The Wedding Dress Hunt - Delphine Manivet

Okay, it's wedding blog confession time. After insisting I wouldn't spend more than a thousand pounds on a wedding dress, and that it was outrageous to consider spending any more, I've chosen a Delphine Manivet gown. OUCH! It's SO much more than a thousand pounds, and my wonderful mum has offered to pay for it, but I've got severe buyer's remorse on her behalf. The problem is I love it. I love it more than The Boy {almost}, and when I tried it on for the second time, this wonderful feeling of relief swept over me, because I knew I'd finally found the right dress. It has begun to become a bit of an issue for me. Everyone kept asking whether I'd found my gown, and with only four months to go, it was all becoming far too stressy. Not being a fashion person, it had become something of an endurance test, and I felt I was failing at being a happy bride, because choosing a dress is supposed to be fun, right? Pictured below are some of Delphine Manivet's gorgeous dresses {photos by Kiss the Groom}, but if you want to know which one is mine, you'll need to check out my Twitter feed @beforethebigday, because I can't risk The Boy seeing it here! Click here for more on My Wedding.

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My Wedding - Buying Dresses in NYC

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary.

Buying Wedding Dresses in New York
If you follow me on Twitter, you might have spotted that I've just been on holiday. My cousin lives in the Caribbean {lucky me}, so I took off mid-Jan for a spot of sunshine. The flight stopped in New York, home of some of the best wedding shopping in the world, and I was off the plane in a shot, ready to try out some of the best bridal boutiques I could find.

First stop was Saja Wedding. I've already featured them on Before the Big Day, and Saja's dresses are simply gorgeous. Ethereal and floaty, they're perfect for a summer wedding. From simple to detailed, Saja also creates a heavenly range of accessories. Here are a few of my favourites from my marathon trying-on session!

Next stop, was the legendary J. Crew Bridal Boutique on Madison Avenue. It's a gorgeous place, with giant dressing rooms, and a dreamy selection of gowns, shoes and accessories. I do most of my shopping alone, but the group that was due to arrive after me included 12 bridesmaids, all looking for dresses along with the bride! J. Crew's dresses start wonderfully cheap, so I was hoping 'The One' would be one of those under $500. Here are a few of my favourites.

Last on my list {it was a flying stop}, was Lovely Bridal. A recent addition to the bridal market, it's a cute shop in Soho, just doors away from super-trendy Bleeker Street and the Magnolia Bakery. The changing room here was even bigger, and trying on the dresses was a real experience. They stock lots of fantastic designers, but my eye was drawn to the Delphine Manivet gowns, and those from LA designer Alix & Kelly.

So which one did I choose? I'm afraid I can't tell you that - not because I'm keeping it secret, but because I still haven't decided...... So with only 4 months to go until my big day, I still haven't chosen my wedding dress - argh! Please tell me which is your favourite - maybe we could have a vote?

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My Wedding - My Photographer

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary.

My Photographer - Chloé from Caught the Light
A few days ago, I suddenly realised that in all my rambles about my wedding, I'd failed to mention an incredibly important person - my wedding photographer. After we picked the venue {more on that in March}, I knew that I needed to choose a photographer asap, because the good ones get booked at least a year in advance. As a wedding blogger, it was also going to be incredibly difficult to pick between all the amazing wedding photographers I feature on this site, and believe me - they're all hugely talented. So the real clincher came in the form of a coincidence. I'd already featured Caught the Light's work on Before the Big Day, and one day one of my mother's friends spotted one of the bridesmaids, and we realised we knew the family. It then emerged that Chloé from Caught the Light had photographed the weddings of all three sisters, which is a serious stamp of approval. A quick email and a coffee later, and I'd officially booked Chloe for a trip to Provence!

That makes it sound easy, but I understand that picking a wedding photographer is a serious business. At first I was so shocked by how much they could cost, that I seriously considered not hiring an official one. One of my bridesmaids, Jemma Harding {mini-ad: Do check out her new website!}, is a huge talented photographer, and she had offered to give me my pictures as a wedding present. But having been to lots of weddings, and seen how hard the photographers have to work, I knew that she wouldn't really be able to enjoy the whole affair if she was constantly clicking. So once I realised I knew I needed one, my search began.

