A Memorable Wedding

Maximise Your Impact (Part Two)

Brides and grooms are often looking for something memorable for their wedding, however budgets don’t always stretch to have high impact extras. Below are some tips on saving money without losing any style and keeping it memorable!

Fabulous Fabric 

Fabric is often a lot cheaper than premade sashes and can look as good!

You can use ribbon to decorate your tables, chairs, flowers and if you’re having a marquee well place ribbon strips can add a dash of colour in all the right places.

Creative Favours

Get creative with your favours. Guests love the personal touch; a stone with the guest’s name on it, cupcakes, cookies, a special thank you card, guests really appreciate the time it takes to thank them for attending.

Shabby Chic

Antique shops are great places to find unique, quirky vases for your table centres.

You could even source some interesting glass bottles which create a really nice effect at a simple summer wedding.

Guests love these quirky details to weddings, and they make fantastic photo opportunities.

Personalised Table Plans

I am going to make our table plans, firstly to save costs, but also so that I can personalise it to our wedding. We are naming out tables after streets in Ankh Morpork, a city in the popular fantasy novels by Terry Pratchett. They are my absolute favourite novels and h2b has let me bring my favourite novels into our wedding!

You can personalise your table plan any way you like! Guests will love to see photos of you and your h (he won’t be 2b at that point!) incorporated into your plan. A lot of couples are naming tables after the years they’ve been together, which gives guests a little insight into your relationship.

Lovely Lottery

A lovely touch to weddings, and affordable wedding favours, are scratch cards or lottery tickets.

Your guests can share in the joy and excitement of your special day while at the same time having the chance to win the big bucks!

The only problem is that if they do win, you won’t get a share!

Savvy Saves!

More posts coming soon! To see the previous post, click here.

Wedding Favours

More Things in the Post

I opened the door (after walking an hour home from work – got to lose weight!!) and found another of the packets I ordered!

Fortunes! I found them on Amazon.co.uk, and absolutely fell for them. I’d have preferred them in silver, but they were only available in gold.

The Chinese word on the front means ‘fortune’ and the proverbs inside are different in each card. I thought it might make a nice talking point on the tables. The guests might compare fortunes to see which one they’ve got.

Ideally, they would get guests talking to people they wouldn’t otherwise know. I was thinking of putting them into the favour bags, and along side the favour boxes (because they won’t fit in the boxes) for each guest. And as you can only open the fortunes once, we won’t be able to pick and choose the fortunes, it’ll be completely fate as to which fortune you’ll receive.

It’ll be interesting to read the fortune h2b and I get on our wedding day!

Exciting Things in the Post!

All That Glitters..

Exciting things have arrived in the post!

I got a bit bored on Sunday and decided to buy some things for the wedding I’d decided I was going to buy anyway.

I was a little disappointed that there weren’t as many diamantes as I thought there would be. When the packet says 2600 diamantes, I pictured a rather large bag!

However, when I poured them out to take this bag and saw them sparkling in the torch light (giving away my photography secrets), they actually take up quite a bit of space.

Also, mixing them together with the purple diamantes (they are purple, despite the picture looking blue) will the tables out a bit. I was thinking of including some normal confetti, hearts or something, like my brother had on the tables at his wedding. Or is that too much? Decisions!

Also, these silver shimmer place cards arrived!

The silver shimmer is very subtle and no one will notice, but I think they look fantastic! I was thinking of putting a diamante flower (from Hobby Craft) in the corner, just to link all the sparkles together.

There are is one more item arriving in the post,, these are going in the wedding favour box ready for when we need them in a few months!

Wedding Magazines

There are a sea of wedding magazines out there. I have bought at least one copy of all of them, but I prefer to buy three of them regularly, because I like the ones that fit in your handbag. Most of the smaller magazines also have larger options, but I prefer to buy the smaller ones. 


Below is a quick guide to the magazines as far as I see them. They are fairly similar really but I'm sure everyone will have their favourites.


For buying magazines about wedding flowers, buy the magazine in the same season your wedding will be. My wedding is in spring so I will be buying Wedding Flowers magazine in spring. It will be filled with spring flowers and give me a chance to have a look before talking to my florist. 


