Mr and Mrs diamanté champagne flutes for under £5!

I spotted some diamanté studded Mr & Mrs champagne flutes in a shop and thought 'wow, that looks cool' and it has been playing on my mind since. I googled to see how much a pair of them would be and the prices ranged from £20 to £45!!! Ouch!!!

On one of my visits to ASDA I noticed they were selling champagne glasses for 60p each so I bought 2. 'What's the harm?' I thought to myself. 'I'll give it a go and see what happens'

....

...this is what I've created....

I started off by printing templates out from the computer for the 'Mr' and 'Mrs'. I stuck these inside the glass with tape to act as a stencil.

I bought some diamanté stickers from eBay for £1.79p for 350 gems. It was just a matter of following the template with the stickers....

How it looked with the template underneath...

...and without...TA-DAHHHHHH!

Very happy with how they have turned out and for a grand total of £2.99p! Bloomin' bargain.

Table centrepieces

For my centrepieces, I wanted something Christmassy, simple, romantic and yet affective.

I decided that you can't get more Christmassy than candles so I figured these would have to fit into my design. 

As you know, I love a freebie too and in winter I love to collect weather cones to use as free decorations at Christmas. I have a load of weather cones  in my decoration box from a couple of Christmases ago that I painted the edges of with glitter so I thought I could incorporate these into my centrepieces.

I went to a wedding fayre and noticed that the big glass goldfish bowls were a popular choice of centrepiece design. I went to ASDA and purchased 4 large goldfish bowl candle holders at £8 each and 2 smaller ones at £3 each. 

I then bought 4 large winter-spice scented red candles and 2 smaller ones. This came to £54 in total spent at ASDA.

I then came home and began playing around with ideas. And this is what I came up with.....

I put some battery operated fairy lights into the glass bowl first, then the candle on top of the battery box which gave it some height. Then I placed the weather-cones around the candle. I found a few small red and gold baubles to place randomly within the weather-cones and then placed some sprigs of berries that I had in my craft box around the candle.

And as you can see, they also look great in the dark too. 

With the smaller ones I won't use quite so much decoration as they are going on the top table. I am either going to strewn holly (another freebie!) around the candles or I will use mini weather-cones. I won't bother with the fairy lights as I think candlelight on the top table will look good enough. I have also managed to find mirrors to go under the smaller centrepieces to reflect the light from them. At £1.49p each they were a bargain from The Range. I am yet to find any for my large bowls but I continue to look.

This is by no means the finished product when it comes to the smaller table decorations. This was just me playing around with ideas and checking they fit on the mirrors.

Working progress shall we say :)

The one....

Well, I've found 'the one'. Having gone to a very expensive bridal shop the day before and finding the most beautiful dress I have ever had on, I was initially feeling very sad about the whole affair as there was no way I could afford the £1735 that the price tag showed.
However, today (with a sceptical head) I went to another dress shop and tried on several dresses at a lower price. Each one I was thinking 'it's not as nice as the one yesterday' but then I tried on 'the one'. I've heard about ladies saying 'you just know when you try it on' and it's true. I was speechless and just lost for words at how perfectly it fitted and suited me.

I have put down a deposit on the dress and it will be arriving in July at the shop and I'm already counting down the days until I can wear it again. I just love it and more importantly, I think my fiancé will love it too.

I thought about some top tips for brides when going dress shopping:
- don't fret about what the shop assistant is thinking of you. Just go in and enjoy the experience. You are only going to do it once! (Hopefully.)
- take one person you trust implicitly with you. I took my sister as we are very similar and she can quite often tell what I am thinking from a look alone. So it was handy only having one person's opinion when trying the gowns on rather than several conflicting ones.
- wear a strapless bra so that you know what you'll look like on the day.
- don't get hung up on one dress if it's out of your budget. It's too expensive and you don't want to break the bank and risk your carefully planned out wedding budget on a dress that you are going to wear for approx. 10 hours of your life!
- If you're unsure in your head then take it off. It's not the one.
- If you're thinking 'this makes my.....look big' or 'this does nothing for my.....' then take that off too. It's not the one. Even if it is perfect everywhere else on your body, you will always be thinking about that problem part that you feel the dress accentuates and the last thing you want to feel on your wedding day is self conscious.

Wedding dress shopping

Today, my sister and I are going wedding dress shopping.
I am dreading it because I'm nervous about the clerk at the shop being too pushy or maybe even looking down her nose at me when I tell her my budget.
But on the other hand, the little girl in me is looking forward to trying on all the beautiful dresses and feeling like a princess for 2 mins.
We have one bridal shop today, one tomorrow and one Friday. We've spread it all out so it's not too stressful and reduces the risk of Bridezilla turning up haha.
We are also going to go and sort the chair covers today and I'm going to dabble in a bit of bartering!
Wish us luck.

The best things in life are free

Somebody once told me that 'the best things in life are free' and do you know what? They are!
This is especially true when helping reduce the cost of your wedding.

Here are a couple of money saving ideas I have had for my wedding decorations that have cost me next to nothing!

Grab yourself a jam jar.

