I’ve been so busy planning some of the wedding details that we’ve sort of forgotten about our upcoming (well in 2 mths time) engagement party.

Since I’m not much of a creative bunny and Sam is happy to go along with whatever, I enlisted the help of my aunt (who I must say is brilliant at card making) to help us design our invites. It took two trips to the card shop for a decision to be made on colour and style. I know it’s only engagement invites so we wanted them to be simple yet nice. We picked the perfect paper and design and got straight to work cutting, using double sided tape and sticking..between my aunt, mum and I we were a production line and after an afternoon over a few wines we had created the best bunch of engagement invites ever (yes I’m biased).

So now the exciting part..posting them!! I know our party isn’t until early October but I just couldn’t wait so I posted some out to my friends who I had told or who I thought needed to know wayyyy in advanced. Then after being to excited and impatient we decided to send the rest off! So now It’s just sitting back waiting for the RSVP’s and counting down the days until we can party with our nearest and dearest.

So onto the important part of the party: drinks! I must say I love the cheap bargains you can buy online! We’ve had plenty of bargains purchased and I think the delivery post man has begun to think of us a serious wine coniersers or just party animals hehe.

We will keep you posted on our engagement party success!!

I’m very excited because this week my best friend (bridesmaid) who I have been friends with since we were 3 is coming back home after spending 4 mths away! She has been away for the most exciting time of our wedding planning where we picked a date and venue so I have a lot to tell her about. 

Thought I’d better talk about the bridal party and let you know how we came about selecting the crew. 

Jess is my wonderful friend who I’ve been friends with since our kiddie days so it was a no brainer that she was to be up there. 

Erin is my other lovely friend who has been around since high school and we’ve been good friends. I’d always thought I’d pick her as she is a special friend. 

On the bloke side of things we have 

Broc who is Sam’s good mate and cousin, I think he was always going to be in the party as him and Sam are pretty much attached at the hip 

Nathan is Sams older brother and Sam was best man for at his wedding a few years ago. Was also a pretty obvious choice he’d be involved somewhere 

I think we chose a pretty darn good group of friends and family to be in the bridal party and I know there will be lots of fun times and lots of laughs and jokes when we’re off getting photos, and they’re all pretty good looking !! hehe  

Best advice when choosing – make sure they’re special in your life, they will relax and have fun and will be there to help out before and on the day – you don’t want someone who can’t have fun with you, make you feel at ease and help out with the planning. 

We’ll see how good our selection is when we get closer to our wedding hehehe jk guys

one of the most exciting parts of a wedding to look forward to ….the honeymoon!!!! 

I was walking past a travel agent last week and I thought I’d pop in to grab some books of possible honeymoon places. The lady gave me about 6 magazines and told me ‘go home read them and come back when you would like to find out more information’. I took these home, gave them to Sam and told him to have a look for some ideas…he then disappeared and came back about an hr later with what seemed like a really romantic escape. I thought it was really sweet of him with what he had planned until I found out that the reason he was so keen on the places I’d suggested was because he planned to include a ’surfing trip’ while we were away..not happy  

I managed to convince him that he was not going to spend our week away with a bodyboard. 

Now my days are spent browsing trip advisor websites dreaming of magical places, I really can’t make up my mind on where to go.

I thought I’d better let you know about the amazing holiday we had 2 weeks ago and how amazing it would be for a honeymoon.

LANGKAWI – amazing, friendly and very pretty. We stayed at Casa Del Mar resort and as soon as we walked in we were greeted with cool pepermint towels, cold drinks, home made biscuits, live piano playing songs in the foyer and beautiful oil being burnt in the oil burners in our room. This place is soooo good if you want to relax.

We spent our week lounging on the beach and by the pool, sipping cocktails, enjoying each others company and not thinking at all about the wedding plans (was nice to switch off) .

