So in the world of wedding planning it seems like the list of things to do just keeps growing and growing. First of all I must apologise for the long gap between this post and my last post. I have been here, there and everywhere with work but I am finally on the ground for a couple of weeks.

In my last post I discussed the booking of a wonderful saxophonist, well I can confirm that we have booked Paul Martyn to provide all our musical needs for the duration of the day, as well as playing the saxophone he can also sing and then provides the DJ set as well which is fabulous as we have everything booked under the one person. Oh and a very important thing to mention is that Mr C has finally seen the venue and he loves it, just as well really seeing as I had booked it before he saw it hehe.

Well I promised that I would mention The Dress! I had read about a shop called Fur Coat No Knickers in various magazines and blogs and it sounded like just the shop for me so I got in touch and booked an appointment. Prior to visiting the shop I thought it would be wise to visit a traditional wedding dress, after dragging my mum down to London and trying on countless dresses I was still no further on with falling in love with the one. I wasn't too worried as it was only shop number one and I had loads of time to find the perfect dress. So after a lovely lunch including a bottle of Prosecco it was time for my appointment at FCNK. They have since moved premises to a new much larger unit but my first impression was "I love this place" incidentally I also love their new place which is not too far from Borough Market. I tried on a few dresses from their own range which are beautiful and I was very tempted by a couple but then fortunately for me they had a beautiful vintage dress that they hadn't long had in which said "Take me home Kate" all over it. Now the girls in the shop are pretty generous with their fizz (not a bad thing) and I wanted to be sure that it was indeed the right dress for me, so they let me sleep on it for a couple of days and then I went back with my mum and best friend and I got my dream dress. It has since had a lot of alterations and I love it even more. I can't divulge much about the dress but it is 100% perfect and I cannot wait to sashay down the aisle in it.

We have also made some flower related progress. My best friend and Maid of Honour got married in September and her flowers were stunning so luckily for me she has done the groundwork and I have booked the lovely Jenny Knight who runs Flower Barn (look her up on Facebook). Myself and my mum went over to see her and although I confess to being sure that I would never ever get enthusiastic about flowers, we came back buzzing with ideas. Thankfully Jenny understood my description of wanting "dishevelled yet structured with thistles" for the flowers and also my requirement that the centre pieces need to be able to withstand my friends wearing them as hats as I am ashamed to say that this happened at a wedding we went to in December. Also we have decided that as the maids are wearing deco dresses it might looks a bit too much if they have bouquets so we are doing wrist corsages for them. As well as looking a bit different it is also bringing our flower cost down. For the boys we have bought some cute bicycle lapel pins from River Island which we are hoping to put into the men's buttonholes.

And finally, I have been getting my craft-on in recent weeks, I am a huge fan of the ever popular giant light up letters that many people have used as a feature in their weddings. However we have had to put them in the "extravagance not necessity" category. I was resigned to this until we got our spare bed delivered and I noticed that it was packaged in a lot of cardboard. So at the moment I am just doing a K to practice and if I can make something that looks reasonable I shall make a J. The idea is to spray paint the letters gold and then stab lights through them and voila, a pair of giant letters. At the moment I am on the paper mache stage, it has been a lot of fun so here's hoping that it proves successful. In the event of success I will provide instructions of how I went about it for anyone that is interested on a future post :-).

Next stop cakes and Invitations oh and hotel room recommendations eeek.

Until next time

Kate xxx