III; Tuesday Afternoon

So after the flowers arrived we met with the venue's wedding coordinator. We ran through the times, we ran through the list of things we would need the venue to do for the third and final time and for the third and final time she confirmed that the staff there would indeed take care of said list and assured us that everything would be 'perfect'. I laughed. Well we all know what happens when you expect 'perfect' now, don't we?

She also took this time, three days before the wedding to inform us that she, the woman we had been planning the wedding with for twelve months, wouldn't actually be there on the day. She doesn't work on Friday afternoons apparently. But it would 'all be fine!' because The Pig Farmer (I can't bring myself to say his name) - the grounds keeper and apparently 'Master of Ceremonies' (now there's a title. Now how do you suppose one becomes a Master of such things? Does one have to train for ten years under the previous master? Does one first become a Novice of Ceremonies perhaps? Or do you suppose one just dawns a pair of tartan trousers, is handed the key to the crockery cupboard and told to knock oneself out? Hmm, one wonders) would be there all day and he's always in charge of weddings, that's why we call him The Master. And all weddings are the same really, aren't they? OK, she didn't say that last bit. But she might as well have. Then we'd have been prepared. And that would have been nice.

But she didn't, so we left relatively unworried. A little nervous that a man who we found fairly objectionable (I won't go into why, but our past experiences of him involved waiting for 45 minutes at the side of the motorway, 20 minutes in a car he'd just used as a sheep pen, a racist joke or two and the offer of a good deal on a pig carcass.... "you're a vegetarian? What about duck then?" ) would be Master of our wedding. But the Up Until the Day Before the Wedding Coordinator said it would be fine, so we believed her.

Actually now, that I think back all of our worries were focused on whether or not it would rain. The weather had been and still was abysmal and we were planning an outdoor wedding. The whole 'Will it rain? Won't it rain? Where will we eat if it does rain? Don't worry, it will all be fine!!!" conversation distracted us sufficiently from any of the other alarm bells that should have been ringing at this point. Although honestly we had little reason, other than his personality, to suspect that The Pig Farmer would be anything other than dedicated to giving us the wedding we had planned. And paid for, let's not forget paid for because throughout the whole wedding planning process I had a tendency to feel like we were asking the venue to do us a favour with each and every request. Requests like 'we want to serve beer at our reception. What do you have available?' as opposed to 'I want to ride out of the castle and down the aisle on a Shetland Pony. I don't want the guests to see me before hand so we'll have to trot in through the kitchens. OK?'.

It is the curse of the bride who doesn't want to appear 'demanding' - aka a crazy, wedding-obsessed bitch, to forget that she is actually paying people to do things for her and that in exchange for her money she is owed a service, and a fucking decent one at that.

I use 'she' here because grooms don't suffer from the same problem. They want to know if the venue can find a wider selection of local drinks then they just ask. No worrying about whether the venue will sigh, roll their eyes and think they're A Demanding Groom and therefore an insane and irrational being because they haven't forgotten that even though there is a wedding involved the simple customer/service provider formula is the same as it always is; our money + their advertised service = they do things for us, when we need them done.


Oops, I got distracted. I'm supposed to be telling you about the wedding. I think I might have some minor wedding related anger lurking under the Serene and Contended New Wife exterior.


Back to the recap.


After our oh so reassuring meeting with the Up Until the Day Before the Wedding Coordinator we took advantage of the briefest lull in the week's driving rain and went to play in the undergrowth. It was heaven. The world was pretty, the boy was a child again and I was in love...

Does this make it any more understandable that we fell completely for this place and naively suppressed any tiny, niggling whispers of doubt we might have had about it before the wedding?


Part II
Part I


(All photos by me)

Little boxes of treasure...

I love these little boxes of beautiful treats from Lobster and Swan on etsy....



Coastal Hideaway


A Little Something Pale



Flamingo


Strawberry Pavlova



Midnight in Paris


For when inspiration needs a helping hand.

All images by Lobster and Swan. Check out her beautiful blog for more inspiring gorgeousness.