Wedding blogs are definitely the right way to go about choosing a photographer, but make sure you look at their whole portfolio before you book, because you want to make sure every picture is fabulous, not just the ones they pick for the blogs. Don't miss the Before the Big Day Black Book for my recommendations! Ask around for any recommendations from your friends, but remember that your taste might be different to theirs. I had no sense of my preferred style of wedding photography until I started this blog - you'll probably need to do a fair bit of research to find what you want. Do try to meet your photographer before your wedding. If you don't like them personally, then you're not going to be able to relax around them, and relaxed = good pictures. If you want them to hussle large groups of guests, then make sure they have a strong enough character to boss them around, but if you want subtle, reportage-stye wedding photographs, then you'll want them to be a bit more laid back.

If all this terminology of 'style' freaks you out a bit, then keep it simple and follow these rules;
1. Check out the Before the Big Day Black Book for my recommended photographers.
2. Do you like the look of their work? You don't need to know why.
3. Can you afford them?
4. Do you like them?
5. Are they available for your wedding?

Lastly, even if you're a credit crunch bride {who isn't!}, my advice is don't scrimp on the photographer. Your wedding is an important day, and it'll pass so fast, you'll want the pictures to bring back the memories. If you're really struggling with the cost, consider getting married on a week-day, and only hiring a photographer for a few hours - they often do reasonable rates, it's just all about avoiding Saturdays.
{All pictures published with thanks to Caught the Light}

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My Wedding - Five Months To Go

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

If I had to pick a single word to describe how I'm feeling right now about our wedding, I'd use panicked. With less than five months to go, the decisions are coming thick and fast, and I feel like the days are flying past, without me actually achieving anything. If it wasn't for my fabulous wedding planner, Kerry, I'd be a complete stress-case. In part to calm myself down, here's a list of what I've actually got sorted out.

The Caterer
We have found a caterer who is just about within our budget, and we're booked in for the taste-testing in early March. Choosing caterers was really difficult. Trying to figure out who was the best value was pretty much impossible, because they all offered different options. Kerry very kindly put everything in a table for us, and I'd thoroughly recommend doing that if you're still struggling. We got three quotes in the end - the first two were a bit to fussy and fancy. Lesson learnt - don't be afraid to keep on asking for quotes until you get what you want. It is out there, even if it doesn't feel like it in the early days.

The DJ
Choosing a DJ was harder because we're in France. Have you ever been to a French nightclub? The music is always dreadful. So we knew our DJ would need to be English. This is when the lovely Kerry stepped in all over again, and suggested her friend Sophie Callis, who's a professional DJ in London, but lives in France. We met her last week and we love her. We totally clicked, which was a huge relief. I now feel like I'm going to have this lovely team of ladies behind me on the big day. However, our entertainment budget is completely blown. We've at least doubled it, by hiring both a string quartet, a DJ and a music system. Mobile DJ's normally bring their own kit, but all the French ones were just too cheesy, so we've had to go for our own system. That's something to remember if you're planning a wedding at home, or in a rented house. If you hire a full set-up wedding venue instead, they'll usually have all that sorted for you. We've argued away our double-budget, by rationalising that if everyone's going to fly out to France for our wedding, the least we can do is host a great party!

The London Wedding
We have to get legally get married in England before our ceremony in France, and I'm determined to keep it discrete, and 'not a big deal', so it doesn't take away from the main event. However, it does mean that our grandparents, who won't make it out to France, can come along. We wanted to have it in Shoreditch Town Hall which is round the corner from our flat, but on the day we went to register our wedding, we discovered it was going to cost a fortune! The Hall itself is cheap-as-chips, but to arrange for a registrar to come ten minutes down the road from Hackney Town Hall costs £400! So we're going to host it at Hackney instead, and taxi all the relatives down there. I had a minor bridezilla moment when I discovered we'd have to get married at 3pm instead of 12.30pm, but reasoned that a high tea after the ceremony would be just as good as a lunch. Just think of all the cake!

So there's a list of three things I've done, here's the list of what's left - stationery, flowers, wine, site visit, ceremony to be written, dress, veil, shoes, groom's outfit, honeymoon, drinks the day after the wedding, catering for the high tea, dress for the London wedding.....aaaaah!

My Wedding - The Planner

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

When it came to wedding planners, I always swore I wouldn't get one. To start with they sounded like a waste of money, and something only extremely wealthy people could afford, and secondly, I'm pretty organised and we had a year and half to get everything booked - I mean how hard can it be?

