Tuesday 7 September 2010

The big day (Part I)...

Miss R is now a wife...

The Church...

This was the church on the day Mr R stumbled across it by sheer chance back in January, (hence the snow on the roof) ...isn't it just adorable? We had dreamed about a tiny church just big enough to hold our 60 guests. And what we found was a tiny church in the middle of nowhere that looked like it had just been dropped next to the most beautiful river and countryside. What a find!

Set up complete.....phew!

...the finished Bijoux barn!


Monday 6 September 2010

Beautiful blooms...

...Dahlias, Peonies, Stocks, Roses, Daisies...I love flowers.

The day before...setting up the barn

Here are a few photos of the day before setting up the empty barn and turning it into our Bijoux wedding dream...

You can just see Miss J on the right of this photo having a quick water break and pondering just how much we had to do...and probably in hindsight cursing why she had kindly offered to make one of her amazing Carrot Cakes (my favourite cake in the world) as our wedding cake today on top of everything else.

...and here I am Illustrator turned Florist for the day. Selecting/buying the flowers and then arranging them was one of the jobs I was really looking forward to. I absolutely love arranging flowers! Miss J and I went quite crazy and bought so many, I had no idea they would take so long to arrange, I was at the venue until about 9 o'clock the night before and then back at 8am on the morning of the wedding to finish them. I couldn't sleep anyway so it really didn't matter. All I can say is that I would never have got them finished without Mr R's best man Mr M jimmying me along with a countdown to when I absolutely had to be out of the venue and go and get ready. Needless to say and as everyone who knows me guessed I was late for the church, but I'll come to that later on.



The party venue...

So here is the barn we found back in January on a cold winters day although these picture look pretty sunny, must have been a good sign....





Wedding Invitations....

Firstly a huge apology for my delay in starting the seemingly mammoth task of blogging/showing you the wedding and how all our collecting over the last 6 months ended up looking on the big day....after the wedding myself and my husband (hee hee...I'm still getting used to this,) had to find a new home and fast, this process took rather longer than we'd hoped and was a pretty stressful start to married life, thankfully we are now happily settled in a new flat and enjoying turning it into our home. So here goes I'll start with the invitations.....

Making all the invitations was huge fun, I had asked my Mum if I could use some of my Grandad's old stamp collection to decorate the envelopes and planned to use stamps from England, Ireland and Australia to represent mine and Mr R's heritage and also stamps from Italy as this is a country we love to visit and was where we got engaged last summer. My slight OCD got the better of me and I of course had to then group the stamps in colour and tone on each individual envelope before commiting to securing them. (I do make things difficult for myself don't I now?) Lining the envelopes with the vintage music paper was quite a task and my perfectionist Virgo ways came out in full force (again...) even reading the lyrics that were visible and seeing if they had any relevance to anyone we were inviting. Mr R's Mum is called Mary and this name was mentioned in a song so of course that had to be Mr.R's Mum and Dad's invitation. It transpires that the song inside the envelope was a tune that Paddy used to sing to Mary and that they love. How cute is that? What a beautiful coincidence! All the hard was worth it as lots of friends complimented me on the lnvitations and they really did set the tone from the start for the day.