My Wedding - The Stationery

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

All the bride-guides tell you that stationery is super-important because it's the first indication your guests get of your wedding style. Now it's really easy to just put that down to gumph, and say to yourself that no one really cares what the font looks like on your invite, but I LOVE stationery, so I'm choosing to believe this particular bride-guide rule. As a consequence I have spent hours and hours looking at the various different styles and colours and fonts. I've considered the wonderful world of letterpress, and quickly turned away from it on account of expense. I've looked into DIY, I've searched Etsy, I've looked at the US stationery blogs Oh So Beautiful Paper and Paper Crave, and I still haven't decided what I'm going to do. There's just too much good stuff out there. My brain is full to busting of paper, and I'm still only halfway to deciding. On my good days, this is all part of the pleasure of planning a wedding. On my bad days, when I'm feeling broke, it's just another thing to stress about. Today was a bad day {£600+ on a plumber's bill - ouch!}, so I'm deliberately writing this to get my creative joy back.

I quickly decided against the generic British wedding invitation. They're gorgeous, they're classic, but I'm all about being original, so I'm in the market for some serious creativity. Letterpress stationery uses heavy card, and presses the font into the paper, before filling it with ink. It creates the most gorgeous effect and looks expensive, mainly because it really is super pricey. We're talking £6 an invite. So that was out. I love the idea of lots of little tags and accessories and stamps, so that opening the invitation is a bit like unwrapping a present. Check out the pictures {above} from MaeMae Paperie, and you'll see what I mean.

My emphasis is on a natural, garden feel to the wedding, so I'm drawn towards the more rustic, eco-friendly paper. However, I also love sage green, and the shutters of the Chateau are green, so stationery in that shade would be a hint towards the location. Wood is a major trend this season, and I'm all for using different materials to keep your guests guessing. You see - too many choices already!

Follow Studio {below} is probably my favourite stationery boutique right now. It's an Australian outfit, and they use these glorious sludgy colours and organic fonts. The only problem is the expense. It works out as £4 an invitation, and that's before all the extra stationery. But then again, it would be a beautiful collection designed by a talented graphic designer. Indecision-agony!

The budget alternative is to print my own. Or at least, to print some of the accessories. I'm really keen to create a welcome pack for my guests, with an info booklet and other bits and pieces, like a personalised Do Not Disturb sign for their hotel door the morning after the wedding. Along those lines, I recently purchased my first printer - an HP OfficeJet 6500, and I'm going to be having some fun practicing. If printing is easier than it looks, then I may well buy a DIY invitation set, and go it alone. I've been looking at Download & Print for their free invitation suites, and Mae Mae is planning to do her own collection too. My article for Before the Big Day on printables is here, if you want to find out more.

I'll leave you with my two wild cards {above}. They're nothing like my other ideas; one is purple, and the other startling blue. They don't fit in with my theme, but I love them too much to let them go right now. I'm super-keen on the wax seal - wouldn't it be exciting to receive an invitation in the post with one on the back. Exactly the sense of anticipation I'm trying to create for our wedding.

Have you chosen your stationery yet? Please do leave a comment about how you made your decisions! What did you go for? Send me a pic, and I can put it up on the blog, or big up your stationer here.

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My Wedding - The Venue

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

So we'd established we wanted to get married in Provence, now all we needed was a venue. SO much easier said than done! For any  newly engaged couples out there who haven't done this yet, there are two options. If you can afford it, I'd recommend hiring a planner to find your venue for you. They'll do a fabulous job of noting down all the attributes you want, and then they'll create a booklet of the best venues in the area, show you around all of them in one day, and bada bing, you're booked. No stress, no angst, no pain. I even found a company that would do this for me called Dites Moi Oui. They sent me an example of one of their booklets, and it was amazing, with every detail you'd want, including floor plans - I mean wow!

The downside is they charge you about £800 for the pleasure, and in our constant aim to spend less, not more, I decided to take on the challenge myself. It started off fun, at least for the first couple of months. Then it become less fun, as it appeared that what I wanted didn't exist. Or at least, we couldn't afford what I wanted. The budget monster raised its ugly head again, along with a nagging uncertainty of whether to go for a charming farmhouse with lavender shutters {unpretentious, sweet, cheap, unmemorable???} or a beautiful chateau with turrets {pretentious and expensive, but with a real feeling of occasion}. Should we take it for a week, or just one night? Where exactly should it be {Provence is quite a large area}? Many nights were spent surfing the net, and tearing out hair.

This lasted till April - yup, four months. I reckon I looked at every single edifice in Provence, from a shack to a castle. And then, with only four weeks till our recce trip to France, the political campaigning for the British General Election started, and I was swamped at work {my day job is at BBC Radio 4}. So when it came to two days before crunch-time, I'd only booked three venues to visit, and all of them were wrong in some way. That's when an angel in the form of Stephanie from Simply Chateau came into my life. I didn't know it at the time, because she seemed to be suggesting venues way out of my league, but she was determined I should visit two of her chateaux. So I gave in (with hours to go till our flight), and let her book the appointments.

Provence was gorgeous. It reassured us as to why we'd decided to celebrate our wedding there, and we had a truly fabulous weekend of food and wine, and a little too much driving. We visited my venues first {see the list below}, and in the end only one of Stephanie's chateau. As it happens, my discoveries had a lot going for them, and I'd recommend them to everyone, they just weren't right for us. But Stephanie's chateau was The One. At one point, we stopped to admire the view from one of the terraces {yes, it has many!}, and I might have got little tears in my eyes. But don't hold it against me, because the place really is perfect, and I promise, I'm not turning into one of those wet and weepy brides.

