Looking back on our wedding: tips for planning your big day

Time really does fly, whether you’re having fun or not! It seemed like just earlier this year that I was planning our wedding and today we’re celebrating our first wedding anniversary!

Your wedding day is one of the most important milestones in your life (including starting university or college, starting your first job, finding your first love, having your first child…the list goes on) and it involves, like with other important milestones, a lot of preparation, stress and high emotions. With all the planning involved, I thought it might be helpful for prospective brides to hear some of what I learned from spending 2.5 years planning our 2015 wedding.

Rediscovering fashion over the years: 100 years of engagement rings

My hobby of jewellery making had taken a backseat when I was heavily involved in sewing for and planning our wedding last year, but it doesn’t mean my interest in jewellery stopped there. I still like to keep my nose in the business and often find myself looking intently at jewellery pieces to understand the intricacies of a designer or jewellery maker’s craft.

It isn’t until you look at something in further detail and understand the work put into it that you can fully appreciate the art of a designer’s work. Engagement rings are one of the most important pieces of jewellery (alongside the wedding band) in a woman’s life. Below I discovered a video shared on Stylist that documents the history of how fashion has changed for engagement rings in the past 100 years.

Shopping for a wedding reception dress!

For the past 2.5 years, I’ve spent most of my efforts (and pennies) on our DIY wedding so I didn’t really think much about shopping for myself. Also having recently made floral pleated tea dress for a friend’s October wedding, I’m trying to find inspiration for a dress for another upcoming wedding and thinking I’d like to buy a dress for a change. Sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy something that’s been made by someone else and that’s where I’m at after spending the first 10 months of this year sewing 7 dresses.

Without further ado, here are my top picks for the upcoming Christmas wedding I’ll be attending.

Our DIY wedding in photos!

A big thank you to everyone who’s helped make our wedding such a special day, especialy all the family and friends who came from all over the world.If anyone wanted to read about the projects that we were involved in for our wedding, you can click on my blog posts below for more information:

• Chinese red wedding dress (here, here, here and here)
• White wedding dress (here, here, here and here)
• Evening reception dress (here, here, here and here)
• Tartan stole (here, here and here)
• Maid of Honour and Bridesmaid dresses (here, here and here)
• Drop top wedding guestbook
• Vegan tablet recipe for our wedding favours

Disclaimer: All photos used in this post have either been taken by myself, family and friends, or our friend Asim of Fuzed Bulb who was our wedding photographer and should not be used anywhere else without prior permission.

Getting pampered at Lush Spa: Beauty School party!

When it was time to plan my pamper day (as I dubbed my hen do) with a few friends, my sister and my mum, I wanted it to be a fun and relaxed day. Apart from a few friends who already knew each other, it was a how do you do kind of day for everyone else. I’d been looking around for places to get our nails done (which we did at The Wax Bar on Rose Street and they did an amazing job) before heading to Mimi’s Bakehouse for afternoon tea. To make sure everyone’s fully relaxed for the next day, I booked Lush Spa on Princes Street for the Beauty School party.

DIY wedding favours: recipe for vegan tablet

Slowly but surely, I’ve been making slight changes to my diet since I made it my New Year’s resolution to be more aware of my food intolerances and to eat healthier. For our wedding, a family friend made her famous tablet (for those of you who aren’t familiar with this Scottish sweet, it’s like fudge, but much softer and melts in your mouth and tastes like heaven). We had vegan and lactose intolerant guests, so I decided to make a vegan batch as well.

Wedding wardrobe complete: from start to finish!

My 3 dresses for the wedding: the Chinese wedding dress, the white wedding dress, and the evening reception dress

The Maid of Honour (left) and Bridesmaid dresses

I can’t tell you how satisfied (or how relieved!) I was to have finished all 5 dresses for the wedding: 3 of my own, the Maid of Honour and Bridesmaid dresses.

Goodbye, Miss T; Hello, Mrs C!

It’s official: I’m now the new (and third!) Mrs C!

Updates on my wedding dressmaking project: the evening reception dress

I thought when I posted my idea for my evening reception dress that it would have been finished before the summer was over. I think I was getting a bit over-ambitious (or slacking?) because I’m still working on it. I was planning to work on a couple of other exciting dressmaking projects (here and here), but it doesn’t look like I’ll get started (or finished) before the wedding.

The good news is, I’m making good progress with the evening reception dress though with only 9 hours worth of cutting, pinning and sewing (by machine and by hand)!

Wedding DIY project: tartan stole

I’ve been on a wee bitty of a holiday which I couldn’t say no to. After all, the last holiday I took from work was 3 days back in February, so the last couple of weeks (plus a few more next week) feels well deserved. My best friend has come for a visit to see Scotland the last couple weeks and it has been a lot of fun travelling and sightseeing like a local, while also seeing the must see points of interest.

I promised that I was going to post a tutorial once I made a stole out of the tartan fabric I bought from the Scotland Shop. I already bought tartan shoe clips for my shoes, but felt a stole would also be a nice complementary piece to my dresses.