Stick a tea light candle in it of a Christmas variety and a gold ribbon around the neck.

Adorn with Holly from forest. Then do the same again with other different sized jars to place around your venue to give that rustic festive/candlelit glow.

I actually feel this needs a more striking gold than the one chosen in my picture so I will probably change this in due time.

Go to forest and gather twigs of varying sizes but that flay out nicely when bunched together. Tie them together in bunches. The pink ones in my picture were recycled from a bunch of flowers that were bought for me.

Spray paint them in your chosen colour with oasis spray (in this case burgundy).

Then place them in flower pots with either stones, sand or soil to hold them in place. Then hang small baubles or glittery weather cones from them and place them around your venue to add a winter feature at your venue.

Free/extremely cheap ways to decorate your Christmas venue but also fun to collect and gather the materials needed! It also proved effective at involving the groom in the process as he came with me to the forest and spray painted the branches :)

Wine glass charms

I always find that is it the small personal touches that really make a wedding and this is the reason why I decided to make wine glass charms for my reception dinner table. 

As the colour scheme is going to be red and gold AND because there's already shaping up to be quite a lot of red on the dinner tables, I decided to make my charms out of gold glittery card.

I just got some glittery gold card (you can never have TOO much glitter at a Christmas wedding in my opinion) and printed some 'Just married...' notes from another word doc. and stuck them to the back of the card and secured them to the wine glass stem with some gold organza ribbon.

Simple!

Save the date cards

With my wedding and evening invites complete, I decided to use my beautiful green snowflake card (which also features as my blog background some of you may have noticed) to make my save the date cards.

This is what I did....

I took one page of my A4 green card and sectioned it off into 7.4cms x 10.6cm rectangles and cut them out.

Then I created a word doc and made 8 smaller boxes containing my save the date wording which reads as follows:

'Hayley and Kris are getting married. Please save the date Sunday 22nd December 2013. Invitation to follow.'

Then I cut the individual boxes out. These measure about 6.5cm x 9.5cms so that it's smaller than the green card rectangle. 

Then, using pritt-stick NOT PVA, I glued them to the green card backs. I added some diamanté gems in each opposite corner for a bit of Christmas sparkle. 

And voilà....the final product. Simple, yet cheap and easy to make. 

Invitations

With the price of wedding stationery on average costing £200+ it is sometimes wise, if you are craft minded, to make your own.

I decided to save some money and make my own invitations and save the date cards. Altogether, it cost me around about £35 (give or take a few £s) in total to make everything from scratch and I am so proud of what I've created.

I did things a bit backwards and started making my invites before my save the date cards. This is because originally I wasn't going to have save the date cards; everyone knows the date I want to get married and I didn't think it was necessary. But then I thought about some of the members of my family who are useless with dates and thought again....

For my invites I looked through some of the types you could get printed professionally and although some of them were very pretty, the price tags for them amazed me! I started to look for home-made designs and stumbled across a couple who had made their invites for their shabby chic wedding in the style of luggage tags.

I decided to incorporate this in to my invites but instead of luggage tags I did present tags. I also added a film strip of pictures of me and my fiancé to personalise it further.

This is how I made them....

Firstly, I chose a card design that liked from ebay. It needed to be Christmassy but elegant. I love snowflake designs so when I saw this vintage green card with white snowflakes I was smitten. I began by dividing the card into 5 sections 6cms x 17.5cms. 

I cut these into chunky strips. These formed the back of my present tag.

I turned the strips over and measured a centre dot where I would hole-punch a hole through later. I also measured 2 triangles on each top corner of the strips measuring 1.5cms x 2cms.

This gave me my basic present tag shape.

On the computer I created my invitation wording and then printed a sheet of 5 columns out. 

The wording said 'The pleasure of your company is requested at the marriage uniting Miss Hayley Reed and Mr Kristopher Gillam on Sunday 22nd December 2013 at......' I have blanked out the wedding details as I feel some of this should remain between me and my guests :) '...and reception to follow. R.S.V.P'

Then I found some photos of my fiancé and myself and made them black and white and put them into a film strip type style on a word doc. Once again I made 5 columns. I then started cutting both sets of strips out.

I purchased some 'Wedding Invitation' gold stickers from eBay for £1.75p and some 'Evening Invitation' ones too for £2.25p for guests who are only coming to the evening reception. This saved me having to try to painstakingly write in calligraphy on the invites. These were stuck to the back of the green snowflake card about 1" below the hole-punch.

Then I began constructing my invites. Make sure you use pritt-stick glue and not PVA as I find it sticks better and with no bubble/lumps. I stuck the invitation wording to the white side of the green snowflake card and attached the photo film strip to it by a ribbon tied in a bow.

I also splurged out on these rhinestone snowflake stickers. They were my only extravagant purchase at £2.99 (plus postage) for 12 stickers (also eBay) but they were a MUST to add that little bit of sparkle to my invites.

I placed the rhinestone snowflake stickers at the bottom left hand corner of the invites for a festive finish. This is how my invites look from the front.

And this is how they look from the back. Original, quirky but most importantly cheap! :) Happy crafting!!