If you want somewhere different for a honeymoon, this place is very nice! Just stay at Casa Del Mar!

xo

well we’re back from our holiday hitting the ground running planning the next stages of our wedding.

I created our engagement invites and have started to post them out. We’ve set the date for later this year after a lot of other busy events have happened and when it starts to warm up a bit more!!!! We decided we want to have a bigger engagement party as we’re only having a small wedding we would like to involve all of our friends in family in some part of our wedding\engagement.

We knew one of the top three things to do to start planning our wedding was to find the venue, photographer and celebrant. As you know before we left we’d sorted out ceremony and reception venue so it was now time to find a photographer. We had spent a while looking at different photographers and we knew the style of photos we liked. I spent some time on the internet and read some magazines. After gathering some info we had our top 3 and decided to get into contact with them. We’d read that it’s important to make sure you feel comfortable around them and they take good photos and of course, within our budget. We’d managed to make a booking to meet over the weekend and we knew that this photographer was exactly what we wanted.

We’re now about to pay our deposit to secure them in. YAY!!!!

One thing we wanted to talk to the photographer about was what they recommend for ceremony and reception start times for the day in terms of how long we’d need for photos and what the sun will be like for photos that time of the year. We were really flexible with times for our day so we were happy to wait until we spoke to the photographer to see what they recommended.

I’ll let you know more in our next blog….

It took 6 years for Sam to pop the question. We were away for a weekend during February at QI on the Gold Coast when he pulled out an amazing ring and asked me to marry him…of course I said yes.

We had spoken about what kind of wedding we would have even before we were engaged. We both wanted a simple and small affair with our closest family and friends and nothing too expensive. Once we started to look into wedding venues, we realised the sheer cost of this event. We had set a budget early and didn’t realise that just the word wedding, would increase the price.

We started to send away for wedding packages for every function venue from the sunshine coast through to northern new south wales.  The information packages started rolling in. We couldn’t believe that some places wanted a minimum spend for just the reception of $15 000.

The next 4 weekends we spent travelling around to venues meeting up with the wedding coordinators and checking out the venues we had short listed. We were starting to get frustrated at wedding venue hunting so we took a couple of weeks off to forget wedding talk…this was a great idea as we then did a google of some venues in northern new south wales and came across two very perfect, very us places.

By this stage we had decided that we would like a wedding near the beach, we were flexible with the date but after doing some research and seeing how early things get booked we decided we’d like the end of 2011 for our wedding as this would give us plenty of time to plan. We spent yet another weekend hunting for venues and went to visit Kingscliff\Casuarina on the way to Byron bay.

We walked into Santai and Casuarina and as soon as we walked in we both knew this was the place for us. We made it to Byron and had a look down there but both couldn’t stop thinking about Santai..we both knew Santai was the place for us.

When we returned from our weekend we decided to pay our deposit and secure a date…we now have our wedding date booked in for Saturday 3 September 2011. After paying our deposit we both now feel so relieved that the hardest part is over with and now we can start to do the fun organising…so we’re now looking at celebrants and photographers.

I think the biggest tip we can both give couples out there is to do your research in looking for venues, don’t give up even though it seems like there is nothing out there that meets you’re budget and needs..keep looking. As soon as you walk into a venue, you will know it is the place for you! Make sure you do your research..compare everything with other venues and keep a list of generic questions to ask each venue. We sent away for wedding packages for places we knew we didn’t like..this was good as we got to compare.

Thankfully we have now booked in our wedding date and secured a venue. We booked a holiday to Langkawi late last year and we’re off on Monday for a week to relax..we’ve been calling it our ‘engagement honeymoon’. It has all come together nicely at the right time  as finding a venue that suits you both is (from what we think so far in our planning stages) one of the hardest and most important decisions of your wedding..so take your time!

On another note, we have just created and have started to send off our engagement party invites for later on in the year!
When we return from our holiday we’ll write about our meetings with photographers and celebrants so keep posted!

Alysia & Sam