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!

Top Tips for a Budget Wedding

Did you know that the average wedding costs around £18000!

I wanted to bust the myth that a wedding had to cost an arm and a leg and so far I'm proving it!

I think people have an image in their head about what a wedding should look like or include and it really is an all rules out of the window kind of event. Anything you want goes!

Pinterest is my best friend for inspiration, DIY ideas, decorations etc, and eBay is what makes a lot of them a reality! Did you know I got my wedding dress off eBay? It was brand new with tags in, never been worn and I got it for a quarter of the retail price! There are loads of bargains to be had if you keep your eyes peeled!

I also found 60 glass jars on eBay, all with pretty ribbon around the rim and got them for £12.75! These will all have candles in to give a romantic cosy feel to our reception venue. I've also got 100 organza favour bags for £3.95! I'm currently trying to do my own version of a 'Wedding Day Survival Pack' or a 'Hangover Survival Pack'.

I thought they were really cute and useful ideas rather than a bag of sugared almonds which usually get left on the table. I've currently got these working out to cost approximately 70p per person. I'll be doing the kids a different pack which will included a colouring book, pencils and maybe some bubbles and a toy. I'll do a full post on these once I have them done :)

There's loads of brill downloads from wedding ideas magazine that you can look at here which are really helpful. Their budget planner is by far my fav one that I found and have been updating the spread sheet constantly and trying to beat the original budgets that I set for everything!

Amazon is also a good website to check out as well as your local 'used' websites as a lot of people sell things like table decorations after getting married for much cheaper than they bought them for!

Let me know your tops tips for finding things on a budget! I'm always on the lookout for new sites and places!

The National Wedding Show

 

Warning: Picture Heavy Post

So this weekend me and mother bear went to the National Wedding Show!!!

It was very exciting and there was so much going on I didn't know where to look most of the time and ended up going down a few aisles twice because I'd missed some stands!

We actually ended up buying something from pretty much the first stand we went to. It was a teeth whitening stand and the lady was giving out "samples" to try. It was £40 and apparently has 120 treatments in the bottle and the whiteness lasts approximately 2 years. She said if you put the bottle in the fridge it should last 4-5 years so we would be able to a "second" lot of treatments. I am currently trying this out and will do a review once I've finished :)

I spotted my dress on one of the stands but it must have been a second hand stand because there was makeup on the inside of the dress, stains on the underarms and a pull across the middle of the netting. I know you can't do anything about the netting but you would have at least thought they would have got the dresses dry cleaned!!

 

We actually went there to find ideas for bridesmaid dresses and I was really disappointed with the lack of...well..anything!! There were probably 10 bridesmaid dresses in amongst the thousands of wedding dresses! Do they think we are all bridezillas and only think of ourselves?!

We watched a presentation on body shapes (I came to the conclusion I was a triangle SLASH hourglass. Yes, the woman emphasised the word slash as well :') Straight after that there was a fashion show/catwalk and we decided we would stay for some of it and ending up watching the whole thing! They had different themes such as Winter Wonderland, Blushing Brides, Purity, Country Roads, Highland Hills, Rustic Scenes etc..(disclaimer, those might not be the exact names lol I can't remember what they were!)

Here are a few snaps of the dresses in the show.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which one was your favourite? :)

Time for a trim!

So I finally decided it was about time to take some "serious" length off my hair. I have not had my hair cut by a professional for around 18 months! The horror! Haha, I am more than happy to trim my hair myself as my very first job was a Saturday girl in a hair dressers which made me relatively confident about the things I could get away with on my hair.

I trim my hair (and by trim I mean less than half an inch) once every 3-4 months or so but since I experimented with ombre I have noticed that my ends aren't in as good condition as before. So when I say "serious" I actually mean I only took around an inch off.

Let me tell you, to someone who is desperately trying to grow their hair to a deadline, this is A LOT! It killed me. But I had to tell myself it was for the best. After I cut it, I put some argon oil treatment in and whacked it up in a bun all ready for bed :) The argon oil left my hair a little greasy so I washed it and dried it and was very impressed with my straight cutting skills!

My hair now looks a lot thicker and I managed to get rid of pretty much all the split ends! I keep spotting a little one every now and then but I just snip it off with the nearest pair of scissors. Since I don't use too much heat on my hair I'm hoping to get away with 2 or 3 months till I next feel the need to trim it. I do want me hair to be in as good condition as possible until May to help it grow so I will be keeping a very close eye on it and giving it a lot more love and attention than I normally do!

Here is a pic showing my hair journey from when I got engaged (second picture) up until June this year :)

Weight Loss Check In

My weight loss journey started in May and so far I've lost 10lbs!

I want to lose another 11lbs for the wedding but since I have already bought my dress and it's at home, I will keep trying it on at regular intervals to make sure it still fits. If it looks like it will start to become too big for me then I will have to stop my weight loss. 

The biggest thing I have to credit for my weightloss is an app called MyFitnessPal.

I haven't necessarily been 'dieting' but MFP has made me more aware of how much I was eating and the number of calories in things! Did you know there are 405 calories in a tesco chocolate muffin!? I sure as hell didn''t!

I still have quite a lot of naughty things like Subway, McDonalds and takeaways but I have them less often and make better choices when I do.

It's also good to add friends on there as it's really encouraging when you've had a bad day and logging in to see peoples positive comments. If any would like to add me my username is: stacybee92

Here are a few motivational quotes for today :)

 

Blushing Budget Bride

So here's a quick update on the wedding so far. 

Me and Jake are getting married on the 30th May 2015. 

I have already got my dress, veil, shoes, chair covers and sashes, transport for me and the bridesmaids, church, reception venue, paid the honeymoon deposit, DJ, photographer, sent my save the dates and got a few bits and bobs for me to attempt some DIYs. How much have we spent so far? £1690.30! 

I want to bust the myth that a wedding has to cost a fortune. We have a modest budget (£5000 preferably including the honeymoon) but I don't want my wedding to feel in any way cheap or that it was done on such a small budget. 

Things we still have to sort? Food, drinks, invitations, bridesmaids dresses, shoes and accessories, groomsmen outfits, shoes and accessories, flowers, church and reception decorations, table centres, seating plans, hen and stag do and various other things I can't think of off the top of my head. 

One way we're trying to keep costs down is by DIYing as much as we can. 

Here is my first attempt at a DIY table centre:

I painted some glass bottles we had leftover and this is what I came up with! We have mirrored plates for them to stand on and miniature candles to be scattered around them but for a first attempt I think this came out brilliantly. Unfortunately, the flowers don't do this justice but they were the only ones I had lying around :')

I also have around 60 glass jars to do something with so I may very well end up going with those as centrepieces rather than the bottles as I think they will look more romantic. What do you think?

Pinterest is my absolute best friend at the moment as well as YouTube, Google and eBay!

I have my shoes and I have also bought some flatbacked pearls and craft glue. I will be attempting a DIY pearl shoe with (potentially) a jewelled 'I do' on the bottom :)

There'll be a post up soon on them as I have nearly finished pearling them so stay tuned!

 

Nice to meet you!

Well hello there! It's Stacy, by the way :)

I'm getting married in May 2015 and really loved the idea of documenting the entire process to give me some lovely memories a few years down the line. I am hoping to DIY as much as I can to help keep the cost down and make the day just that bit more personal. If I happen to help anybody else in the process then that's a bonus!

I will be posting all about my wedding - DIY's, budgeting tips, diet tips, hen night etc as well as the odd nail pic (I love doing my own nails!) and anything that may crop up.

Please feel free to leave me comments and any suggestions and I'll see what I can do!




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