II; Tuesday morning

On Tuesday morning the first batch of our flowers arrived. As you might remember we arranged all of our flowers ourselves. In fact it never even crossed our minds to use a florist given how unbelievably expensive they are and how little I was willing to relinquish creative control. (not that I actually did any arranging myself, but we'll get to that).

We used two online companies for our flowers, Flowers 4 Florists (I hate that '4' it has pissed me off every time I have seen it. What is wrong with words? Real words, with all their vowels?) and The Real Flower Company. Flowers 4 Florists were great in that they had a huge choice of flowers and they were reasonably cheap. They were crap in that you could only order a week before you need the flowers, leaving an element of surprise in what might be available, they didn't reply to emails and they couldn't guarantee a delivery date, which was a bit of a bummer. We wanted the flowers on Wednesday morning so we could arrange them on Thursday morning but F4F would not budge on their 'we might deliver them on the day you want, but we might deliver them the next day instead, any time between 8am and 6pm', and the flowers arriving at 6pm the day before the wedding was a risk we weren't willing to take. So, we ordered them for Tuesday, thinking they might not come until Wednesday but lo and behold, they arrived first thing Tuesday morning. Oh well, at least we had plenty of time to unpack and admire them, even if they were a bit wilted by Friday.

The peonies, oh the peonies. They were just beautiful.

Stocks, they smelled like heaven. And a bit like grannies.




The agapanthus started shedding their heads almost immediately. Every time we walked past them a shower of little blue and white buds would hit the floor. They were the only flowers that were really starting to be past their best by Friday. They also happened to be growing in the castle gardens, which tied our tables decorations to the setting really beautifully and accidentally.



White, purple and white lisianthus. Along with peonies, garden roses and anemones they are my favourite flowers. They have a wild, carefree, romantic vibe that I adore.



I wasn't in love with this weird daisy/Christmas tree stuff. The Boy liked it though so I tried not to hate it too much. It was the only thing we ordered that I didn't love and the only thing we had lots of left over. It was just so damn bushy.



Blue delphiniums. These are so English Country Garden and the colour is almost unreal. They are just so vivid, they are like therapy for the eyes.



And the peonies again. Just because.



Almost like roses, but less prissy, more wild, more (dare I say it) romantic.



The Boy loved this green stuff, said it looked like hops. Flowers that look like beer ingredients = happy boy. I wasn't sure it would really go with our flowers, it seemed too modern somehow, but it was perfect. The Boy knows his flowers. (Although I still think the daisy trees were weird, I just can't agree with him on that one.)

We had so much fun unpacking the flowers and I was amazed that so many of them had been packed into just two boxes, they just kept coming. The above cost us £160 ($288), which incidentally is the same price I was quoted for one bridal bouquet. This lot was 15 pitchers worth.

I really do love flowers and I adore the work of some of the amazing floral designers around. There are some breath taking bouquets out there and yes, I do have twinges of longing when I see them. Centrepieces? Not so much. The ones I love are the kind that are very DIY-able. I detest flowers turned into sculpture, flowers are beautiful natural things and that is how I like them presented; naturally. Not manipulated into towering pedestals or god forbid, animal shapes. So taking on flowers as a DIY project was perfect for us. It also helped that when The Boy's darling cousin turned up the next day to be our loyal wedding helper, she brought her boyfriend with her, who grew up working in his mother's flower shop (cue angels singing and rays of sunlight beaming down from the heavens). He was an absolute godsend and was invaluable come the day before the wedding, when suddenly turning 8 buckets of flowers into 15 centerpieces wasn't looking so stress-free.


Part I; Monday

A bride's revenge....

Friday night was much fun. There was stripping, singing, nipple tassels and a burlesque reenactment of Flashdance. Good times. I also got to wear The Shoes again and apparently they have become the stuff of wedding legend. We bumped into Dark Haired Bridesmaid's Mum who was deep in conversation with a group of people about The Shoes. When they discovered that The Shoes were in the house pandemonium broke out and I was dragged to the nearest disco light to have them inspected. I think I could get used to that sort of fame.

ps...

