
29. I LOVE Benedict Cumberbatch and James McAvoy
30. I sleep on my stomach or my side – never on my back
31. I am ridiculously forgetful
32. I work in accounts
33. I don’t really drink tea or coffee
34. My worst habit is picking my lip
35. I rarely get stressed
36. I’m always happy and smiley
37. I spent 2 years of my teenage life without canine teeth
38. I’m cold 90% of the time
39. I get moody when I’m hungry
40. I’m a very messy person
41. I don’t have may friends
42. I used to get called hamster cheeks at school
43. I laugh when I’m nervous
44. I go silent when I’ve really hurt myself
45. I can be really healthy for about 4 weeks but then I get really bad cravings and have to binge
46. People who don’t know me would say I’m shy, people who know me would say the opposite!
47. I lose my temper quite quickly
48. When I’m in a really loud room I make a strange noise in my back of my throat
49. I am doing my level 4 AAT
50. I’m a secretly competitive person

So there are my 50 facts! Were there any that surprised you?

Happy New Year!

 

Welcome to 2015!

If you’re anything like me, you’ll start off the New Year full of the best intentions to stick to any New Years Resolutions you have picked and then come the middle of January you’ll realise that you’ve broke at least half of them!

So this year, instead of picking resolutions that I know I’m not going to be able to stick to (giving up chocolate, crisps, biscuits etc) I’ve picked ones that will help me be happier in life and things I enjoy doing (but perhaps don’t do them as often as I should) and to live life to its full potential.

Here are my new years resolutions

1. Read more

I used to be a total bookworm and I love reading so a couple of Christmas’s ago I got a Kindle. I loved that I could get books for cheaper that in the shops and I instantly downloaded and read a TON of ebooks! However, this last year its really slipped. I don’t think I’ve picked it up for a good 6 months! If anyone has any suggestions for books they’ve enjoyed, please leave me a comment so that I can check it out!

2. Draw more

I have a sketchbook that Jake bought for me and some good pencils but again, I don’t think I’ve picked either up for a few months. I’m mid way through drawing Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and I really should finish him. I can’t sit and just draw a full picture in one go, I have to put it down and go back to it otherwise I mess things up. I have already marked the next couple of pages in the book with people who I would like to draw so I should really sit down and start it again before I go back to drawing stick people!

3. Go to the gym at least once a week

I actually enjoy the gym when I get there. It’s getting there that’s usually the problem! I have a gym buddy and when we both go it’s great, but she has a very busy job/lifestyle so it’s not always possible for us to go on a set day each week.

4. Eat healthier

As I have been trying to lose weight for my wedding (13lbs down!) I have been inevitably eating healthier. But I have actually found that I really enjoy eating healthy and so I want to try more foods and see what else I like that I never thought I would.

5. Go outside of my comfort zone

I have a habit of saying I won’t like something before I actually try it! I think that I know what I will and won’t like and won’t try anything if I think I won’t. So this year, I want to try and go outside of my comfort zone. This could be with trying new foods or trying new experiences. For Christmas, Jake’s stepdad got the boys and their girlfriends tickets to use this big zip wire thing on Bournemouth pier and the thought of it scares me! But I really want to try it and you never know, I might find out that I’m a bit of an adrenaline junky!

6. Try to blog at least once a week

I already know that this is easier said than done. I don’t lead a particularly interesting life and so don’t have much to write about but I have a lot of interests and I will be doing a lot of wedding planning now that it’s less than 5 months away so I will have some nice DIYs to blog about and give people hints and tips on how to do their own budget wedding!

So there are my 6 New Years Resolutions and I will try and keep you updated on how they go throughout the year which will give me extra motivation to stick to them! What are your resolutions?

First Snow of the Year

So yesterday, we in England had our first snow fall of the year! It lasted around 1-2 hours and was then washed away by the rain. Always the best kind of snow if you ask me!

I don’t like it when it sticks to the roads as I really hate driving in it and everything seems to just grind to a halt! It seems that nobody really knows how to deal with snow here…

I spent this Christmas down in Bournemouth with Jakes family and being down south, the weather really wasn’t Christmassy in the slightest. We walked back from the pub at around midnight on the 23rd and it wasn’t even that cold! I had a blazer on and a scarf! No gloves, no earmuffs, no coat…its clear the weather was trying to lull us into a false sense of security as this week apparently its meant to be FREEZING!

On a plus note, being down south meant we were in the perfect place to spot Santa in his sleigh delivering all his presents! The International Space Station (ISS) just happened to be flying over our part of the country on Christmas Eve and so I got to go outside with my nephew and show him Santa The people in the house next door were also doing the same thing! I said to him “can you see Santa?” and his reply was “yes but I can’t see his reindeer” I swear kids are just so cute!

I’ll be posting more often again now as wedding planning is being kicked up a gear (5 months to go!) and now that I have my new laptop (my old one broke in November) so keep an eye out!

Spider Free Home!

As someone who is terrified of spiders, this summer/autumn has been absolutely horrible! The disturbing size of the monsters that have been occupying my house left me scared of being home alone in case one decided to make an appearance!

After 2 monsters in one night I decided enough was enough. 

I'd seen some reviews on a plug in spider repellant but at £25 I was a bit reluctant as I hate spending money unnecessarily. Especially on things that I'm sceptical about them working. 

I found someone on eBay with good feedback and they also offered a money back guarantee if your house wasn't spider free after 45 days. Win! It did warn that there could be increased activity in the first week or so as the spider vacate but I could cope with that if it meant I wouldn't see any again!

I plugged it in on the 5th October before I went to visit my mom and the image I had in my head when I got home was like the scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets where all the spiders are all in a conga line across the floor :') safe the say, that isn't what happened!

I think we had around 4 spiders (massive ones as well!) in the first week which was as expected but then we didn't see a single one after! It was only this week that I saw 2 small (and I mean tiny) ones lurking around. I am soooo happy!!

So the one I ended up getting is PestBye Advanced Spider Repeller and I got it through eBay. 

It has a variable frequency so it works on thing other than spiders but I've just put mine on a fixed one as we don't get anything else. 

If you don't want to spend £25 then other things I've heard work are conkers, peppermint, tee tree oil, lemon and certain plants all give off a smell that spiders don't like. I do have 2 conkers on my bedroom windowsill and they've been there longer than we've had the plug in and seemed to do the job but it could just be that there were more spiders downstairs than upstairs!

Let me know what you've tried as you can never be too prepared when it comes to spiders in my opinion!!