{Photo Credits: Follow Studio stationery, Mint Photography, via Once Wed}

The answer is very hard. The thing is, we're getting married in Provence, and although I speak French, I don't have the specialised vocabulary needed to talk catering {traiteur}, string quartets {quartor à cordes} or portaloos {still not sure}. Then there's the issue of hiring lighting and sound systems, crockery and cutlery, and communicating with the caretaker - aaah! Back in August, my stress-levels were rising, and it was all becoming distinctly not fun. I was panicking and avoiding thinking about our wedding, and I was getting secretly pretty angry with The Boy not helping out. Eventually it all came to a head, and somehow we didn't have a huge row, but a sensible grown-up discussion {astonishing}, and The Boy insisted on The Planner option.

 But who? This is the problem with weddings, there's just too many decisions! You come to one, only to discover there's another to be made. There are a couple of very good wedding planning companies in the south of France, but I didn't want my wedding to become formulaic, so really I wanted an individual to help out. I was lucky. Thanks to my endless research earlier this year into venues, I'd stumbled upon a fantastic blog called My Riveria Wedding. The author, Kerry Brackan, is a French speaking, English events planner in Cannes {uber-glam!}, and she was starting to consider moving into wedding planning on a private basis. I'd written to her back in March, but she hadn't quite started out yet. I emailed her again on the off-chance she'd change her mind, and in a fantastic turn of fortune, she said she was now available. Woohoo!

Straight away, it was like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. It was amazing. I started looking at wedding blogs again, and indulging in the details and the ideas. Kerry started making phone calls right away, and we've already got two catering quotes, which she's assiduously translated for me. She's also going to coordinate the wedding on the day, which will mean we can enjoy every minute, without worrying about whether there's enough loo roll or who's going to light the candles. So the moral of this story? Hiring a wedding planner isn't cheap, but once you've got one, you realise they're worth ten times what you're paying for them. After all, what's the point in spending all this money on a wedding, if you don't enjoy it?

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My Wedding - Cocktails

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

Our wedding is in about six months now, and we've finally got round to picking a caterer. Now that may sound super-late, but apparently in France everything is booked much later, and they're happy to take bookings with only a couple of months to go. Anyway, I've discovered that I'm a desert and drinks kind of gal. Starters and main courses don't really float my boat, but once we get onto the puddings and cocktails, I feel inspired! We've decided to have a couple of signature cocktails, so we've got to pick a design and name. Here are a few that I've caught my eye.

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Secret Garden

Wedding themes can be based on anything - a favourite necklace, a film, a book you've read, or every colour of the rainbow. I've chosen a Secret Garden for my theme, partly because our venue is a walled garden, and partly because of a vintage key I picked up in New York and my Alex Monroe bumble-bee necklace, which my mum gave to me as a 30th birthday present. Once you've chosen your theme, the best way to come up with ideas is to search Etsy - it's a collection of the world's most creative minds, and it's chock-a-block of gorgeous products. Here are just a few of my finds - what theme have you chosen?

Product Credits {clockwise from top left} - 1. Creations 4 Brides, 2. Which Goose, 3. Tulaloo, 4. Paper Platypus, 5. Chloe AND Maddie,  6. Which Goose

Product Credits {clockwise from top left} - 1. Silver Lining, 2. JL67, 3. Enormous Champion, 4. SMV Designs, 5. That Final Touch, 6. A Remark You Made

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My Wedding - Save the Dates

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

My plan for our Save the Dates was a disaster. If you check out my last posting, you'll see that I'd decided to use wooden cards (see below) with the symbol of a key stamped on one side, and the Save the Date message stamped on the other. Unfortunately it really didn't look good. The font of the message stamp is light and feminine, and the key stamp is really heavy and clunky, and they clashed horribly. It wouldn't have been that much of a disaster, but in my enthusiasm, I'd already stamped all the wooden cards with the key, meaning I couldn't use them any more. If you're planning your own DIY invitations, I'd definitely recommend creating one template, to check out the finished effect, before you go stamping crazy.

