signed, sealed and (hopefully!) delivered!

Next engagement invite post I can actually show you what's inside (I'm sure you are stick of the outside!) but here are all our engagement party invites all lined up and ready to go. I posted them this morning, yay! I'm so proud of them...they are like my little babies, I didn't want to let them go haha. Hope everyone likes them!!

make up!!!

As I mentioned yesterday, my ladies and I had a make up party!!

While at the Bridal Expo a couple of months ago, my bridesmaids and I ran into a lovely lady named Rebecca, from Wye Cosmetics. As it turns out, the company not only does bridal make up, but they do parties to sell their make up, which is very similar to Napoleon and MAC. So after having a chat with her, it turned out that if I booked a party I got a free lip palette AND I got a free wedding trial at the party! Free stuf?! Sign me up!

So we booked the party back then, and it finally happened yesterday. It was great fun and a lot of the girls got some new make up out of the deal (it is SO much better to get to try make up before you buy - none of this getting home and having the totally wrong colour/type for your skin/crappy mascara that looks nothing like the ad!)

And of course, I had a make up trial.

Now, I'm not a heavy make up wearer normally. Some mascara, bronzer and lip gloss and I'm out the door. *Occasionally* there's a little eye shadow. But foundation and all that jazz? Usually left for the big nights out.

So one of my big things was that I really don't want to look *fake*. I want to look like myself, just a little more polished. I had make up done for my 21st (*cough* Napoleon) and looking back at the pictures, I really hate it. It was so fake and looked like it was plastered on! And I really don't want that for my wedding photos.

So this was my inspiration pic - I LOVED this look, but also said that I was happy for the colours to be altered to suit my skin tone, etc.



I had some other photos as well but believe it or not, I couldn't find them to print them off to show her...until today. Always the way! Oh well, the pic above is what we were going off.

This picture was taken just after she finished. Please remember these photos were taken in bad lighting and on an iPhone so really don't do the make up justice.


Yep, that's my little nephew again...he's looks kinda grumpy but he really wasn't. He had girls fawning all over him all day - he loved it!!

Unfortunately, you can't really see the shadows on my eyes in this pic, but she did a really lovely job with some nice browns and golds.

Below are some pictures taken at the end of the night, after the party AND after I'd been out to dinner with some of the girls. This was approx. 8 hours later, so the colours had settled and the eye shadow wasn't as sharp as the original application, but it blended together nicely and still looked really nice at the end of the night, so I'm happy I got to see how it lasted! We also had been in a rather warm restaurant which great because as someone who easily turns red with heat (and alcohol!), I wanted to see how the foundation stood up. I'm happy to say that by the end of dinner, despite my cheeks feeling rather hot, my MoH reported no redness! Was rather excited by that...




So. What do you guys think? I would love to hear some opinions!! I hate how bad the photos are from the end of the night but it was the best I could do. (Can you tell our bathroom has terrible lighting at night? Good light in the morning though!)

sneak peek of engagement invites...

...in the process of stuffing, stamping and sealing, but these are the envelopes! What do you think of the address wrap??

our page boy!

Ok so I've been a bad blogger this week...See, what happens when you find amazing blogs to read, is that you stop writing in your own. Whoops!

But back into it!

I've got a number of posts lined up for this weekend, as long as I get 5 mins to sit down and write them. Today in fact, I am having a make up trial! Quite excited, it's included in a make up party for me and all my lovely ladies, so I'll be sure to do a write up of it (with pictures!) tomorrow.

But today, I would like to introduce you to our gorgeous little page boy, my nephew, Aiden. He is the son of my younger sister and bridesmaid, Danielle. And he's a gorgeous little monkey.

Now you've all seen the awesome books I found for our flower girls (can be seen here). Well, I ordered a Ring Bearer book online, and made up something similar for Master Aiden!





Cute right? Well I gave it to him on Thursday night. Now, he's only 9 months old, so doesn't really get it (of course) but he LOVES books, and was very excited to get something hehe. My sister really liked it and is looking forward to reading it to him when he's bigger! I can't believe he'll be two when we walk down the aisle!







PS. For anyone who is wondering what the sticker on the back of the card is, it's our stickers that I made to use to close our engagement invite envelopes! I've also used them on the back of the flower girl cards as well, here's a bit of a close up:


I think they turned out great!

Now just to give the little ladies their books!! Has anyone else done some fun projects for the littlest members of your bridal party?



PS. If anyone would like a copy of this Ring Bearer book (it really is a cute one!) it can be found here.

the engagement party!

Ok, so I am still working on the invites - they are done but I can't put them on here just yet! I'm still waiting for a few addresses, then they will be sent out and I can share them! I would love to hear what you guys think of them.

But what I CAN share, is what I've gotten (or am getting!) organised for the decor for the party!

