belated gifts and minister meetings!

Well today was the first meeting with our minister, a lovely man by the name of Ron. As it happens, Ron married my bridesmaid, Romana, and her hubby, and my OTHER bridesmaid, Kylie, was in her wedding party. He was quite excited to hear this, and decided that my wedding was going to be a "mini reunion" hehe.

I'm so glad we asked Romana for a recommendation for a minister - he was LOVELY, he has a good sense of humour and specifically went into celebrant work after retiring as a minister specifically because he saw such a gap for young couples who wished to have a religious ceremony but weren't allowed to have their ceremonies where they wanted them (ie. if they wanted a location outside of a church). He was absolutely wonderful to talk with today, but us both as ease and helped us through all the beginning stages of our Intention to Marry paperwork, etc. Now all we're waiting from is a little package in the mail with all the details for the costs of the ceremony, as well as our little ceremony workbook package and we can start planning our day! Very excited. I particularly loved that he made a point of speaking with the future hubby and letting him know that he expected him to be completely involved in the creation of the ceremony - he wasn't allowed to just go with whatever I want! He has been told that he has to make sure that what he is saying and doing at the ceremony is as much what he wants as what I want.

I love this because as much as I want the future hubby to be involved in every step of the planning, he is very happy to just go with the flow - not because he is lazy but I think because he has no specific expectations of what he wants from our wedding day other then for everyone to have a good time and to have a wonderful, love filled day (oh, and the boys in grey suits! hehe). So while that is great when it comes to picking out the table cloths or the bridesmaids colours, I do really want him to have involvement in the creation of our ceremony, the selection of our readings, the decision of what to say for our vows...all those things that are most important to us as a couple, making a promise together. So points to Ron for that!!!

In other news, we got a couple of belated engagement gifts over the weekend - small sections of bigger gifts (they had already spoiled us!) that weren't around in time for our party. One such gift was a lovely Etsy buy (I believe it was Etsy? I love that I got her hooked too!) from Miss Laina and her partner:


Nawww! It's just gorgeous, I love it!!!!!

She knows my taste so well. She even requested colours to match our decor!! Hehe. You can't really see in the pictures but it has a pretty black ribbon to hang it up from but we have no hooks at the moment, so it's living on our DVD shelf. Must remember to buy a hook!!

The second gift was from my gorgeous sister-in-law and my brother - this gorgeous little book of sayings and vows. I love it! I already have a couple of pages marked and this will definitely come in handy when we're creating our ceremony!


Juzzie also wrote a gorgeous note inside the front sleeve for us...

That's likely to be all the wedding news from me this week, until we hit up the bridal boutiques on Sunday! This is because I have taken a task on this week - I have dug out my Nanna's old sewing machine and I am trying to learn to sew! Following the lovely Suzannah over at Adventures in Dress Making and seeing all the gorgeous little dresses she has made (not to mention her wedding dress and bridesmaids dresses!! Seriously, start following, wedding recaps will be starting soon and I can't wait!) has inspired me to try and save some money (Hi, my name's Amanda and I'm a shopaholic) and learn to make myself cute dresses! Particularly since summer is coming and there are so many options for beginners cute summer dresses! In particular, I fell in love with this little number over at The Selfish Seamstress, only to find that the folks over at Grosgrain had created a Frock by Friday tutorial on it!


Image courtesy of Grosgrain

So, my pattern and material is cut, my bobbin is threaded...but my machine is not. My machine is SO OLD that I can't even find a tut on how to thread this particular one online. I got to a certain point using a generalised threading tutorial, and now I'm stuck. Luckily, my lovely Mum will hopefully be coming over to give me a hand. It's killing me not to be able to move forward!

Wish me luck and hey - why not join me and make yourself a fabulous little dress? There are plenty to choose from over in the Grosgrain 'Frock by Friday' series - leave me a comment below if you decide to try your hand at it!

a busy wedding week

I promise a more exciting post with pretty pictures soon, but I thought I would share some of the exciting things going on for us this week!!!

Tomorrow we have our first meeting with the Reverend we are hoping will perform our wedding ceremony! After the dramas of trying to locate our birth certificates (despite me bugging him for 2 weeks the future hubby left it until today to pick his up from his Dad's... Of course it's not there... Lucky as I am writing this (at 1am) his Mum just messaged as to say she found it!), we are now organized and ready to go in the morning. I'm nervous! I have this irrational concept of someone turning around and saying nope, you guys aren't actually fit to be married. Anyone else feel silly like that?!

Also in wedding news, I walked into a few bridal boutiques today and booked in some appointments for Sunday! Yep, we are finally officially going dress shopping. This. Feels. Weird. Honestly, I'm not actually excited. Is that weird? I kind of feel like everything until now (despite having paid for things!) has just been day dreaming, and because I've mostly been talking about it on here there's been no one to mock me! However I feel like when I go to try on a dress people are going to ask me what the hell I'm doing! Like I'm a little kid trying on Mum's clothes.... I almost feel like I'm going along and it's actually for one of the other girls... Not for me!!! I think I'm going to feel so silly trying on the first gown!!!

I'm counting on that feeling going away though, and look forward to blogging about the experience. Tell me though - Do/Did any of you guys experience similar feelings before you first tried on dresses? Or were you just excited?

6 months have flown...