Several weeks then passed where I tried to figure out what to do, and meanwhile the clock was ticking, because we were going away for August, and I wanted to get the Save the Dates out before we left. In the end, I decided to save the wooden cards for the reception, and use white luggage tags instead. By now, I'd left it too late to buy the perfect sized tags from Etsy, so I had to buy regular ones and chop the ends off them. As you can see, my scissor-skills leave something to be desired, so the edge wasn't entirely straight, but hopefully my guest won't notice!

Our flight left on Tuesday evening, and I decided to buy the luggage tags and start stamping on Tuesday morning! So it was a bit of a lastminute affair, but The Boy chipped in, and within a couple of hours, we'd managed to stamp and put together 100 or so Save the Dates, and carefully put them in the envelopes. We took them with us to the airport, with the plan of posting them just before we got on the flight. I'd decided on gold 1st class stamps for the look, but because of the pegs, they were too fat for a standard stamp, and needed more postage. So we ended up sticking on over 200 stamps with only half an hour to go before our flight took off. Tense wasn't the word!

The whole experience was good fun, but I'm not sure I'll DIY our actual wedding invitations. Despite all the impressive efforts of other DIY brides, I'm thinking they must have more raw talent than me, and I'd really like our invitations to look more professional. Although I will go on with my DIY attempts in the hope that I get a bit better! By the way - I'm always hugely inspired by the blog I Do It Yourself - definitely worth a look!

My Wedding - The Stationery #2

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

You'll see from the title of this article, that I'm still obsessing about stationery. It's got to the stage where I really need to get our Save the Dates out. We're not getting married till 28th May 2011, but I'm keen for everyone to be able to pick up the cheapest Easyjet flights, so we need to be organised.

After endless agonising and pondering, I've finally settled on stamping the Save the Date statement on a business card-sized piece of balsa wood, stamping the other side with my key symbol, adding a Mini Moo card with the details of our website, and pegging them together with a tiny peg. These will all go in a miniature brown envelope. Whew! Lots of fiddly bits, but I'd like to add intrigue to the invitations, and build the anticipation for the wedding. Originally I was going to use luggage tags, but I really liked the unusual, natural element of the wood, and it fitted in with my Secret Garden theme.

 Meanwhile, I've been a big fan of Mini Moo cards for a few years. They enable you to create your own designs, and the finished products arrive in these cute boxes, and are just the most desirable things ever. The added bonus is that because I get their newsletter, I get their discounts, so 100 of them only cost about £10 including postage - bargain! The balsa wood cards were a custom order from Perch Papiers, and I already had those from early in my planning, but choosing an ink stamp was really difficult. I spent hours and hours looking through Etsy for the perfect stamp, and then realised that if my stationery is going to look a professional package, then I'm going to need everything to be in the same font. 

If you're DIY-ing your stationery, then you've probably already figured this out, but if you're just starting out, my advice is to choose a font first. Now in my quest to be constantly original, I didn't want to use just any old Windows font, so I went in search of special free ones online. Be warned - there are thousands. And then there are thousands more that cost about $40 each, and they're even more beautiful. Prepare to spend several days choosing - I browsed DaFont, 1001 Free Fonts and Urban Fonts, but there's loads more sites. Eventually, I picked a free font called English, which looks just like the picture above!

It's a bit scrolly and a bit romantic, but not so fussy that my elderly relatives won't be able to read it. What do you think? The relief of having finally made a decision was huge - I felt I'd achieved something! Now it came to the fun bit - I designed the Mini Moo cards, and the Save the Date stamp and set about getting it all made. The Moo cards will have 'Hooray! A wedding in Provence' on one side {white on grey}, and 'Excited? Want to know more?' and the details of our wedding website {grey on white} on the other side.

Originally I wanted the Save the Date stamp to look like the picture on the left, but I got in touch with Purple Lemon Designs, on Etsy, and the lovely Kelly suggested a slightly different looking stamp, which I loved, so I decided to go ahead with that. All in all the whole package will cost about £65 pre-postage - bargain!

My Wedding - The Theme

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

In my last posting, I was getting very excited about stationery, but it all came to a halt when I realised that I actually needed to start making decisions. Now I'm sure loads of brides make their theme choices on the hoof, and in the end, the bits and pieces all come together perfectly, but I'm not that kind of bride. I like order. Order makes me feel in safe {!}, and as I don't have a great deal of confidence in my style, I'm keen to get it sorted well in advance. My inspiration boards helped, but I needed to narrow them down, and as I'm a wordy type of person, my ultimate mood board was a list of adjectives. And here they are!