We're having the party in a local hall, connected to my sister-in-law's family church. The hall is MASSIVE compared to most of the local halls around here, and trust me, we are going to need the space! So far, we are planning on having all the tables lined up in long rows (as opposed to smaller round tables - I feel like everyone might get chatting more and mix up the groups a bit more if they are all together!) with kid-friendly grey table cloths (we are having a LOT of kids there, so they may have to be plastic!), glass bowls with gold stones and peach (or as close to the peachy/pink I'm after as possible!) floating candles, and mixed size, decorated glass jars with some blooms inside. The glass jar decorations will be a DIY project so there will definitely be more on that soon (right now I'm still collecting jars!)

The reason I'm having the glass bowls with the floating candles is that a) I wanted a smaller centerpiece that people can talk over and that also won't take up too much room on the tables (since we are having so many people!) and b) I plan to recycle them at the wedding for something specific...but I don't want to go into that just now!

So that's all pretty simple and straight forward...I'll be picking up some blooms the morning on the party and just popping them in the jars myself. Nothing too fancy. The part of the decor that IS getting me very excited though, is our dessert/cake area!!!


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A DIY Ice Cream Parlour!!! If you go to the source link, you can see the full, amazing layout of this parlour and all the freebies are there! I've downloaded them all and I'm SO excited for this part of the night!

Given that we are having so many children at the party, my mum and I had already decided to have a big ice cream dessert area. Finding this DIY project was icing on the cake! I'm so excited to decorate this area, and also the cake table and slushie machine area that will be near it. It will all be decorated in a similar style! I've already printed off THIS amazing freebie from Heirloom Paperie, to go over our cake area:



I have also downloaded these cute-as-pie mini flags for some cupcakes I hope to make:

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Lastly, I have also bought these cute little flags, which I'm sure I'll find a home for, from Wedzu:



I just hope that it's a nice, fun and relaxed atmosphere and it looks good :) Thinking about trying to find some grey, peach and white paper lanterns to hang or sit around the room as well...And we managed to work some bunting into our invites so I think they really reflect the look I'm going for for the room!

What do you guys think? Is it going to work? I always get so nervous that things will just be a flop...

some odds and ends

This post is mostly just for some cute bits and pieces I've found online and wanted to share!

First up, how cool are these STD's:


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So cute! I would have loved to have tried something like this but I think they are a little too fiddly...I would have gotten annoyed! Hehe

A fun "Bridal Party Survival Kit" template can be found here! I definitely want to make some bridal party survival kits so will be keeping this template in mind.

A cute tree-themed STD!

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And a just-as-cute invite!

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And lastly, some cute little flags! I love these and think they would be fun in photos...it's a cute little DIY!! What do you think?

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our mini shoot Pt. 2

Ok so we've discovered that my computer did in fact eat some of our pictures! For some reason, whenever I rotate a photo using Window's Photo Viewer - it disappears! Like, vanishes. It's not sent to the recycling bin it's just...gone. But my brother still had a copy of all our pictures on his laptop (but had deleted them from the camera!) so I've managed to get them all back. I KNEW there should have been more colour options with the "He asked" and "She said yes!". Now maybe I can play around and make a second STD and maybe have two different options sent out...that could be fun!

Anyway, just a couple more pictures that were missed in the last round up then...ok yes, they are still pretty similar but I like them. LOL. I think the first two are new favourites as well:



It's nice to get nice photos of you and your partner, isn't it? I rarely get photos of the two of us unless they are self-taken, so they always end up looking the same! (two heads squished into the picture...you know the ones!) It's really nice to have these in general, but in particular to celebrate our engagement. I can't wait to get a proper shoot done! Just have to try not to "pretty" the boy too much... *smiles innocently* Who me? Never!

our mini shoot

Ok, as promised, here are some pics from our mini shoot with my brother. There's only a few different shots because we were really only doing it purely to get some photos for our invites and Save The Dates...that and I didn't want to scare my future hubby with a big stylized shoot! (Although I'm sure my brother would have loved it!) In FH's words, he requested that I not try to "pretty him" with too much lovey dovey stuff. :) He did agree to use the signs though, and one of my favourite shots actually came about because he decided to use one of the signs of his own accord!

With no further ado - some piccies!









And finally, my favourites as mentioned earlier:



These are all unedited...some need cropping and things, but we've only really touched the ones that we've used so far (for invites, etc.) and cropped those to the size we need. None of these have been touched I believe!

I also think that I'm actually missing a few...I seem to remember there being more...I mentioned to my brother after the shoot that we could probably only use the landscape shots, not the long shots, so I think that's all he transferred to my computer. I'm going to find out and if there's any more good ones I'll pop them up.

What do you guys think?