Broken zips and dropped stitches

My dress has arrived!

It has made its long journey from China and is now hanging in my spare room. I love it! Who would have thought you could buy a wedding dress for £90?! 

In reality it is going to cost slightly more than that as it needs so alterations doing but it is still definitely a bargain!

Unfortunately the 1st time I tried it on the zip broke! I had a friend from work helping me get in it and as she zipped it up the zip broke. She was absolutely mortified!! I really didn't mind though as I would much rather it break now when we are able to put in a stronger one than for it to happen in the day! 

There are a couple of stitches which have also fallen out and the length of it is too long. I have made an appointment with a seamstress for a couple of weeks time for her to have a look at it and let me know how much it will cost for her to do the work it needs.

Overall I am really pleased with it. I knew when I bought it that I would probably need to do some alterations and the things that need doing are pretty easy things. They are just little issues with finishing plus the big but easily sorted issue of a broken zip!

I soooo want to put a photo of it on here as I love it so much but I am going to resist! You will need to wait until after the big day for photos!

Invitations, chewed post and other weddings!

This week we have ordered our invitations. We were going to do them ourselves but then we saw some really nice ones online for no more than it would cost us to do them not to talk of cutting out the hassle! Coming up with the wording of the invites and submitting it to be put on them made us realise this is going to be happening for real! Yes of course we know it is going to happen but it sunk in a little deeper through the invitation process! It is all sooooooo exciting.

Creating the invitations made me think of a problem we may have further down the line. We have two dogs who like eating post! When we go out we shut them in the front and often we come home to chewed post. At Christmas they had eaten the box of perfume we had ordered online for Mark's sister! This made me realise that if we are asking people to RSVP to our address then it is likely we would never see these RSVPs and if we do they could be unreadable! So I have finally bought a post cage! This has arrived and we now just to fit it over our letterbox and gone will be the days of chewed post!

On Friday we went to a wedding of one of Mark's university friends. He found it a bit if a surreal event in so far as there being quite a lot of ex girlfriends there who he hasn't seen for a long time! It made me think of Scott Pilgrim vs the Workd - a terrible but apt film! It was a lovely wedding and throughout it all I was thinking about how the next one we'll be at will be our own! Again very exciting!

It's a Kind of Magic

It has been a fairly quite time in terms of planning our wedding recently. But we have booked one more thing for reception entertainment. We decided we wanted to have magician to entertain our guests during arrival drinks and the meal. 

We did an Internet search and was really impressed with one particular website. We emailed a selection of different magicians for quotes. The one with the website we really liked came back with a really friendly and chatty email and straight away we warmed to him. In the email he said that if we were in London at any time he would be happy to meet for coffee to show us what he does without any obligation to book.

So two weeks ago we headed to London with Mark's daughter to meet Neb the magician. It was a little surreal sitting in the Waterloo Station branch of Starbucks while a magician showed us a couple of tricks! He was a lovely Scottish man and we weren't disappointed! His tricks blew our minds and for a week afterwards we shook our heads every now and then asking each other how he did them!

We have subsequently booked him and are really looking forward to seeing more of tricks on the night! If you fancy getting an idea of what he does this is his website:

http://nebmagic.com/

We asked him about the Davina McCall quote on the site. He met her at Charles Worthington's (hairdresser)

New year's party where he was booked for a gig. So he has performed to the rich and famous!

Dress bought!

So following on from the disastrous dress sale last Sunday I decided to bite the bullet and order a dress I had seen on ebay. I had seen it as soon as we got engaged but I was a bit wary getting it as it's from China and you never know what it's going to look Lille when buying online.

I fell in love with the dress though and decided to take the risk. Not only is the dress gorgeous but the price is amazing at only £96 including delivery!!! I took my measurements and sent it to them so it will be made to measure. A I am still losing weight though I expect some alterations will need to be made but at that price you can't go too far wrong. The estimated delivery date is in August so looking forward to that!

The morning I have also seen bridesmaid dresses online at Debenhams which are in the sale so just waiting to hear back from my bridesmaids for their sizes and I will buy them!

Everything seems to be falling in place and on top of that I won a competition this week! I won £100 voucher for Westfield Shopping Centre. That will come in really handy as we'll be able to buy shoes or Mark's suit with that!

The Twilight Zone

On Sunday me and one of my bridesmaids had an encounter with the Twilight Zone!

A month or so ago I saw an advert online for a wedding dress sale. The website billed it as a large national event taking place in cities across the country. It said that there would be rails of dresses all heavily discounted from £100. This sounded exactly what I was looking for as we are on a bit of a tight budget. A sale was happening in Guildford so I booked two tickets so me and my bridesmaid could go along.