{Other Venues}
La Mas De La Rose
Chateau des Barrenques
Chateau Talaud
Le Mas de la Brune

We decided to take it for three days, as it made more economic sense than one night or one week, and it means that we'll have the weekend wedding we always wanted. It's a private house rather than a hotel, and it has 11 bedrooms, which means closest family, and my bridesmaids can be on hand for moral support and on-the-day jobs! It was over-budget, but we've had no post-booking remorse, it was perfect, and we'll just cut back in other areas. No pics I'm afraid, because we want to keep it a surprise for our guests, but it has an onsite chapel, pool and tennis court. I'm so excited about it!

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My Wedding - 1st Steps

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

{Date}
Setting the date for our wedding was fairly simple. We wanted a sunshine wedding, rather than a winter one, and The Boy has a year long job interview ending in July, which meant this summer was out. I certainly didn't want to be asking him what he thought about buttonholes and balloons, when he was stressed about work. So we looked ahead to 2011 and settled on the bank holiday weekend, so that our friends and family could come out to France for the full three day stretch. The Big Day will be 28th May 2011, but the plan is to have a whole weekend of activities....if our budget holds out!

{Budget}
Speaking of the budget, that was the next step. Initially I thought we should set a budget of £20k, and then I did one of those questionnaires in a wedding magazine, and realised that realistically our budget would need to be a bit higher. Gulp! £20k is a serious amount of cash, and I think one of the crazy things about the wedding industry is how much things cost. If anyone has worked out a way to do it for cheaper....please, get in touch! I'm determined to DIY as much as I can, but if we're making everyone come out to France, I think the least we can do is throw them a decent party, and decent means good food and wine, at the very least.

{Location}
The budget trauma lasted me a good few months, and there was also a fair amount of parental pressure to go for a UK wedding. My mum has a lovely house in Dorset, with a big lawn, so there was nothing stopping us from having a lovely countryside, marquee wedding. We even have a family church! But, but, but....we really wanted to get married in France, and despite resistance, The Boy and I decided it was our big day, and stuck to our guns. It wasn't easy though, and I definitely had a few moments when I worried I was being a bit bridezilla. I think it helped that we were going to be paying for quite a lot of the wedding ourselves - I imagine if your parents are footing the whole bill, it must be harder to put your foot down.

{Guest List}
Can I let you into a secret? I wrote the guest list for my wedding six months before we got engaged. Like I said in my first posting, The Boy has had to take a serious amount of pressure on the marriage front. I'm amazed he held out for so long! The good news is that I have a small family, and we have a pretty tight-knit group of friends, so we've managed to get the list under 150. Throw in a few people declining on account of distance and/or age, and I reckon we're around 120. Manageable.....I hope!

{Inspiration}
So we had a budget, a location and a list of 120 guests. Now we needed to settle our wedding style. One of first things a bride should do once she gets engaged is create her inspiration boards. Not only does it help your suppliers {florist, stationer, dress designer, etc}, but it is SUCH fun! Needless to say, I'd been saving pictures for months, and I churned out these boards pretty fast.

If you're newly engaged, and looking to do the same, there's several computer programmes that you can download for free. I use the collage function on Picasa, but there's also Picnik. Alternatively you can use the Style Circle function on US site Style Me Pretty. I tend to save pictures as I go {right click, save a copy}, picking my favs from wedding blogs, and then I put them altogether in a collage. If you're not web savvy and have access to a colour printer, then print away, and you can always tear out pictures from bridal magazines.


What do you think of my boards? Have you already created your own? Send them over to me at beforethebigday@gmail.com, and I'll post them up on the site!

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My Wedding - Engagement

It's taken me a while to come round to writing about my own wedding. I'm not sure why. I'm not naturally shy, but I'm determined not to become one of those 'it's all about ME' brides. Bridezilla. Bride of Frankenstein. You get my gist. But considering I'm out there gathering ideas from all these other lovely brides, I think it's only fair I share my own planning. So with exactly a year to go, here's my story....

The Boy and I met 'officially' in 2006. We'd actually bumped into each other years before, through his best friend Kiran, but neither of us really remember it. Apparently it was in the Nando's on Upper Street in Islington - dead romantic! Our first date was at a Japanese restaurant called Koi's, near Kensington Park - I'd recommend it, because you have to take your shoes off, and it's good to check out a guy's socks before you consider him as a future husband. So one thing led to another, we bought a flat together, went travelling for a year, and by the time I turned 30 in February last year, I was pretty much ring obsessed. In fact I started Before the Big Day four months before we got engaged. Talk about a hint!

The Boy asked me to marry him on 4th January in the mountains in France. We were skiing, and I'd headed home early for a bath, and while I was tucked up in my dressing gown, The Boy wrote 'will you marry me in the snow'. He went down on one knee, and read out an extract from The Great Gatsby {below}, and I said yes. And cried a bit, and he might have too, but he's too macho to admit it.

I had to wait till we got home before I got my proper diamond ring. I always thought we'd choose the engagement ring together, but The Boy had taken matters into his own hands, and picked one for me. It's a solitaire diamond, and it's perfect.

We decided we wanted to get married abroad for lots of reasons. First of all we really want a wedding in the sunshine, and in the UK you can pretty much guarantee rain. Secondly, friends of ours had celebrated their big day in Carpri the year before, and we'd had such a riot that we wanted to recreate the mood.

So we picked the South of France, specifically Provence, because we spent our first summer holiday there, and we'd fallen in love with the food and wine, olive trees and lavender. Also, it was close enough to the UK to keep flights cheap, but far enough away to be sunny. Also, I can speak French, or at least, I think I can! In the next installment, I'll show you my inspiration boards, which I'm using to give my suppliers a sense of our wedding style. Do leave me comments and tell me about your engagement stories!