General Magazines

Wedding Ideas This is my favourite magazine. It doesn't have many articles but I like it because of the way it shows the real life weddings, all the products and ideas it displays and because of the bright colours and friendly layout. I think it's the most accessible of all the wedding magazines and it comes in a handy, handbag size.
Perfect Weddings Very similar to Wedding Ideas, this magazine is again packed full of fantastic wedding ideas with articles to give you tips on anything from booking your photographer to dealing with difficult bridesmaids. The photos are clear and easy to look at. They also have articles about real weddings, but where Wedding Ideas titles the real weddings with the couple’s name, Perfect Weddings titles them with a phrase relating to that wedding.
You&Your Wedding I see this wedding magazine for a more sophisticated bride. The articles aren’t as bright and colourful and the way they present the real weddings are a bit less accessible than in Wedding Ideas. It’s a very good magazine with a lot of good information and helpful tips.
Wedding Magazine Not handbag sized, but still packed full of fab ideas for your weddings. It’s good to have a look at all the different styles of wedding dresses that they have. Wedding is dissimilar to the other magazines, coming from a different angle.
Cosmo Bride From the popular magazine, Cosmopolitan, comes Cosmopolitan Bride. With the same tone and mood of Cosmo, Cosmo Bride covers similar issues as featured in the other magazines but it’s a full size magazine and packed full of useful information.
Brides Another magazine filled with ideas that a new bride-to-be could cut out and start building ideas from. Some articles with tips for dealing with suppliers and looking for venues, Brides is another good place to get some good ideas.

A lot of the magazines are the same but they all have different material in them and are all worth a look. Some are released weekly, some come out monthly. Either way, you will have a lot of opportunities to get lots of ideas.

Confetti the Shop

Much has been in the news about shops going bust since we entered the recession. One of those shops was Confetti, a wedding supplier. I think they are fab and I was really disappointed when their shop closed down in Birmingham. Now that I have some wedding savings saved up, I was going to spend a lot of it on favours at Confetti. I was delighted when I found the website was still going. 

Hobby Craft

You can order online!


I was looking for wedding favours. I'd been to Hobby Craft, willing to make the favours myself. There's some beautiful ideas from Hobby Craft but not everyone has the time to sit and make wedding favours for 100 guests!


I was on the Confetti website, looking at comparing prices, and I found the favour boxes I wanted in the colours I wanted them for half their regular price! Confetti often do sales or discounts so it's worth keeping your eyes open for a good bargain. I ordered the boxes right there on the spot. I wanted to do a mix of boxes and bags, so that not everyone gets the same wedding favour. I bought the bags from Hobby Craft but I bought the boxes from Confetti. When they arrived, they were absolutely fantastic! 

The favours for my wedding.

The boxes I ordered were already assembled with the ribbons on them and they cost less than it would have to buy the boxes unassembled and the ribbon separately. Like I say, they were reduced so I got quite a bargain! 


One of the features I like on the Confetti website is that you can search by colour scheme. My colour is lilac, as you can see from the ribbons on the boxes I ordered and I was able to look up other items that were along the same colours. 


If you're into photography as much as I am, Confetti has a good deal on disposable cameras for the tables. (Actually, the way I'm going for my wedding, I'm thinking of putting so many things on the tables there won't be any room for the food!) Often disposable cameras don't turn up a lot of good photos, but for me I wouldn't want to miss out on a spontaneous photo that really captures the mood of the day.

Bubbles!

I also like the idea of bubbles on the tables. Not sure how many adults are into bubbles, but if you have a few children at your wedding they will be entertained by a bottle of bubbles. I was at a christening recently and the children were all captivated by bubbles. it's a fantastic way to keep kids entertained during a long day. 


A increasingly popular trend in recent weddings are tea lights on the tables. When the lights go down, while the venue are preparing the evening tables, the little candles are lit and set a really wonderful atmosphere for the evening. I've included a photo from my best friend's wedding that my fiancé took to demonstrate how effective tea lights can be. 

My best friend's wedding

I'm also including a link to Confetti's special offers. I found the boxes I'm using just by chance in the special offers section of the website so I think it's worth a look to see if something you really want for your wedding is available there. 


I'm not on commission for Confetti, but I see a good idea and I think that, bride to bride, we could really benefit from using a service that provides so much at a reasonable price. Weddings cost so much, if you can get a bargain anywhere I think it's best to pass on those tips. 


If you have any money saving tips, please leave a comment and I will blog about it.