Out of the Bag

Naturally, I inisisted on doing all the honeymoon packing. The Fiance didn’t really care, and I love packing. I graduated to packingmeister years ago, when every summer holiday or Christmas my mum would get distressed, so I gradually took over the whole project. Like my aunt, I have a kind of packing “gene” – I not only love packing, but love minamilaist packing, whilst catering for every eventuality.

People are always surprised by what I manage to confine to my mini handbags.

At first, however, the packing was daunting even for me.

5 minutes later the cat got in the bag and made herself comfortable (the Fiance hoovered the bag shortly before I started packing it, because whilst it was living under our bed, it had become hers). But she wasn’t there for long.

Believe it or not, all this stuff does actually fit in the bag, with perhaps the exception of my hat, and that only because I was cautious of squishing it. I may have to wear it down to Oxford, protective plastic packaging and all. Plenty more fits in as well, because in addition to this lot is several shirts of the Fiance, our wedding day shoes, or wedding night “picnic” (in the fridge) and the bits and bobs we need in the meantime, as well as flatter things like remaining usher goodies, our tickets, passports, and emergency medical supplies (mostly plasters: my mum was very insistent we packed plasters).

And here’s the proof that it fits!

The pile of clothes that you see in the foreground consists of swimming costumes and wedding day underwear – all of which I rolled up inside the Fiance’s smart wedding day shoes. Yes, yes I did. All of it. Careful use of space makes a lot of difference to the ease of packing, and I always stuff shoes as full as possible.

Here in this neat and beautifully arrayed image you can see that I have stuffed every piece of underwear and all pairs of socks that I am taking on honeymoon inside my new brown shoes.

Space efficiency rocks.

Also important was ease of access packing. On the day of arrival we will need our evening meal packing items available, and bathroom bits, et cetera. The next morning we need wedding day bits – everything from clothes/grooming equipment to shoes. Then that evening we will need our picnic, and the following morning access to “normal” clothes and toiletries. And thus here is the finished article (my parasol only fits diagonally and at a specific range of depths) – or at least as finished as it can be with the stuff we can’t yet throw in.

Paying for the Wedding

As of today – the last hour or so, we have now paid for more than half of our wedding (the biggest expense, caterers, isn’t due until May 1st). I’m very excited about it! Never been so excited before about paying money – the Fiance and I danced around the living room!

Earlier on, we wanted to pay for things in full as they came up, but suppliers don’t like you doing this. I can see their point when small changes incur huge faffs rearranging what is essentially small change on the scale of the total cost – and I have changed our flowers a few times, although they didn’t even want a deposit from us!

So we paid deposits, like good children. But then today we received a call from the registrars saying that they wanted payment 12 weeks before the wedding day, and we were overdue! It is now 29 days… We’d never known the payment date (or had an invoice for the amount!) so we looked up the fee on their website and paid it electronically, presuming we’d got the right amounts.

Everything in the garden was lovely. The Fiance updated our budget spreadsheet and made a list of everything else we’d paid in parts – flowers, transport, food and drink… And thus began the furious invoice hunting.

I located two – the cars and the flowers. Christopher cars were out at a wedding when I called them, but are going to ring me back to let me pay. Their payment was due on the 18th – two days ago (oops – but at least we realised and I contacted him!).

The flowers, as I mentioned, didn’t even have a deposit on them. I trawled through the email conversation I’d had with Jemma from Austin Flowers hoping to find out when they wanted our money. When I eventually found it, it wasn’t very specific either – payment was due before the week of the wedding – around the same time as the catering.

Well, I decided I didn’t want to do this again in two weeks time, and it’s a Friday afternoon, so they should be open. I called up Austin Flowers and explained my business to be greeted with a very cheerful, “Oh! I’ll just look up your invoice!” In fact she sounded delighted that she wouldn’t have to chase me at some later date; I suppose if you’re as relaxed about payment as they seemed initially, it does fall to them to do all the chasing.

Payment over the phone was quick and painless. Another expense sorted: hurrah!

Meanwhile, the Fiance was investigating other suppliers. The Town Hall didn’t pick up the phone, so he left a message with them, and they replied by email shortly afterwards telling us that we didn’t need to pay them anything until the 5th of May – two weeks prior to the ceremony.