No wedding recap today folks, I was planning on continuing our tale of getting hitched tonight but we've had an impromptu invitation to go and watch our bridesmaid take her clothes off in public.

Is this the coolest fucking couple you've ever seen?

A Desert Bride (and groom) by Michelle Pullman

Audrey, Elizabeth and Rose...

This is my wedding outfit of the day....

1920s inspired flapper chic, inspired by the too gorgeous for words headpiece by etsy seller Sweets n lo. Combined with the Marchesa dress, photographed by Karen Mordechai, that I will love forever and these Emmy shoes which I adore. I would dance all night in this outfit.

A word to the wise....

Think carefully before you post those fuzzy, yellow tinged pictures your friends and family took on your blog. You might think that it's a quick way to share the first trickles of wedding porn you have, that your blogging buddies deserve a little something for all the support and interest they showed through the dark days of planning and that you can post some more beautiful pictures when you have the time to delete your eye bags but beware, you might come back from holiday and find your un-edited self all over the bloody internet.

(Not that it didn't give me quite the thrill to be mentioned on some of my favourite blogs; Frolic, A Practical Wedding and Smitten to name but a mere few. And I've got to tell you, Smitten made my mum squawk rather too. Only because she's heard of Glamour, the wedding blog world? Not so much.)


While we're handing out advise I would also like to caution you against the advisability of reading what perusers of blogs other than your own have to say about you and your wedding. While your own dear readers may leave only the loveliest of comments in their wake, unfortunately the same can't be said for everyone else's.


Which makes me oh so grateful lovely ones, that you are kind enough (read: have the manners) to keep any disgust you may or may not feel for my choice of outfit/what I 'allow' by boy to wear/my body to yourself. It's much appreciated.


(Just to make it clear, absolutely none of the readers of the afore mentioned were anything but lovely, the betrothed community know only too well that no good can come from criticising the choices of a bride once it's too late to go back. And they're just too damn nice to say mean things about a girl's scrawny physique. For which, once again, I'm grateful.)


(Image by Lillian and Leonard Wedding Photography)

I; Giving into peer pressure. Kind of...

I know that many of you are desperate for more pictures from the wedding. How do I know? Because you keep hounding, I mean asking me very politely for more. We have the files from the photographers (in RAW form, they need a lot of work before they become public) and that makes a grand total of 800 professional pictures, 600 friends and family pictures and about 800 that we took ourselves and darlings, I just don't know where to begin. I look at them and I start hyperventilating. Seriously.

So I'm going to start at the very beginning. (A very good place to start.) Well not quite the very beginning because I can't get that one picture I took of our old jalopy laden so high with weddings goods we thought we might get arrested on the way off my camera and onto the computer. But it looked kind of like this.

(Just picture the car smaller, rustier and purple and instead of the turbaned gentleman in the middle a 'wedding' signpost, a box of cheese and a ridiculously expensive and rather delicate dress squished into a gap the size of a football.)

The wedding was on Friday and we left on Monday. Part of the whole wedding shindig was a week in a self catering cottage on the castle's estate, which although it cost about 15% of our wedding budget was the best decision we made. The (bastard) venue was an hour and a half from home and we were doing so much of the wedding ourselves, anything other than staying either very close or even better, 50 feet from the aisle, would have driven us both over the edge of mental and physical health. It seemed like a good price to pay for making the wedding as relaxing as it could be and damn was it worth it.

Mostly because it looked like this from our bedroom window;

Kind of heavenly. Even in the rain.

and this was 20 seconds from the door (either front or back, we had two. And one of them led to our own garden, with a picnic table. And a trampoline)

Honestly, staying there was one of the most wonderful things about the week of our wedding. It was relaxation beyond anything we have experienced in a long time. And while not quite a holiday (the whole wedding to throw in four, three, two days was kind of omnipresent) it was the closest we've had in years. And the most luscious. The last time we went on holiday we stayed in the YMCA and shared bathrooms with padlocks on the door with 20 other people. There were communal showers for fuck sake. This, this was Luxury.