The sale was taking place in Debenhams so we set off on Sunday and head to the Debenhams car park. Well this was the weirdest car park in the world! Debenhams being a large department store we were expecting the car park to be fairly large. First off to get into it I had to drive down the most narrow and steepest slope I have ever seen. It felt a bit like a roller coaster it was so steep! Once we got in the first thing I said was "is this it?!" It was soooooo small. There were probably about 40 spaces and half of those were for staff. A lot of the spaces blocked others in so you could quite easily go shopping and come back to find you can't get your car out. We were lucky though and managed to park. It was lucky I have a small Ford KA though as I had negotiate into a space through cars, vans and posts.

So once parked we went up to the bridal dress department in the store for our appointment which was at 2pm. There was no one around. No customers, no staff. We eventually found a staff member who worked in a different department who then told us the bridal staff member was on her lunch break until 2.30! Remember we were expecting a large sale with lots of people around! Eventually the lady was dragged away from her lunch who was then rude to us telling us that she didn't know we were coming and our ticket meant nothing to her!

While we had been waiting for the lady we had been looking at the dresses. There was one small rail of sale dresses and the two large rails of dresses priced mainly over £1000. The cheapest we could find on the sale rail was over £500. Again remember the advert claimed there were lots of dresses from £100! There was one dress I particularly like the look of on the sale rail but it was really grubby with even sweat marks on the armpit areas!

The lady asked if we new what we were looking for and we told her we wanted something that had straps and came in at the waist and hips. The lady then pulled out a few dresses all of which were strapless and a lot of them were definitely not tailored at the waist/hip area. I don't think that she was listening to a single word we were saying. We had to repeat over and over again 'we want something with straps.'

Eventually we chose 3 or 4 to try on but I knew straight away that I would not be buying anything. They were all out of my price range. The first one I tried on was the sale one I mentioned earlier with the grubby marks. It was also the best one. My bridesmaid tried to get her down on the price as we would have to pay for dry cleaning. They were still wanting £699 for the grabbiest dress I had ever seen and on top of that I would have to pay £65 for dry cleaning (she claimed this was cheap) and then a further £150 for the alterations needed. £905 for a dress that had been tried on so much it had sweat marks!

In the end I was honest with the sales lady and told her that the whole thing was not what I was expecting and not as the advert had portrayed it. She said that there had been a couple of £100 dresses  the day before but they had sold and besides 'they weren't very nice!' I couldn't believe she said that about things she was selling. One of those buyers may have been a friend of mine for all she knew! She then went out the back and brought a dress out which she thought might be more in my 'price range'. I never found out how much it was in the end as it was so completely opposite to what we had described we wanted that I was just a bit shocked! My bridesmaid was obviously also shocked as she gasped and then blurted out 'she's not 60 you know!!!' At that I just couldn't keep a straight faec anymore or stay in the store. We made a brisk exit laughing.

So all

The Royal Variety Show

I am currently likening our wedding reception to the Royal Variety Show! Ok so it will not be quite so grand as that and we certainly have budgeted in the cost of the Albert Hall but the amount of entertainment Mark is coming up with it might as well be billed as a variety show.

These are the ideas so far:

Tango Dancers
Battle of the Bands
Performance Poet
Magician
Fire breather
Juggler
Performing dogs
Disco
Mime artists
Fireworks
Acrobats

Before you start getting excited (I guess that will only be if you're going to be invited anyway!) I can tell you now we will not be having them all! We will only going to be able to afford a couple of them but we are currently weighing up our options and getting quotes.

Each morning Mark wakes up with another idea and so we have to rethink everything we thought we wanted originally! It's so exciting knowing that we are basically planning the party of our lifetime having exactly what we want. I am also loving the fact that Mark is coming up with ideas. I have heard so many brides say in the past that their fiancé is not interested in the planning of the wedding. Mark is being as involved in it as I am and it is great for me as I know it's going to be our day. It's so nice on wowing that Mark is as excited as I am.

The Dress

If you thought you were going to get to see my dress you were wrong! This is actually for two reasons:

1. I want it kept as a surprise

2. I don't yet have one!

I did go dress shopping with one of my bridesmaids today though. We went to Surrey Brides which is a little bridal shop in Weybridge not too far from where we live. I went knowing that I wouldn't be choosing one as I knew they would be out of my price range. Most of them were around the £1000 mark which we just don't have to spend on a dress. They did have a couple of dresses in the sale which were a bit more in my budget but I didn't fall in love with any of those. What the trip today did help with was knowing what it is I am looking for. I now have quite a clear picture of the style of dress I want.

Our next stop is the UK bridal dress sale! It is happening this weekend coming in several cities across the country. The one nearest to us is Guildford. Me and bridesmaid will be going along on Sunday. They say they have a wide range of designer dresses at half the price. The dresses there are all ex-samples, ex window displays or last in the range. I am quite excited about Sunday although I know that there will be issues to do with alterations by not buying new from a bridal shop.

I am worried about false economy I.e buying a dress on Sunday because it's cheap but then ending up having to pay quite a bit of money later on have it altered to fit properly. If I have no joy on Sunday I have seen another couple of bridal shops which seem to be more in our price range than the one I visited today.

One last point:

It was great fun dressing up in lots of wedding dresses this morning - I felt like a princess!!!