He also emailed Oxon Carts – the rickshaw company. They hadn’t given a date for remaining payment either. A few minutes later he got a response: the balance was due tomorrow: they were going to email him then, but he’d beaten them to it. Excellent. So I transferred the rest across online, and the Fiance gave them our payee reference code and explained what we’d done.

Sorted!

The only thing left is the Somerville drinks reception, which the Fiance’s parents are in charge of. The Fiance is emailing them everything they need.

A Selfish Venue

Every couple, when choosing their venue, have to take into account their guests. How they’re going to get there, how much it will cost them, and all that jazz.

But don’t worry yourself to death over it. Yes, it’s handy if your venue’s in the place where most people live, but what with universities and people moving for jobs, the chances are your loves ones, like ours, are spread out across the country – or the world. And people do expect to travel for weddings, take trains, drive long distances and stay overnight. The effort people will go to for a wedding is quite touching. I suppose it all comes down to – they just love you that much.

So don’t upset yourself worrying about them, but don’t go out of your way to make things difficult for them either so that you can have your fairytale dream. Common sense.

But here’s something which may not be common sense to everyone. Making things easy for the guests is not about proximity, but access.

What do I mean by that?

Well, we’re getting married in the centre of Oxford. It’s within 10 minutes walk of the train station, 5 minutes walk of the coach station and 5 minutes walk to a main car park. There are park and ride facilities and we even have a few parking permits for slightly more central locations, which we have mentioned (quietly). I think this means pretty good access. We have friends and family coming from Sheffield, Bristol, London, Wales, Germany, Malta and Australia. These are not proximate.

We’re also having a daytime wedding, so guests from the UK can come that morning, leave that night and are not obliged to stay over. Some of our friends are “crashing” at another’s place (as we have at least a couple of friends from Oxford). So they might have to spend a bit on travel, but they don’t have to pay for a bed that night – the cost isn’t prohibitive.

As someone who doesn’t have a car, I’m always noting that most wedding venues are crap for access. Not just inconvenient, but totally and utterly crap. They tend to be very out of the way, with no nearby train station, poor or not too close by bus services and expect all their visitors to drive.

I don’t have a car, and I think it’s a disgusting reflection upon society that I’m expected to. If we came in a car, someone would have to not drink, or we’d have to stay in the venue, or we’d have to park at a hotel and taxi in and out – all things which spoil enjoyment or significantly compound the cost.

I’m talking about manor houses, the bigger, more expensive and more picturesque hotels and other countryside resorts. They’re lovely, but they’re mostly very inconvenient for most people, and personally that’s a big deal to me. When I RSVP to a wedding I check that I can get to it.

Worse are the church weddings where you have a reception venue miles away and needs to be driven to – not a great idea if there’s alcohol after the ceremony, and again puts people under pressure to order taxis (yeah, because weddings never run over time, do they…) to ensure they make it on time. When everybody else is fighting for them too, of course.

The basis function of all this is, if your venue is out of the way, you are going to have to check your guests are okay with that too – yes, ask them for permission. If you don’t have enough people able to get there, it is your responsibility to help them. One popular solution is hiring a vintage bus to transport guests to the reception venue and to off-site better value hotels at the end of the night.

The other suggestion is carpooling. Your guests won’t all know each other, so it’s best to include something in the invitations. I’d recommend hosting a spreadsheet on google docs, asking drivers to fill in how many spare seats they have on offer, and those not driving to fill in requests for seats. Share and share alike. It would take you minutes to set up such a document and be hugely appreciated by all your guests.

I Have a Plan

We did some work on our seating plan. It’s starting to come together really well. The Fiance found lots of different maps of Oxford and cut them to size for the tables, which we then mounted on blue card and blue tacked to the backing paper, upon which i had carefully outlined a to-scale room plan (we will be sticking it together properly later). We even made little blue chairs to tag peoples’ names onto.

I’ll let the pictures do the talking now.

