photo by Peter Bui

What an amazing day. We’re about to go off on our honeymoon so recaps will have to wait – but one of my friends has already posted his photos on Facebook if anyone wants to check them out!

I was spoiled with not one but two hens type things thanks to my awesome girls (plus an extra girls night out to get me out of the apartment whilst The Boy had his bucks thing at our place). The first was the amazing weekend away with my close girl friends, and on Saturday was a high tea for more of my family and friends. My bridesmaids and Miss N made an assortment of cupcakes, mini-quiches, sandwiches, macarons, scones, prawn cocktails, salmon open sandwiches, cream horns, punch… so much awesome food!

At one point one of my friends who was meeting most of these people for the first time turned to me and said ‘you have so many great people around you’. And it’s so true. I feel incredibly lucky to have so many wonderful people in my life.

Just a few more days to go!

I think the pictures say it all really.

I’m about to head off for my hens weekend away in Margaret River! It’ll be a fabulous road trip with my 4 favourite ladies, and beyond that I have no idea what is planned for me. We’re celebrating Miss O’s impending marriage too, which is just a few weeks after mine. This mysterious package came for me whilst I was killing time reading a book waiting for them to arrive – how exciting!

I’ve been terrible with blogging here lately – partly because I’m slightly over the whole wedding planning thing, and partly because I still have so much to do! So here’s a bit of a catch up.

• Had a bit of a hair and makeup trial at my place, which was mostly successful! A friend, Miss N, is helping us and I love how my hair and makeup turned out. Unfortunately we were too knackered by the end of the evening for me to be bothered of taking a photo of the end result.
• We officially have all our RSVP’s back – and the number of attending guests is far less than what we originally estimated. I’m sad that some of our people won’t be able to make it, but I can’t help thinking of the money we’re saving.
• We’ve collected a huge number of jars and bottles to use as vases on the tables – but still have to clean them and remove the labels, which is a huge pain! I really hope it’s worth it in the end!

• We had a great wine tasting evening to decide on which wines to have at the reception – only to later find that the list I was working from was outdated! Luckily the one that was removed from the list was at a tie with another wine that stayed, so it wasn’t too hard to change our choices.
• I finally got to see my dress and have a fitting. I don’t love it – but I certainly like it more than anything I tried on, and can’t really think of what would suit me better. I do regret my choice of dressmaker somewhat, for various reasons. I’m hoping I’ll feel less ambivalent towards the dress when the alterations are finished and I’m all done up.
• The Boy and I went to see our jazz singer perform at The Ellington. She was completely fantastic! I’m so glad we decided to splurge on a band, I think it’ll really set the tone for the day.

Less than three weeks to go! I’m looking forward to this wedding no longer consuming my life!

A few weeks ago I met up with my friend Miss K for cake and to give her the paper to print my invitations on. I got there a little early and wandered around a bit beforehand, and came across a little ‘pop-up shop‘ with some secondhand and vintage bits and pieces. In there I was excited to see… a yellow typewriter!

I’ve seen typewriters used as guestbooks on various wedding blogs, and loved the idea as I’ve always wanted a vintage typewriter. I didn’t really pursue the idea though, as I figured the Instax would be enough. But coming across one that happened to be bright yellow (and all in working condition) made me think we could stretch the budget a little further for it…

But I decided to be mature and walk away, as the budget has already been stretched beyond what I was comfortable with. It was painful to just leave it though!

I ended up telling my friend/ex-boss/colleague/office buddy, P, about it later. Talking about it made me really want to go back there and buy it, but the issue of the budget was still there, and the pop-up shop was probably gone anyway. But when I went into my office a few days later (after a crappy sort of week with broken water heaters and sick days and deadlines), I found the typewriter there on my desk with a note from P on it. He’s calling it a belated birthday present. It was such a lovely surprise! I really have the most amazing friends.

Now I just need to get a new ribbon and do up a sign with instructions, so people don’t get confused trying to use it. Interestingly there is no exclamation mark, which I know will be a challenge for some!

A while back I posted my review of some Shoes of Prey shoes, and then ordered some for myself. This week they arrived, just a couple of weeks after ordering!

