Planning my Wedding: Booking the Venue and Meeting the Vicar

 Last time I posted about the wedding plans, we were in the process of booking our venue. Since then we have successfully paid our deposit and secured the venue for our wedding date. We are officially having our wedding reception on February 14th 2014- Valentines Day! I am so excited to have a date secured as it means we can start planning everything else now.

Totally hoping for snow!

Our Wedding Venue

The first thing I started planning once the deposit was paid was arranging a meeting with the Vicar at the church we want to get married in. It isn't my local parish, but the church I had Cameron Christened in last year, and one that is important to me for this reason. The chruch is also beautiful, really grand and traditional inside. We have been warned by the Vicar that the church is quite strict, but that we should be able to have our wedding there as we both lived within its parish for six months or more.

We are hoping to get married in the church where Cameron was Christened

We have a meeting with the Vicar at my house in a couple of weeks and I am hoping we will be able to get the church all booked then. I am pretty nervous meeting with the Vicar to be honest, it feels a bit daunting even though I met him a few times when arranging Cameron's Christening. I am so pleased we are going to be getting married in a church. Even though I am not the most religious of people, I feel that it is more traditional and romantic to exchange vows in the church. It is all so exciting!

I am hoping to find a photographer in the New Year, but wedding dress shopping is on hold until I have had the baby and lost all the baby weight, I am thinking probably next Spring/Summer. I have been putting together collages of all the ideas I have gotten from wedding magazines and my wedding dress ones look amazing, it is going to be hard to resist dress shopping!

Planning my Wedding: Deciding on a Theme!

As promised, the second installment of my wedding planning feature!

One of the most exciting parts of planning a wedding, I have always thought, is deciding on a theme which you can then work everything else around. I always thought I would use a deep purple in my wedding but when it came down to looking through magazines and coming up with ideas, I actually decided to drop purple completely and instead found myself drawn to a pale baby pink colour.

I have bought about five wedding magazines since getting engaged last month and have gone through them pulling out things that I liked. I then cut these out and put them in a file and looking through it, it is nearly totally pink!

Luckily Tim doesn't mind the wedding being very pink and girly, and he has made some input into the planning saying that he wants a pale grey suit, which actually works really well with the pale pink colour.

I didn't like the idea of just having one colour as a theme so we sat down and thought what theme would go with the colour. I came up with Sweetheart as I am obsessed with using sweets in the wedding, as favours, decorations and as part of the menu and the pastel shades of sweets go well with the colour scheme.

Hearts work well with the date of the wedding as it is going to be held in February, around Valentines day and I felt that the word Sweetheart conjured up images of pale pink hearts rather than the perhaps more 'traditional' red ones used around Valentines day.

I have also decided to have an 'accent' colour of cream/pearl and plan to wear pearl accessories on the day.

So far I have found a gorgeous dress I would love to have my bridesmaids in and have been planning the DIY invites shaped like hearts.

I am really happy with the theme and so excited to start putting the wedding together. We are trying to work out whether there is any chance of us being able to afford to get married in 2014 rather than 2015 at the moment, but if not I will just have to be patient (something I find extremely difficult!).


Coming next time: DIY plans to help cut costs!

New Feature: Planning My Wedding

As you may recall, I got engaged a few weeks ago and as a natural born planner, I wasted no time in starting off our wedding plans. Luckily for me, my fiance is very laid back and is allowing me free reign over most of the wedding plans.

Due to having very little money, and the fact that I am not giving birth for another few months, we have set a date for February 2015. Although this sounds miles away, it is in fact only two and a half years away and only two years from when we are due to move in together, so I feel it actually gives us a great timeframe to work with.

The first thing we had to work out was our budget, not the most fun part of the wedding planning process, but something absolutely vital in working out when we can realistically afford to get married, and where and what our wedding can include. We both agree that you don't need to spend a huge amount on a wedding, especially in a recession, but it will still involve saving a lot over the next couple of years!

Having set a rough date, and a budget to work with, the next thing I am focusing on is finding a venue. I have emailed quite a few of the local country houses enquiring rough prices and have found so many of them totally out of our price range that I started feeling disheartened. However, we are now discussing having the wedding on a Friday, which would bring the cost down a bit, and also trying to negotiate the catering packages, as neither me or Tim are really fussed about providing a big sit down meal and would prefer to have an intimate ceremony at a church and then a party in the evening with friends and family.

One of our possible local venues

Obviously as our wedding won't be for another couple of years, we aren't in a massive rush to find a venue but I feel that by finding our dream venue as soon as possible, I can start bringing the rest of the planning together more as I'll know what setting I'll be working with.

Coming next: Deciding on a theme!

I hope you have enjoyed reading about my wedding plans? Is it something you would be interested in reading about in future posts?