A Fayre Deal

So on Sunday I went to a wedding fayre at the Crowne Plaza hotel, Birmingham. This was my second wedding fayre – the first being at the Cotswold Lodge, Oxford, and very early on in our planning. This time we’re close to the end, so we told suppliers we were there for the finishing touches, which may be stretching the truth a little. We didn’t really have any intention of buying anything, but we decided to look, just in case, and cheifly we were there for an outing, a glass of champagne, and the general excitement of being an engaged couple out doing an engaged couple thing (it never occured to me that it would be worth going to a wedding fayre with anybody other than the Fiance, then again, he remembers someone at his old work whining about having to drive her sister to wedding fayres every weekend, so maybe nobody would want to go!). Then again, we went to the Cotswold Lodge wedding fayre with no intention of buying anything, and that’s where we found out about the rickshaws.

When IS the best time to go to a wedding fayre? When you’re at the venue stage? Or when you’re looking for photographers? Or jewellery? Surely things like jewellery are going to get sorted much much later than photographers? So perhaps there isn’t a right time or a wrong time (well, there is a wrong time: there’s before you’re engaged or when you’re already married)…

The Crowne Plaza Hotel stands in the middle of Birmingham, elevated from the street on top of a massive concrete car park. This wasn’t a very good start, and I wasn’t that impressed with the inside of the hotel either, though the bar was okay. On the other hand, I was very impressed with the management – the hotel representatives at the fayre were friendly and interested, very hospitable and welcoming. The kind of people who made me think: Yes! I’d love to leave organising something important in their hands: I’d feel completely relaxed and assured they’d do a reliable job, probably better than I would. And I am very, very highly stung. Or so I am told…

We also got two glasses of champagne each instead of one, and the second one was massive because they “might as well finish off the bottle”.

There were several interesting stalls at the wedding fayre, and we went round and chatted to all of them, but in a quick summary – there were some very nice but not especially exciting floristry, table decor and cake stands (we did get to try a cake, and I did admit we wanted to make ours and she gave me some advice), a singer, a guitar and flute playing pair, a rather fun DJ twosome who sounded veyr together about providing cover for emergencies and stressed that you could GET HOLD OF THEM, which is apparently a problem with DJs. There was a wishing well hire place, with a wishing well in our colours, a caracaturist who couldn’t spell “stationery” and a Sikh family business who put pictures onto glass (except it wasn’t real glass, but it looked like glass). There was also someone who made bridal jewellery, and although I said I didn’t like pearls, was very keen for feedback because it was her first wedding fayre. There was a woman called Karla Saunders who ran an exercise course for getting fit in the run up to the wedding and a few stationers I had a sniff around for final ideas for orders and table plans. Also, a couple of photographers.

There was also a rather interesting stall which caught my eye covered with fascinators priced from £5.99 and hair pieces et cetera. They will actually come to your house and let you try on all sorts of bits in a group of girls. They were called Fascination. They didn’t have a website on their card, though, just a telephone number. I loved the mini top hats.

Now, one of the photographers deserves a few extra words. This is Jon Keeling Photography – and whilst we’re not even considering them, I’m going to big them up. Why? Because when we told them we had a friend doing our photography they gave us something.

This:

You may need to open the image location in a new tab and zoom to read it – but the gist is, a helpful list of things to check through with your photographer to make sure the contract’s in order, you’re covered for eventualities and they have everything they need to do their job well – from the expertise to information about the venue. It is VERY comprehensive, and whilst we have gone through all this stuff already, it’s definitely worth checking off their list too.

I think it’s a great thing to do. In the end, if we make sure our photographer is good, we’re reassured because of the help we’ve been given, and will recommend them (um… like I’m doing now?), and if we’d found a fault in our photographer and decided we weren’t happy, we’d have someone we find trustworthy on hand (would’ve been a bit last minute for our wedding, but you get the idea). So anyway, I just wanted to say Thank You for this to Jon Keele Photography.

Turning the Tables

Circular or rectangular tables? It doesn’t sound like that big an issue, but one thing I have learnt from interloping through the wedding world is that tiniest details are matters of greatest controversy.

I decided we’d have round tables. I went to a wedding with round tables. The balls I’ve been to had round tables and in this picture of the town hall they have round tables, which look pretty:

But then I recently came across this picture of the same room set up with rectangular tables:

The Fiance went to a wedding recently with long tables, and Somerville always had long tables for hall… but we’ll stick to round – we did decide on round (and more importantly, the table runners have been cut).