Our cottage. I didn't want to give it back.

coming up next... raspberries, toads and the land that time forgot.

A bit of froth...

I love this dress, as worn by Marcia Cross who plays my favourite tv character ever, from Elie Saab's Fall 2008 Couture collection. If I was picking a wedding dress today it would be tea length with lots of tulle.


Today I love tulle.



Photo 1 from Style.com.

August 16th

Saturday August 16
Aquarian Lunar Eclipse

[This] evening as the moon rises a glorious eclipse will take place. Even those who miss the spectacle will feel the influence. It will liberate something, end something, challenge and revive some hunger for adventure in your heart. If solar eclipses invite us all to rethink our idea about what's possible, lunar eclipses enable us all, in different ways, to overcome fears and negative emotions that have been holding us back. Over the coming weeks we will all go through experiences that allow us to move on.

August 16th, 1am. An Aquarian girl just got married.


Words by Jonathan Cainer and via Secrets of a Butterfly.

Yum...

I think a few days spent in that first one might cure the blues...






Jenny Packham, Spring 2009 at London Fashion Week. Via Coutorture

Emptiness

I'm home. I'm tired, grumpy and despite ten days away and all the sea air a girl could ask for I am still suffering from a severe case of blogging lethargy.

It started before the wedding when my computer started crashing every three minutes. It continued when we got home after the wedding when I realised that there was no time to even think about having just got married before we had to leave again for a week's work. Getting back to find that having done nothing for two weeks there was a list of things to do that was even longer that The List we had a week before the wedding didn't help. And 'going on holiday' which was effectively just running away for nearly two weeks, weirdly enough didn't do anything good at all for that list or for my ability to think straight. Or at all.

I sit in front of the computer and my mind empties. Not in a calm, serene, breath through your mouth and allow the thoughts to drift away way, in a when did I become so fucking thick way. A where did all the inspiration go? kind of emptiness. I don't like it.

Photo by The Boy

A little something...

... from the evening portion of this shindig we call a wedding

Tweet tweet...

I finally finished them! And they looked quite dapper. The Best Man stood staring at them intently for a few moments then turned to The Boy,

"She looks just like Cara. It's the eyes, something in the eyes...." before turning back to stare intently at them again. It was rather late in the day and I think he'd been getting stuck into the homemade champagne.



Photo by me.

A gripping tale...

Sexyredframe is another of my newest favourite blogs. She tells the tale of leaving her boyfriend of ten years for a beautiful boy who makes her heart race with the kind of passion and skill that leaves my heart racing and leaves me itching for more every time.

It's like reading a novel in a-page-a-day instalments and really, it's quite cruel of her not to just keep going.

Hop on over, it's all really rather thrilling....

Playing in the grass....

Image by Heather of One Love Photo

lovely envelopes....

They could be completely empty and I would still be thrilled if one of these fell through my door....

Kristina, from Lovely Morning's wedding invitations. Aren't they the chicest?

Heavenly delights....

I read the following conversation on my aunty's Flickr page:




Red Haired Aunt: If you look closely you can see the bride's red shoes peeking out under her dress. She wasn't going to buy them because they were really expensive but I told her they were an investment, like buying a sculpture. I'm so glad she listened to her Aunty.

Unnamed Flickr Person: What a good influence you are!

Red Haired Aunt: No pockets in a shroud, as Granny says.

Unnamed Flickr Person: Your granny a fan of the old Monolos was she?



Photos by me. Shoes from Dune.

Girl, you make me laugh....

She really does you know. Every time.


By David Shrigley.

Bohemian bride....

I just adore this couple and their sweet, understated style. It's so young and fresh, relaxed yet sophisticated. So utterly perfect is it that when I saw this image on {frolic} I was convinced it must be from a magazine fashion spread.

Photo by Alison Cox