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Further plans established!

Sunday Sep 07 2008 21:57:35

By Cellielliest

Today we got a bit further with the catering and decorations for the reception venue. My future inlaws were here and helped to decide which catering company were the best in terms of value. We're having a pigroast for 150 guests (apoogies if I repeat stuff between posts!) and settled on one that costs about £2400. That includes enough meat to cover everyone, apple sauce, homemade stuffing with apricots and other lovely stuff in, crackling, mixed rolls, 2 salads, coleslaw, potatoes, a vegetarian option, a choice of 4 desserts, a chef to cook it and people to serve it up, not forgetting the china and stainless steel cutlery. It sounds very good when I type it all up, but it's also a bit depressing how much money we'll have to spend on this day! I don't begrudge it, I just never had any money to spend before and so I don't like doing it! It will be lovely to host such a wonderful event for my family and friends. Anyway, we haven't sent our invitations out yet as the wedding is in July so we might not have to cater for that many people, we'll have to wait and see.

The decorations: I had found a pack of 50 balloons in a magazine for £4.99, which I thought was very reasonable and the inlaws2b confirmed this so one option was to buy those, but then we realised that if we were going to put these on the tables they would need to be helium-filled! So anyway, cut a long story short we are going to go to a local party shop and get 60 helium-filled balloons for £72, which sounds like a lot but they will be delivered to our venue free of charge and it means we don't have to pick up a helium cylinder and spend the previous day or the morning of the wedding filling balloons! My Mil2b said that would be her treat for me (very generous as she and Fil2b are providing most of the funding anyway! They're lovely).

The dress I wrote about in my last post will have to be rethought as it was far too expensive for my budget. We're going to go and look for a place in Mil2b's local area as it looks like there is a very nice shop that sells BM dresses for older, younger, and v. young girls. I looked on the 'light in the box' website but I'm a bit dubious about buying a wedding dress from there purely because I don't think I'd be that lucky!

Other ideas for our tables (including the balloons mentioned earlier) are jam jar vases that I've mentioned before, and some old confetti tubes that we haven't used (and likely can't because they are metallic)... I will explain! I was looking at example table decorations in confetti magazine, and I liked the look of the metallic shapes scattered on the table - adds a little bit of colour. We've got three or four tubes of this stuff and as you have to use biodegradable confetti at most weddings now I thought we could put it into use on the tables! I'll have to find a way to explode them into a bag or something though!

No BM dresses!

Friday Sep 05 2008 16:47:06

By Cellielliest

I went shopping today with one of my BMs. We were going to look for dresses for both of us for the wedding, with more focus on her... as it turns out we only found one wedding shop and a possible dress for me. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind but it was very nice and suited me... I don't know why I don't feel really enthusiastic about it because it was gorgeous and made my figure look lovely. Perhaps it was the rain that followed us all day or something. Or perhaps it is the thought of starting work on Monday that is putting a dampener on everything.

Anyway, we couldn't find any bridesmaids dresses, which was really irritating. I know that the shop I found my possible dress in does BM dresses and menswear, but we could only see the menswear, with no sign of the BM dresses anywhere.

I really need to sort out a budget breakdown... I currently have a budget set and I was going to use the "spend as little as possible everywhere" to save money but perhaps I should actually work something more specific out. The dress was £650, so perhaps if I make that my maximum on a wedding dress as I'm not made of money. That's actually more than I wanted to spend but I don't know what is out there atm, so we'll see. Will speak to the boy. Urgh, finance.

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Full Time Job

Thursday Sep 04 2008 22:08:01

By Cellielliest

Well, I'm not really sure what I'm going to write about here but I'm feeling the need to do SOMETHING so here it is :)

I've just started teaching so I was partaking in the obligatory inset days this week... it was actually really useful, I think I learnt lots about teaching style, which is good because I've not done any formal training. Looking at some bad and mediocre examples of teaching I think I will do ok! Basically I've got an instrumental teaching job in my area and it's almost a whole week. Someone pointed out earlier that now that both my partner and I have full time jobs we'll see less of each other, which I suppose may be true... also because one of the evenings we're out rehearsing I might now be in a different group rehearsing something else. If that makes sense. At least before we were in the same room interacting in some way! I think it's going to be a bit difficult to organise a wedding that is planned for the day after school summer term finishes if we're both working. But, we need the money so it will be good in that sense I guess. Argh.

We've decided it would be a nice idea to use jars as vases for the table centrepieces (money-saving galore!) Thought if we decorated them either with ribbon or glass paint, or both, it would give a nice feel to everything and match my idea for the 'wild-flower' look. I don't want anything too fixed or symmetrical if that makes sense, so my bouquets and centrepieces will be small and almost like they've just been picked from the garden. I hope. I probably said some of that in my first entry but I can't remember and I doubt anyone's reading this anyway so pft! We've actually started buying different brands of things (chocolate spread, curry sauces) in accordance to the type of jar - how sad! People are saving them for us so we've already got 5 from other people that we know of. We've saved two so far. I want to start playing with different designs! I like the stuff like that., decorating things, deciding what they will look like.

I'm sure that's all I've got to say for now, I'm sure I'll think of something else at some point. Oh, I'm going shopping with one of my BMs to look at dresses for her and possibly for me too. Yey!

Starting out

Tuesday Sep 02 2008 13:27:28

By Cellielliest

Well, where to start... I started thinking about wedding stuff a few months ago, gathering pictures of dresses I liked for me and my bridesmaids, picking who was going to play a role in the wedding and sorting out a nice colour scheme. Our venues were also sorted really easily. Having done all that I momentarily lost a bit of my enthusiasm because I didn't know what else I could do that wouldn't involve actually making real decisions! However, when my fiance went away for ten days I found that I had nothing to do but browse things on the internet, buy magazines, and start phoning around asking for quotes. This totally rekindled my enthusiasm tenfold, and now I can't stop talking about it to anyone who will listen!

One of the ideas we are chucking around (thanks to someone I don't know on YAYW - thank you whoever you were!) is the idea of using jam jars as vases for our centrepieces! We've started collecting and soon I hope to start playing around with decorating them... If it's totally lame then we'll just recycle lots of jars!

One of the most exciting days was when I went to a friends house and sorted what my invites will look like. We had quite a few options but came up with something perfect! I can't wait to send them all out and find out who is coming so that i can start thinking about favours, table settings, etc. etc. there is so much to do!

I will no doubt update when I have done something more!