Our decision was fairly straightforward, partly because we found it fairly trivial, but believe me, I was tensed and ready for battle.

There areso many controversies with tables. Not just their shape, but where they are in the room (too near the buffet, loud people, or people they don’t like), whether anyone is sitting in front of a table leg (surely unavoidable most of the time?), whether there is a top table (we have one; he wanted one) and who is on it.

Seating plans can also be a nightmare. We decided to fit 79 people onto 9 tables rather than 8 to ensure that everyone was sitting with someone they knew or someone they might get on with and to keep groups together where possible, or divide them into big happy chunky portions who might get on with the rest of their table, whilst able to lean back and poke So-and-so who was sitting at table 8.

Top tables have always been controversial because of deciding who to put on it, especially with extended family or step family, with +1s, odd numbers and who is doing the speeches. A lot of brides and grooms don’t like being on display, not having someone opposite to talk to, having to sit with certain guests and having a lot of junk like a flower arrangement or ‘Mr & Mrs’ signs cluttering up the table in front of them. These are all things you should take into account, try to keep everyone happy and basically just pick something sensible and easy. Tables will not change your day.

Some couples cut the chase and have a special sweetheart table, but this doesn’t appear to be very popular. Others have a migrating bride and groom, with a place set for them at every table. Personally, I prefer the German tradition of visiting each table for a shot during the meal, which at least involves everybody and not only those lucky enough to be seated beside them.

A Bit of Sparkle

I know I’ve posted about my/our jewellery before, but why not do it one more time? I have an update… and photographs!

Wedsnesday was a very good day, and we managed to tick a few wedding chores off our list, as well as enjoying ourselves with a meal out with the Fiance’s dad in an Indian restaurant. His dad even brought us some corks for our collection!

One of the main adventures was over to the jewellery quarter to meet Gavin Mack, a Birmingham and Banbury-based jeweller (convenient for us!) who works for 9 jewellery shops in a little workshop along a narrow corridor and up some stairs above a cafe. All the chairs are very low, so that he can stoop over his work bench without getting back ache.

He’s part of a group of 3, who all do different bits of work for these shops – and are not really that together with the online world, so I thought I’d help them along with a review. Afterall, we found Gavin friendly, accommodating and good at his work – although perhaps a little tricky to locate, with only a small plaque with his name on to mark the right door.

I found Gavin as a recommended supplier on weddingface.com (which I am using to host my guest list and budget calculator), but he’s mostly turned up through guidesforbrides.co.uk, where he’s listed under Banbury.

We wanted him for two things – my earrings, and our wedding rings.

My problem with the earrings was wanting something which went with the engagement ring, but it had to be dangly. The number of sites I have trawled through on google searches something of the like, “trillogy earrings, drop, white gold” is immense. I’d’ve been happy with silver and zirconia, but am pretty smug to have diamonds and 9ct white gold – just like the ring.

I’ve finally managed to take some decent close-ups of my engagement ring, so take a nosey!

It also has this cute wiggly metal shaping down the side:

Eventually, I found the earrings I was looking for on geraldineonline.com, a jeweller who ships from China, but they were studs, so I looked into having them made into drops at a reasonable price – which is where Gavin comes in. He recommended adapting these existing earrings rather than making some himself, as it would be a lot cheaper for me, especially given the work it would take to source the diamonds. They are made with machine, which means they’re incredibly delicate compared to what could be made by hand. He didn’t, however, have any trouble transforming them into drops – I think he said it would take him half an hour!

Here is one of my beautiful earrings:

I’m so pleased with them! *Cue feminine gushing*

The engraver he works with is apparently the only hand-engraver in Birmingham, so we were lucky there too. He didn’t bat an eyelid at our unusual script, and without further ado, Gavin resized the Fiance’s ring (I asked him to size it for us, as we’d found 3 size differences between shops! – ouch!) and the engraver scratched “Love for you eternal” (rough translation) in Epidict inside the bands.

Here they are! Mine:

His:

The message (and engraver’s mark – at the end is ‘R’ on his, ‘G’ (or the closest Epidict has to a ‘G’) on mine):

It’s a truly beautiful script – written as though Epidict with it’s constant joining is totally natural to the maker. I’m astonished how smooth it looks. Our old cat, Rupert, used to have a hand-engraved name tag, and the script on that was twice as large as this, in Roman characters, and no smoother nor more natural. This is WOW.

