Sinead and Steve’s Wedding Planning Journal - A UK Theme Park Wedding 11th June 2016 (Update 6/6)

[Jesslydevie1]

Wow wow wow ,love your honeymoon plans ,do you mind if I ask how much your flights are to New Orleans please I would soooo love to do this .

[Guest]

Originally Posted by Jesslydevie1

Wow wow wow ,love your honeymoon plans ,do you mind if I ask how much your flights are to New Orleans please I would soooo love to do this .

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Thanks! We can't book our internal flight until nearer the time, but Virgin said it would only be around £200!

[Guest]

Save the Dates

So now we had the wedding booked we wanted to send out save the dates, as June is a pretty strong holiday month!

As Steve is a web designer who does a lot of graphic design stuff in his job, we always knew he would be designing the save the dates for us.
As it was so far in advance I pretty much let him do whatever he wanted! He loves music and records so this was what he came up with:



I love it! we got them printed on kraft paper through printed.com which only cost us £20 so we were thrilled!

[Fleurlur]

Very cute!

[Guest]

Originally Posted by Chilly80

Sounds like it is going to be a great honeymoon.

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Originally Posted by Fleurlur

Very cute!

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Thanks! I love them, just got to get him started on the invitations next!

[Guest]

The Dress Saga!

This was probably the most stressful part of wedding planning for me, even including choosing between a UK or US wedding!

I did not have a clue about what kind of dress I was looking for! I've not really been that interested in weddings before we got engaged so I hadn't considered what type of dress I would go for.

After pinteresting pretty much since we got engaged, and appointment after appointment in dress shops, my dress ideas were all over the place! I had three main 'ideas' for the dress after looking online:

Fearne Cotton's dress:



This David's Bridal Dress:



And my all time favourite most beautiful wedding dress in blush... which is sadly custom Christian Siriano:



So pretty much still all over the place! It got to the end of September and I still felt like I was getting further away from deciding rather than closer! After a particularly harrowing afternoon where I was pulled into a sample that was about 10 sizes too small for me, I decided to get a cheap high street dress as I clearly had no clue still, and we put the extra budget into a videographer.

One Saturday afternoon, I noticed on one of my wedding facebook groups (yep, I'm a member of quite a few!), that someone had bought a dress that looked A LOT like the aforementioned Fearne Cotton dress! After a bit of digging online I found that it was Mori Lee 6742 and the RRP I'd seen advertised in a few places was £499... In budget!



After frantically calling around I found a shop in near me that stocked the dress. They told me that it would be being discontinued at the end of October, so I roped in my nan and off we went! I also made another appointment at a plus size wedding dress shop that's a few streets away.

When we arrived at the shop, the dress was on the rack and I was already sort of... underwhelmed. It was beautiful, but there were a few things about it like the stiffness and shine that I just wasn't sure about. It was also annoying for me that the beading was quite silver and one of our wedding colours was gold. As it was a sample size and a zip back, I could only put it in front of me. The assistant was trying to convince me it was amazing on me, which to be fair is absolutely her job, but I was just thinking, how can you tell? She was explaining then that she could take my measurements and I could try it on when it came in, and I realised that there was no way I could buy such an expensive dress without being able to try it on, it just wasn't going to happen!

Feeling a bit deflated that I'd pinned my dress hopes on a dud, we headed over to the second shop I'd booked an appointment at. I absolutely ADORE this shop, as they had samples that fitted me and I could see how the different shapes looked on, which I hadn't been able to see in the other stores. I tried a few on, and then tried one on that I absolutely fell in love with, London by Callista:



It looked absolutely amazing on, and it was the only dress I tried on in the whole process that I felt amazing in. What's more, my nan who is known for her honesty absolutely loved it and got emotional! This hadn't happened to anyone at any point of my wedding dress search yet! She said how amazing I looked and every dress I tried on after she said couldn't compare! Sadly the price tag was slightly less amazing... £850 over budget! My nan tried everything, but finally conceded I was wayy too 'sensible' as she put it and we left empty handed!

That evening I felt really miserable and wished I'd never tried it on! It was really beginning to feel down and think I would never find anything I liked! I couldn't even explain to Steve why I was so down as I am notably unable to be subtle about secrets like this so dress talk is totally off limits in our house!

The next morning I was looking up pictures of the dress, and for some reason decided to search it on ebay. Well imagine how shocked I was when there it was, buy it now, the colour I tried on, my size... and only £100 over budget! I literally couldn't believe it! After doing a little bit of research (not much mind), I found it was an ex sample from a bridal shop in Carlisle that was closing down. After briefly discussing it in a totally vague way with Steve (seriously these conversations are not fun for him), I decided to buy it!

They sent it next day delivery on Monday, and it arrived on Tuesday. It's absolutely perfect and it fit! It will need altering for length, and I'm going to maybe get some layers taken out of the netting, and I think I'm going to get a sash for it, but I am so thrilled with it! It's safely tucked away in my Mum's house. There's a few more photos of it below:

This shows the colour a bit better:


And this is from the day I tried it on:

That turned out to be much longer than expected! The bottom line is I now have the dress and I am super relieved! Thanks for reading all that if you got this far!

[PrincessCastle]

Congrats on finding a dress! It's so beautiful! I love eBay, it's great for surprise bargains. I'm going to put that down as a win for Carlisle! I think I know which shop it was from, they always had beautiful dresses in the window xx

[mazzadee]

Beautiful dress and amazing plans enjoy every moment!

[Nesbits]

Beautiful dress. Loving your journal.

[DLS1005]

Beautiful dress and amazing honeymoon plans!