6 months ago today, my gorgeous man got down on bended knee and asked me to marry him. In just over a year, we'll get to say "I do". Can't wait to be his wife <3

Making it seem even more real is the fact that we booked our first meeting with a minister yesterday!!! Eek!!! I think meeting with the Reverend will make the plans seem much more real - and all the paperwork that goes along with it!

Hope all is going well in blogging world - I promise some more posts soon, I'm just a bit sick with the flu at the moment!!! Xx

back to the venue

So. I feel like I have almost caught up now on what we have already done, wedding wise, and can start moving on to the bazillion ideas I have found while spending my time happily lost in wedding blog heaven.

But I feel like before I share some of the ideas that I have already fallen in love with and hope to use on our day, I should share a little more about our venue. As much as we love it, it has presented some issues!

Starting from the top, I guess I should start with the lovely Chapel. Do you remember it? Looks a little something like this:



Cute, quaint and almost barn-like inside, I fell in love with this little Chapel and when we walked inside it just felt *right*...

...Which is a problem. Mostly because the Catholic Church won't allow a priest to marry us there, when there are so many Churches in the local area. *cries*

All is not lost though. While my family is Catholic, the hubby to be's family are Christian. My family are quite happy with a Christian based ceremony, since they are really so similar. So now the hunt is on for a Christian priest who is able to marry us outside of a Church location. Luckily, my future sister-in-law has a family friend who is a retired priest. He was recently allowed to perform christenings for our nieces and nephew in my BIL/SIL's backyard. Hopefully (with all fingers crossed) he will be allowed to perform our wedding ceremony.

The problem is, the future hubby and I had to make a decision before signing our contract as to whether we would be booking the Chapel or not. BEFORE finding someone to marry us. By this stage, even though there are so many lovely local churches, we had fallen for the Chapel (and it's GORGEOUS view outside the window...hopefully more on that tomorrow!). So after much discussion, we have decided to book the Chapel and hope we can find a priest...otherwise we will be holding a civil ceremony, with Christian based readings, etc. It's not quite the same, but we had to come to a decision. As Catholic/Christians who don't regularly attend Church, it feels almost false to change our wedding just to have it in a Church. We came to the decision that as long as our ceremony recognises our beliefs and that we will be living with a believe in God, as a couple, we felt that this was right for us. Has anyone else found it difficult to make a decision similar to this?

The fact that a big draw to the venue for us was having everything in the one spot, also affected our choice and we are happy that we have managed to maintain this. The ladies and myself will be staying at the venue the night before, for one last single lady sleepover :), and many of our guests will have the opportunity to stay at the venue if they wish. Given that we will have people who have travelled, this is a great plus.

We also loved the fact that the venue offered so many photo opportunities - the gorgeous big lake with it's fountains, the lovely old trees and the beautiful windows in the rooms within the resort are only a few of the options...there's even a lady who will lend her Shetland ponies for photos! (She has a moving restaurant...yep, it's a horse-drawn restaurant and I REALLY want to give it a go!)

The only other bump we almost hit was when I entered the Gazebo room for the first time. I fell in love with the spaciousness of the room, the floors, the windows, the very exciting separate dance floor (all the other rooms had very limited dance space in the middle of the room)...but the one thing I wasn't keen on was the back of the room.

To give you an idea, the Gazebo room is also used as the Gazebo restaurant - there is a kitchen area out the back and the room is filled with chairs and tables when not in use for a wedding and is used to host the morning after breakfast bunch for guests. So at the back of the room, there are some kitchen-like benches (Excuse the bad photography, mobile phone again!):



It was the only thing about the room I didn't love! However, we've decided to still go with the room, and we've worked out ways to utilise the space. We're going to decorate this area and use it as the guest book/wishing well/present area. Since we are using a thumbprint tree (more on this later!) the dark bench tops at the left side of the area is perfect for this set up - it makes me worry less about staining anything! The rest rest of the space we are going to decorate with various elements of the wishing well/present area (I have so many ideas still to narrow down...family wedding photos, telegram tree, etc. still to come!) with consultation with our wedding co-ordinator. Myself and lovely friend Laina, (remember the discussion about her gorgeous soy melts?) have already started making plans to fill that little shelf up top with candles of varying shapes and sizes...I think the light reflecting off the tiles will look quite pretty!

The rest of the room is fantastic - there is an island in the middle of the room that we will also be decorating with flowers and candles...Hopefully it all works out as I have visualised it!

I'm so happy that the boy was excited about the room...I had a feeling he would be, but took him around to all the other rooms in the venue first. If he had preferred any of the others, we probably would have gone with what he liked, but I had had a feeling he would prefer the open space of the Gazebo room.

Hopefully we will be able to get some pictures of the room tomorrow, but just in case we can't, here's a little view of the room:


From the back looking forward...


From the front looking back...


Corner table (cake table was displayed here on the day)


Bridal table...


Dance floor space...

The only other fear I hold is not being able to customize the wedding enough, to make it feel "different" from every other wedding I've attended...I had lots of little details I want to add, but I have concerns about what my limitations may be for things included in our package! From speaking with our co-ordinator, it appears that they are very open to ideas and don't limit you to specific choices, rather they give you a budget within your package for each section (and left over can roll over to other sections)...but I still worry. I don't want a cookie-cutter table setting, for example...

Has anyone else had room obstacles to overcome, or worried about how individual you are able to be, while working within a package?