Oh, that’d be me. Much nicer than Anti-bride or blase bride. I wasn’t totally disorganised, but considering we didn’t know what our guests would be eating two weeks out from the day, I’d say that warrants “disorganised” in the title. So seeing as I can’t scan in my old-fashioned actual photographs, I’ll let this Cosmo Bride article show you a snippet of the day and share all about the lead-up to it. It should be readable size if you click on each page. x

It was very much a DIY wedding. We aimed to spend less than $5000 and we actually managed to scrape in! Here’s how…

* We cut costs right down by having the ceremony/reception and accommodation at the one spot. We rented a house for the weekend ($1250 total for Friday to Sunday) – I made no mention of the fact we planned to have a wedding there and there was nothing in the terms and conditions that stated you couldn’t host people there. Besides, I’d stayed there previously with a large group of people, so did not feel guilty about it. Only our family slept the night, so we pretty much kept to the “sleeps XX people” rule (we didn’t count the juveniles). The house had three double bedrooms, a self-contained guest house, two large living areas as well as a huge sunroom which due to the absence of sun on the day, was where the bulk of the reception was spent.

* I made the invitations – printed them out and embossed some entwined hearts on the top (honestly, I look at them now and am embarassed but at the time I thought they were awesome).

* Flowers were bought from the flower markets the Thursday morning before the Saturday wedding. I had so much fun doing this - felt all Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (only a little more glamorous than she was as the dirt-covered Eliza). I bunched some roses and lillies together in pinks for the bridesmaids, white for me and wrapped stems in ribbon halfway down. Casual and pretty. I also made the boys’ flowers, had enough for the cake and also decorations. I also had a box of rose petals for the “aisle”. All up, flowers cost me less than $150 and didn’t take too long to make the bouquets either.

* I made the cake – not great-looking, but it tasted fantastic. I’m like the worst foodie person ever so fancy food and styled-to-perfection cakes would have looked out of place at our wedding.

* I did my bridesmaids’ hair and make-up and my own.

* Bonbonnaire was American chocolates (Reeces Pieces and peanut butter M&Ms – my absolute fave) in little paper bags. We filled them the night before – one for the bag; one for me…

* Mum had bought these giant Christmas-tree snake things which we wrapped around the poles in the sunroom and decorated with flowers. And we had two crystal wreaths hanging in the tree on either side of the bridal party during the reception.

* We hired tables and chairs, bought our own crockery to use with the crockery that was in the house, played our own music in a CD player and had simple tablecloths hiding the hire tables.

* The house had these giant candleabras in the wardrobes, so I stuck in some candles and used them as table centrepieces. Bamboo garden torches were lit outside the sunroom so once it turned dark the room glowed beautifully and two large concrete candlesticks from the house were used on the “food table”.

* I agonised over the food. I suck at food. In the end, we hired a spit roast – for memory there were three kinds of roasts, various vegies and salads and guests served themselves buffet style. The guy set up discreetly in the front and it was delicious! And so very us. We fed around 50 people for about $300.

* A colleague of Steve’s did our photographs – handy working in newspapers! We only used her for the ceremony and usual bridal party pics, knowing family members would go camera crazy the rest of the night anyway.

In the end, despite the rain, it was a lovely day and evening and just what we wanted: simple, sweet and representative of our personalities. My only annoyance was the dress straps decided to misbehave on the day and needed stitching up at the last minute which promptly broke and had to be safety-pinned together to stop the braless girls from falling out. And also? It was FREEZING. So that combination made me really self-conscious, so there are endless photographs of me fiddling with the straps or holding my flowers up high to hide the highbeam area. hehe

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under family, wedding, work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.