It's been a year

I married my Matey just over a year ago and it was, and still is, great! At some point I may go over some of the mad DIY bits we did for the day but here are a few very general things that I think are worth bearing in mind if you are planning to tie the knot.

Phone everybody you’ll be inviting and tell them the good news. Don’t email. Yes you’ll get loads of lovely emails back but nothing beats spending a week having chats about it all with your friends and family, you will not stop smiling all week. You will also discover that by the end of it you have the first draft of your guest list

Decide as a couple which things are REALLY important to you and which things are not so vital if you have to sacrifice them?

Our cake was very simple with the words from 'The Red Tree' handprinted around it. Apparently it took nine hours for my brother-in-law to print. Simple doesn't mean quick or easy apparently!

Whatever your budget make a spreadsheet and list everything with expected costs. Things can add up so even if you buy a bargain for 50p for the wedding it goes on the spreadsheet.

You don’t have to have a theme if you don’t want one! You don’t have to have a colour scheme if you don’t want one! (Not having a colour scheme makes life so much easier. I did not want to spend hours trying to match a particular shade of anything) Dare I say that you don't have to have something old, new, borrowed, or blue if you don't want to.

Chocolate leaves!

Don't forget to focus as much, if not more, attention on the service itself. It is easy to get carried away with the fluffy stuff for the reception which is great fun to plot. The service is the point of the day (to state the bloomin' obvious) which  everybody is there to see and will be focusing  properly on with no distractions.

Making things for a wedding takes a lot of time and the materials are not always cheap. If you are on a budget do some calculations to see whether it really is cheaper. We designed our invitations, order of service, menus and thank you cards and printed them on beautiful thick card at home which would only fit through the print one sheet at time. With 400 bits of card to print we spent HOURS standing over the printer which died post honeymoon. Factor in the cost of a new printer, inks, wasted card and suddenly the cost of going pro is cheaper. In hindsight we should have designed them and had the lot printed professionally.

Oh the madness of scanning 100 images from classic books so each person had a different one in their place setting envelope. The words 'Whose idea was this?' may have been said a few time. I would do it all again though.

Be realistic with what can be achieved in the time you have. Look at how many months you have left and aim to be pretty much done a month before your wedding. Trust me you will have a lot to do in the last month so don’t leave making 200 metres of bunting till then. You will probably have loads of offers to help but it may prove impossible to coordinate so assume you are on your own and go yippee if jobs are taken off your plate.

Terrible photo. 100 cushions which took 5 days to make. I felt sick at the sight of them by the  end.

Just enjoy the day. Things will go wrong but nobody will know. You may not notice either. I spent hours fireproofing string to make jamjar lanterns for candles in the evening. Never got used and I didn't notice till we collected all our stuff three weeks later. At the end of the day you have just got married so does it really matter?!

If you can, take the greetings cards with you when you leave. It is weird when it goes from being everybody to just you two and there is no way you will go to sleep. Having a glass of fizz together while opening cards and talking about the day gets it all back to normal and ends the day with it just being the pair of you.