Colours: sage green, soft grey, dusky pink and silver
Mood: light-hearted, relaxed, organic, garden wedding, large lawn, the scent of flowers at dusk, warm air, light breeze, laughter
Decorations: burlap and linen, giant tissue pompoms, fairy lights, huge white balloons, lanterns, bubble guns, thick luxurious ribbons, parasol, blackboard signs, brown string, rosemary sprigs, lavender sprigs, twine, sage, honey, olive oil, lavender bags, brown paper bags

Now all I needed to do was settle on a motif. I knew that I wanted to pick one symbol to hold everything together, and my list included Provencial images like a sprig of lavender or an olive tree, plus a vintage key or a monogram of our initials. Also, when The Boy proposed, he read out an exerpt from The Great Gatsby, with the line "a tuning fork against a star", which made me wonder about having a star motif. Ulimately, finding the venue helped me make up my mind. You have to go through two arches and a grand gate to get into the Chateau grounds. Add that to my love of gardens and literature, and you have a Secret Garden theme with a vintage key motif. To celebrate my decision, I went straight onto Etsy and bought a whole bunch of vintage keys, plus a vintage stamp - yippee! I was finally one my way to designing my wedding!

What motif did you choose for your wedding, and how did you come to your decision? Do leave a comment below!

My Wedding - The Stationery

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

All the bride-guides tell you that stationery is super-important because it's the first indication your guests get of your wedding style. Now it's really easy to just put that down to gumph, and say to yourself that no one really cares what the font looks like on your invite, but I LOVE stationery, so I'm choosing to believe this particular bride-guide rule. As a consequence I have spent hours and hours looking at the various different styles and colours and fonts. I've considered the wonderful world of letterpress, and quickly turned away from it on account of expense. I've looked into DIY, I've searched Etsy, I've looked at the US stationery blogs Oh So Beautiful Paper and Paper Crave, and I still haven't decided what I'm going to do. There's just too much good stuff out there. My brain is full to busting of paper, and I'm still only halfway to deciding. On my good days, this is all part of the pleasure of planning a wedding. On my bad days, when I'm feeling broke, it's just another thing to stress about. Today was a bad day {£600+ on a plumber's bill - ouch!}, so I'm deliberately writing this to get my creative joy back.

I quickly decided against the generic British wedding invitation. They're gorgeous, they're classic, but I'm all about being original, so I'm in the market for some serious creativity. Letterpress stationery uses heavy card, and presses the font into the paper, before filling it with ink. It creates the most gorgeous effect and looks expensive, mainly because it really is super pricey. We're talking £6 an invite. So that was out. I love the idea of lots of little tags and accessories and stamps, so that opening the invitation is a bit like unwrapping a present. Check out the pictures {above} from MaeMae Paperie, and you'll see what I mean.

My emphasis is on a natural, garden feel to the wedding, so I'm drawn towards the more rustic, eco-friendly paper. However, I also love sage green, and the shutters of the Chateau are green, so stationery in that shade would be a hint towards the location. Wood is a major trend this season, and I'm all for using different materials to keep your guests guessing. You see - too many choices already!

Follow Studio {below} is probably my favourite stationery boutique right now. It's an Australian outfit, and they use these glorious sludgy colours and organic fonts. The only problem is the expense. It works out as £4 an invitation, and that's before all the extra stationery. But then again, it would be a beautiful collection designed by a talented graphic designer. Indecision-agony!

The budget alternative is to print my own. Or at least, to print some of the accessories. I'm really keen to create a welcome pack for my guests, with an info booklet and other bits and pieces, like a personalised Do Not Disturb sign for their hotel door the morning after the wedding. Along those lines, I recently purchased my first printer - an HP OfficeJet 6500, and I'm going to be having some fun practicing. If printing is easier than it looks, then I may well buy a DIY invitation set, and go it alone. I've been looking at Download & Print for their free invitation suites, and Mae Mae is planning to do her own collection too. My article for Before the Big Day on printables is here, if you want to find out more.

I'll leave you with my two wild cards {above}. They're nothing like my other ideas; one is purple, and the other startling blue. They don't fit in with my theme, but I love them too much to let them go right now. I'm super-keen on the wax seal - wouldn't it be exciting to receive an invitation in the post with one on the back. Exactly the sense of anticipation I'm trying to create for our wedding.

