Hello again! I’ve got something a little bit different in store for you all today, I hope you find it useful but still fun.
Jack and I (with our Mums!) are going to France in 10 days to see our venue for the first time… Whoop!!! We need to suss things out like where we’ll have the ceremony? Under a tree, in the courtyard or by the pool?!! Where we’ll drink bubbles and mingle with our homies…? Lots of decisions!! We’ll finally get to meet our adorable planner Lou who has been amazingly helpful already, it feels like we’ll be meeting a long lost friend coz she’s just that lush! We’ll also meet out caterer for a tasting, visit local vineyards to find our w-day tipples AND coz they’ll just be loads of spare time in the 3 days, we’ll squeeze in a hair trial (me and the Mums, Jack will skip this bit!) and check out some florists. It’s going to be a jam-packed few days and I can’t wait to share the experience with you, but you’ll have to wait til next time for all the details.
So, what have I got in store for you all this week…?
Living in Sydney and planning a wedding in France while family are based in the UK and friends are dotted all over the world is quite representative of this day-and-age’s logistical wedmare. Gee whizzicals, I just said this day-and-age. Cringe! I know a lot of you out there will also be negotiating your way around complicated logistics – no matter how near or far (Waves to Sophie and Sarah!). That said the world of digital has made this global wedding planning task one ‘eck of a lot easier: we’re skyping our planner, we emailed our save the dates and we share our thoughts and ideas on Pinterest. So, without further ado…
Let’s get digital… DI-GI-TAL! (Sing to the tune of Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s get Physical!”)
Cyber Planning
Google Wedding Docs – Free
I’ve only recently discovered these brilliant google wedding planning docs There’s a whole load of useful planning tools available like a ready made budget planner (that’s so comprehensive it’ll make your eyes and Prada purse bleed), an address book which your guests can update from the comfort of their own home whether they’re in Tenby or Timbuktu and it automatically updates. Amazing! There’s also a doc to help you manage your seating plans and another to help manage your music preferences… and more things like sharing photos on and after the day.
There are loads of budget and countdown apps available on the app store but I haven’t found one that I really love yet. If you’ve got any to recommend, please share in the comments box!
Inspirational Apps
Pinterest – Free and available on Apple and Android
It’s a no brainer but Pinterest on the mobile is ah-mah-zing! It’s as addictive as the desktop version and is a really easy and great experience that fulfils my pinning obsession when I have a spare 2 minutes anywhere. It doesn’t use up too much of your phone storage too, which is brilliant!
Martha Stewart Weddings – About $5 for 6 months. Only available on Apple
So this isn’t really an app, more of a digital magazine, but it sits on your iPhone or iPad like an app. You’ve got to put up with a lot of advertising, which can be a bit annoying (as someone who works in advertising, I really shouldn’t say this!) but you can easily navigate around the ads using the different types of menu functions. It is American content, but there are some really beautiful real wedding features, DIY and décor ideas and lots more fabby inspiration. It’s a really rich experience and you can double tap on lots of pictures to get more information, I really like having it on the iPad as it saves carrying around my big and bulky w-mags. Snazzy!
Vera Wang on Weddings – Free. Only available on Apple
So the only real bummer with this app is it’s size. At 428MB, it’s quite a beast and will eat up a lot of your phone/ipad storage (am I getting too geeky?!) but it’s really full of amazing inspirational images, not just dresses… But ahhh… The dresses!!! I particularly like the ready-made style boards and style advice.
Wedsites
It’s becoming more and more popular for us bridelings to create wedding websites to host all the nitty gritty info our guests need to know about our w-day like accommodation and travel. Essential for destination weddings (in my opinion) because it’s impossible to squish everything guests need to know on an A5 piece of pretty paper. I know, I tried to squish it on!!
After agreeing that we defo needed a wedsite I did a fair amount of research on different wedding site platforms and was really tempted to try using AppyCouple but in the end didn’t fall in love with any of the design templates, they just didn’t seem very us (but it looks an awesome platform, is anyone else using it?)
We really wanted something that complimented the rest of our stationery and wasn’t too stuffy or formal so we decided to forego the really structured wedding-site peeps like gettingmarried.co.uk and opted to do-it-ourselves. Kind of. We are hosting our website on Blogger, the free blogger platform owned by Google. It’s really easy-peasy to use: you don’t need to know any fandangle things about websites or digital (there’s lots of online support to help you if you do get a little bit stuck). What we liked was that it is really easy to buy a personalised domain name, it only cost us $10 for a whole year and we now have a website address that is all ours… Ahhh!!
One of the big things for me was making sure our Blogger page was pretty. Obvs!! None of the Blogger templates were right so I nipped over to Etsy to find a ready-made blogger theme that could turn our site from boring to bravissimo.
I stumbled across an absolute delight of a human being called Kate, her etsy shop is called 17th Avenue. She designs gorgeous premade themes for blogger (and wordpress). We picked a design we loved, paid Kate a very small sum of $ and now we’re in the middle of updating all the pages of our website with juicy need-to-know info. Kate even designed us a cute as a button email button and RSVP widget so guests can digitally RSVP if they are so inclined (although I do hope we get lots of pretty little cards back in the post). As soon as our site is finished, I will be so happy to share it with you all.
Techy Save The Dates
I mentioned at the beginning of this tech-fest-post that we emailed our save-the-dates. We wanted to do something that was a bit of fun and a little bit different that ticked Jack’s geek box (he’s a digital marketer, he can’t help being a geek, I love him for it!!).
Making an animated GIF was all Jack’s idea. We planned what we wanted to say and how we wanted to do it and of course I tried to over complicate it all by wanting to take our photos near an epic Sydney location like, umm… the Opera House?! We went out one weekend to shoot the photos armed with a tripod, huge pieces of paper and props but the wind wasn’t being friendly and it was simply a disaster. I was quite disheartened and had a mini huffle puff!
A few days later I came home after quite a long, tiring and annoying day at work to find that Jack had turned our little apartment in to what I can only describe as a makeshift studio. He had devised a storyboard of what we were going to do including the props we would wear and after a rather hilarious 30 minutes of messing about taking pics and playing with face paints we had our static pictures. Now I just needed to work out how to make them animated… so I turned to our friend Google to find a simple tutorial and found this really helpful guide. I taught myself how to use Photoshop and voila!!
(It’s a bit of a big file so may take a little while to load in below)
Until next time, when I will have a lot of updates post the France trip to share with you, yay!! Have a lush Thursday
Nicola xx