So, yeah, I reckon I’m satisfied…!

Lend Me Your Ears

I’m kind of excited today because we’re going to see “our” jeweller. I found this man through weddingface.com, and strangely he, like us and our wedding, is based in Birmingham and Oxfordshire.

I’d been having trouble finding affordable earring I really liked… I really wanted a pair which went with my ring, and I want drops, not studs. I wear earrings all the time, including giant paperclip ones, can pull earrings, beaded safety-pin earrings and so on, but mostly I wear simple drop earrings, and those are what I like. Again, this became part of my struggle to Look Nice yet Be Myself with respect to the wedding, and I was giving up on anything until I found these from geraldineonline.com:

And this picture is the closest thing I can find to what my (H Samuels) ring looks like:

The earrings are diamond (rather than cubic zirconia), and the same carot white gold as my engagement ring and our wedding bands.

But they’re studs.

So Gavin is making them into drops for me (he thought this would be easier than making the earrings himself from scratch). However, we also wanted someone to do some ring engravings for us, especially tricky as we wanted freehand engravings.

We have our wedding bands already. We were walking down the Moor in Sheffield on a visit to my mum, and walked past HPJ jewellers, who were closing down. They had a half price sale, so we popped in – and walked away £85 worse off, with two wedding rings to show for it! Given that we just wanted plain bands in 9ct white gold, we weren’t that fussy, and the Fiance’s ring is too big… but that’s where Gavin Mack comes in. He’s going to resize the Fiance’s ring for us, and *fingers crossed* can do the engraving. It’s tricky, you see, as we want non-Roman characters.

Something like this:

Our rings:

Of course, even if Gavin can’t do the engraving, I’ll recommend him. He’s sorted out my jewellery problem and given us invaluable advice about what to look for on wedding bands, et cetera, which is a service we don’t pay for. Some suppliers are difficult to communicate with, hard to get hold of, and obstinate when you do, but even though he struggles with email, Gavin is good at replying, easy to talk to, and all in all definitely gold standard.

I will report back after our meeting !

Simply Corking

Hello everybody. *Waves*

Today I just wanted to share this beautiful image of Jo’s cork place names she made for fellow bride Kellie.

The Fiance and I are planning to do something similar, using (like Kellie) champagne corks for the top table and bottle corks for the rest. We currently have almost 60 corks, but are still collecting. To date, I think all the bottles these are from were consumed (or partly consumed) by us, but this may change by May! Kellie actually went a step further and ensured all the corks were from French wines! But I don’t think we can drink enough Oxford wine…

What’s on the Menu?

I’ve talked a lot about food recently. I do that. Most of the time, actually. Whether it’s what we’re having for dinner, what we’re going to get in, what we’re doing for a special occasion, or just plain recipe swapping, I talk and write about food pretty constantly.

So I sat down and wrote out our wedding breakfast menu (not just on here, but in English and Corbel fonts with very precise formatting) and printed it out onto the hammered ivory paper to then glue into our menu books using PVA glue.

The menus are also our table names: I recovered some to-be-thrown-away hardbacks from a library, stripped off the spines, and then we painted them royal blue by mixing together acrylic paints and using chubby brushes. We then named the 10 tables (or 9 and a cake table) after 10 Oxford pubs we’re rather keen on:

The Rusty Bicycle (Bike)
The Gloucester Arms (Glouc)
The Bear
The Chequers
The Turf Tavern
The Royal Oak (Roak)
The Old Bookbinders (Bookies)
The Gardener’s Arms (not the one also known as Pub of Misery)
The Jude and the Jericho (afterall, who can remember which was which?)
The Eagle and Child (Bird and Baby)

I won’t show you the covers in glorious detail, but basically I took a picture of each, photoshopped it prettily into some artistic effect, and then printed them out on photo paper to stick onto the hammered ivory.

On the backs, the Fiance wrote a few interesting facts out to entertain our guests and a solid beer or cider recommendation, because yes, we remember that kind of thing.

And obviously between the pages we have the charming menu provided for us by Cathy from Wrightons, and details of the scrumptious cake we’re making ourselves.