Have you chosen your stationery yet? Please do leave a comment about how you made your decisions! What did you go for? Send me a pic, and I can put it up on the blog, or big up your stationer here.

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My Wedding - The Venue

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

So we'd established we wanted to get married in Provence, now all we needed was a venue. SO much easier said than done! For any  newly engaged couples out there who haven't done this yet, there are two options. If you can afford it, I'd recommend hiring a planner to find your venue for you. They'll do a fabulous job of noting down all the attributes you want, and then they'll create a booklet of the best venues in the area, show you around all of them in one day, and bada bing, you're booked. No stress, no angst, no pain. I even found a company that would do this for me called Dites Moi Oui. They sent me an example of one of their booklets, and it was amazing, with every detail you'd want, including floor plans - I mean wow!

The downside is they charge you about £800 for the pleasure, and in our constant aim to spend less, not more, I decided to take on the challenge myself. It started off fun, at least for the first couple of months. Then it become less fun, as it appeared that what I wanted didn't exist. Or at least, we couldn't afford what I wanted. The budget monster raised its ugly head again, along with a nagging uncertainty of whether to go for a charming farmhouse with lavender shutters {unpretentious, sweet, cheap, unmemorable???} or a beautiful chateau with turrets {pretentious and expensive, but with a real feeling of occasion}. Should we take it for a week, or just one night? Where exactly should it be {Provence is quite a large area}? Many nights were spent surfing the net, and tearing out hair.

This lasted till April - yup, four months. I reckon I looked at every single edifice in Provence, from a shack to a castle. And then, with only four weeks till our recce trip to France, the political campaigning for the British General Election started, and I was swamped at work {my day job is at BBC Radio 4}. So when it came to two days before crunch-time, I'd only booked three venues to visit, and all of them were wrong in some way. That's when an angel in the form of Stephanie from Simply Chateau came into my life. I didn't know it at the time, because she seemed to be suggesting venues way out of my league, but she was determined I should visit two of her chateaux. So I gave in (with hours to go till our flight), and let her book the appointments.

Provence was gorgeous. It reassured us as to why we'd decided to celebrate our wedding there, and we had a truly fabulous weekend of food and wine, and a little too much driving. We visited my venues first {see the list below}, and in the end only one of Stephanie's chateau. As it happens, my discoveries had a lot going for them, and I'd recommend them to everyone, they just weren't right for us. But Stephanie's chateau was The One. At one point, we stopped to admire the view from one of the terraces {yes, it has many!}, and I might have got little tears in my eyes. But don't hold it against me, because the place really is perfect, and I promise, I'm not turning into one of those wet and weepy brides.

{Other Venues}
La Mas De La Rose
Chateau des Barrenques
Chateau Talaud
Le Mas de la Brune

We decided to take it for three days, as it made more economic sense than one night or one week, and it means that we'll have the weekend wedding we always wanted. It's a private house rather than a hotel, and it has 11 bedrooms, which means closest family, and my bridesmaids can be on hand for moral support and on-the-day jobs! It was over-budget, but we've had no post-booking remorse, it was perfect, and we'll just cut back in other areas. No pics I'm afraid, because we want to keep it a surprise for our guests, but it has an onsite chapel, pool and tennis court. I'm so excited about it!

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My Wedding - 1st Steps

This is where I tell you all about planning my own wedding. After all, if I'm publishing all these Real Weddings, it's only fair I share my trials and tribulations. Read the rest of my wedding diary here.

{Date}
Setting the date for our wedding was fairly simple. We wanted a sunshine wedding, rather than a winter one, and The Boy has a year long job interview ending in July, which meant this summer was out. I certainly didn't want to be asking him what he thought about buttonholes and balloons, when he was stressed about work. So we looked ahead to 2011 and settled on the bank holiday weekend, so that our friends and family could come out to France for the full three day stretch. The Big Day will be 28th May 2011, but the plan is to have a whole weekend of activities....if our budget holds out!

{Budget}
Speaking of the budget, that was the next step. Initially I thought we should set a budget of £20k, and then I did one of those questionnaires in a wedding magazine, and realised that realistically our budget would need to be a bit higher. Gulp! £20k is a serious amount of cash, and I think one of the crazy things about the wedding industry is how much things cost. If anyone has worked out a way to do it for cheaper....please, get in touch! I'm determined to DIY as much as I can, but if we're making everyone come out to France, I think the least we can do is throw them a decent party, and decent means good food and wine, at the very least.