Unfortunately, I do not love them. The colour turned out perfect despite their warnings that the yellow soft leather was rather limey, and the width does in fact fit my wide feet perfectly. But lengthwise they are definitely a size too large (even with the inserts in); the heel is lower than I expected; and the style simply doesn’t look as nice on my feet as it did in the design picture. All in all, it was more poor judgement on my part than anything. Their returns policy is not bad at all – just have to pay for shipping back to them (around $25) and they refund what you paid, including the original shipping – but shipping back and forth does add up, and pushes a $250 pair of shoes, plus $25 shipping, plus $25 returning the original pair to a $300 pair of shoes. I don’t have any problem dropping that kind of money on camera gear, but with shoes it’s getting to that uncomfortable price point for me. Still, lacking any better options I was all set to do a return and reorder anyway.

Then I went on a spur of the moment shopping trip with Miss T and Miss C* to a designer sample sale, where I wasn’t expecting to buy anything. I told them about my shoes dilemma in the car, and they jokingly said maybe we’d find some yellow shoes at the sample sale. Walked in, and this is what Miss T found:

Buttery yellow PeepToes, in my size. That fit my wide feet. That are actually somewhat comfortable (to stand in at least). That make my legs look really quite nice. There were literally only 5 different pairs of shoes there in total, and only one of this style/colour – and they were perfect. And on sale – a third of the price of the other shoes. You can’t say no when fate throws you a bone like that.

Admittedly, they are a tad big (although I intend to put in some gel inserts for comfort, so I think they’ll be just right), very slippy and are the highest pair of heels that I own. I tried walking around my apartment in them and between the height and slippyness I think I must have looked very funny. I’m going to have to scuff the soles and practice walking in them if I want to get down the aisle without breaking my ankle. But at least my legs will look nice.

I have an official RSVP! There will be at least one person at our wedding! And one of my favourite people even. I hope I won’t have to be chasing people at the end.

Dropping off family invites to The Boy’s parents, it turned out that I screwed up the Chinese envelope labels by splitting the two names onto two lines. I’m so, so glad I got them to check it all before sticking them on the envelopes, as I only have a few spares! On the plus side, it also turned out that we had doubled up on some guests (they were on the list in both Chinese and English, so I didn’t pick it up), which means we’re inviting 4 less people than I thought we were. Only someone who has planned a wedding will understand how happy it makes me that we shaved 4 people off our guestlist without actually having to cut anyone from the guestlist.

I’m still waiting on my yellow heels from Shoes of Prey with my fingers crossed that they’ll actually fit me, but in the meantime I’ve been hunting for some appropriate ballet flats to wear at the reception. I wear heels for maybe a couple of hours every few weeks at most – I live in ballet flats, sneakers and flat heeled boots – so I’m fairly certain I’m going to want to kick my very expensive heels off after the photos and ceremony. I’ve been trying to shop more sustainably and make fewer, good quality purchases rather than disposable fashion (like those $15 Rubi shoes that last me a couple of weeks at most), so I started out looking for the best damn ballet flats. I even took a quick look at the much coveted Chanel ballet flats, before freaking out that they cost several hundred dollars and quickly shutting that idea down.

Then after a bit of reading reviews and things, I decided that 1) flats for everyday wear will wear out within a few years, even if they’re really great quality; 2) based on reviews, cheaper flats can be still pretty good anyway; 3) designer shoes all look ridiculously narrow, which will absolutely not work for me and 4) yellow ballet flats are going to have limited re-wear-ability for me, so they don’t necessarily have to be top quality (so much for sustainability!). So I just hunted around on Pinterest and looked for shoes that looked cute.

And I found these! Okay, cheap synthetic shoes wasn’t reeally what I was after… but the cute! They definitely have the cute! Added bonus for being a beautiful shade of yellow and apparently running slightly wide (score for all my fellow wide-footed ladies!). And at $28 with our lower-but-still-pretty-good exchange rate, I think I have to at least give them a chance.

Of course, one does not simple buy one item from ModCloth, so now I have to see what else I can pad out my order with.

180 invitees.

90 printed invitations.

4 printed pieces to each invitation (invite, map, gifts, address sticker).

1440 hand-cut rounded corners.

~8 solid hours of cutting, sticking, assembling, stuffing and checking.

I don’t even want to think about the number of hours spent designing and sketching that went into it beforehand.

Big thanks to Miss K (who did all the printing and trimming, and got the yellow just right), The Boy (who helped with the corners, forced me to eat lunch, made me tea and dinner) and Miss T (who came in at the end but shaved a good hour or so off the working time, which meant I had time to eat dinner).

I still have to get The Boy’s mum to check all of their side before I finish them off (not many spare envelopes = no room for errors), create some Chinese translation inserts for a few of them, and actually mail or deliver everything. But the hard part is done.