{Location}
The budget trauma lasted me a good few months, and there was also a fair amount of parental pressure to go for a UK wedding. My mum has a lovely house in Dorset, with a big lawn, so there was nothing stopping us from having a lovely countryside, marquee wedding. We even have a family church! But, but, but....we really wanted to get married in France, and despite resistance, The Boy and I decided it was our big day, and stuck to our guns. It wasn't easy though, and I definitely had a few moments when I worried I was being a bit bridezilla. I think it helped that we were going to be paying for quite a lot of the wedding ourselves - I imagine if your parents are footing the whole bill, it must be harder to put your foot down.

{Guest List}
Can I let you into a secret? I wrote the guest list for my wedding six months before we got engaged. Like I said in my first posting, The Boy has had to take a serious amount of pressure on the marriage front. I'm amazed he held out for so long! The good news is that I have a small family, and we have a pretty tight-knit group of friends, so we've managed to get the list under 150. Throw in a few people declining on account of distance and/or age, and I reckon we're around 120. Manageable.....I hope!

{Inspiration}
So we had a budget, a location and a list of 120 guests. Now we needed to settle our wedding style. One of first things a bride should do once she gets engaged is create her inspiration boards. Not only does it help your suppliers {florist, stationer, dress designer, etc}, but it is SUCH fun! Needless to say, I'd been saving pictures for months, and I churned out these boards pretty fast.

If you're newly engaged, and looking to do the same, there's several computer programmes that you can download for free. I use the collage function on Picasa, but there's also Picnik. Alternatively you can use the Style Circle function on US site Style Me Pretty. I tend to save pictures as I go {right click, save a copy}, picking my favs from wedding blogs, and then I put them altogether in a collage. If you're not web savvy and have access to a colour printer, then print away, and you can always tear out pictures from bridal magazines.


What do you think of my boards? Have you already created your own? Send them over to me at beforethebigday@gmail.com, and I'll post them up on the site!

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My Wedding - Engagement

It's taken me a while to come round to writing about my own wedding. I'm not sure why. I'm not naturally shy, but I'm determined not to become one of those 'it's all about ME' brides. Bridezilla. Bride of Frankenstein. You get my gist. But considering I'm out there gathering ideas from all these other lovely brides, I think it's only fair I share my own planning. So with exactly a year to go, here's my story....

The Boy and I met 'officially' in 2006. We'd actually bumped into each other years before, through his best friend Kiran, but neither of us really remember it. Apparently it was in the Nando's on Upper Street in Islington - dead romantic! Our first date was at a Japanese restaurant called Koi's, near Kensington Park - I'd recommend it, because you have to take your shoes off, and it's good to check out a guy's socks before you consider him as a future husband. So one thing led to another, we bought a flat together, went travelling for a year, and by the time I turned 30 in February last year, I was pretty much ring obsessed. In fact I started Before the Big Day four months before we got engaged. Talk about a hint!

The Boy asked me to marry him on 4th January in the mountains in France. We were skiing, and I'd headed home early for a bath, and while I was tucked up in my dressing gown, The Boy wrote 'will you marry me in the snow'. He went down on one knee, and read out an extract from The Great Gatsby {below}, and I said yes. And cried a bit, and he might have too, but he's too macho to admit it.

I had to wait till we got home before I got my proper diamond ring. I always thought we'd choose the engagement ring together, but The Boy had taken matters into his own hands, and picked one for me. It's a solitaire diamond, and it's perfect.

We decided we wanted to get married abroad for lots of reasons. First of all we really want a wedding in the sunshine, and in the UK you can pretty much guarantee rain. Secondly, friends of ours had celebrated their big day in Carpri the year before, and we'd had such a riot that we wanted to recreate the mood.

So we picked the South of France, specifically Provence, because we spent our first summer holiday there, and we'd fallen in love with the food and wine, olive trees and lavender. Also, it was close enough to the UK to keep flights cheap, but far enough away to be sunny. Also, I can speak French, or at least, I think I can! In the next installment, I'll show you my inspiration boards, which I'm using to give my suppliers a sense of our wedding style. Do leave me comments and tell me about your engagement stories!