Our Day by Design

After celebrating an early Christmas in October with my family, the 19th of November brought Christmas in November with my fellow Blogging Six girls;  Conversation Pieces , My Spare Thoughts , Daydreams in Lace , This Girl Is... & A Dizzy Girl . I was bridesmaid dress shopping for my best friends wedding in the morning {being pregnant I just spectated while the other two bridesmaids tried the dresses on} then I met the girls at Coco's before we headed down to Mimi's in Leith for lunch, where we were going to swap our secret santa gifts. The rules for the secret santa were a small bought present and something homemade and I think its safe to say we were all quite nervous about handing over our gifts. However, everyone loved what they had been given and what had been made for them so there was no need for the nerves. You can read some of the other posts the girls have written about our secret santa here , here & here . I had Lisa-Marie  so I bought...

I recently bought 2 ornaments from SarEi , a shop which sells personalised Christmas ornaments for all occasions on Etsy . Sarah sells loads of different designs and was so easy to work with and great at replying quickly to my questions & requests. Cobalt and Garnet - Hand Painted Wedding / Anniversary Ornament (Image from here ) One of the ornaments was for us as I wanted something on our tree to celebrate our wedding and the second for my baby nephew to give my sister & brother-in-law at their wedding , rather than the traditional horseshoe, since the wedding was so close to Christmas. I chose the wedding / anniversary design shown above and then chose the colours and text for each. Ours was of course deep purple, with a grey / silver design & text. It has our first names & wedding date on the front. For my sister, I got a navy one with a silver / white design & text. The front had their first names & wedding date on it. I then got the seller to put a messag...

Whoop! I've reached 250 posts on my little wedding blog and I havent even finished my recaps yet! I thought it was time to take a break from wedding recaps and share some of my recent Etsy purchases! Although I'm no longer looking for wedding related items, I still love browsing on Etsy. I wanted some new earrings so thought I would take a look and I ended up with a couple of pairs and a few other things! Purple & Grey Pearl Earrings from seller Abacus Bead Creations (Images from here ) White Gold Orchid Earrings from seller Delicacy J (Image from here ) Grey Five Flower Cluster Pin from seller No Plain T's (Image from here ) Deco & Filigree Snowflake Rubber Stamps from seller Norajane (Images from here & here ) Set of 3 Manhattan 5x7 Prints by seller StudioKMO (Image from here ) I love the earrings and the Manhattan prints; we just need to get a new frame so that we can get them up on the wall, along with our framed wedding print and the picture of our ven...

Of course I couldn't get bags for the girls and our mums without getting one for myself too. Handbags are totally my weakness, unlike shoes {which I why I bought 3 new ones in Florida last year}, so there was no way I couldnt get one for my wedding! Again, Emma was able to make exactly what I wanted for my bridal clutch and she even put my new initials and the wedding date on the label inside. Since I wanted to use it on the day, I went for an ivory satin bag and got Emma to make the main tab & frills in organza to match my dress. I added some colour with purple satin lining to match the girls bags. I love my bag and on the day I filled it with the stuff I would need like my lipstick, lip gloss & perfume then a few other random things I might have needed like plasters, tissues & blotting paper. I took my bag in the car with me which was great as it meant I could touch up my lip gloss on the car journey down. I ended up leaving it up in Ashleigh's room after we ...

We also got gifts for our parents to say thank you for helping us with the wedding. Like the gifts we got our wedding party, we also wanted them to be things they could use at the wedding. Our dads both got the same hip flask that the best man and ushers got, along with miniatures of Macallan Single Malt Scotch Whisky, as its one of my dads favourites. I know its traditional to give the mums flowers but we decided against that for a few reasons; there would already be loads of flowers from the centrepieces that we would could give them, what would they do with them at the hotel on the day and mostly because it wasn't something they could keep. Since I loved the girls bags so much I decided to get another 2 made for our mums too. I kept the gunmetal grey satin as its really lovely but got the lining in black satin and the frills in black chiffon; so that they were different from the bridesmaids and also black goes with anything! I got their initials put on them too. Obviousl...

Although we got the girls things they could use on the wedding day, there wasn't really anything the guys needed since we were hiring them full kilt outfits. We wanted to get them something they could keep but also that they could use if they wanted on the day so we chose hip flasks which they could carry in their sporrans. (Image from here ) We got the hip flasks online from a company called Kiltmakers . They also offer engraving so we got their initials engraved onto the front. We thought we should also get them something to put inside the flask so got miniatures of their favourite tipple's from the Whisky Shop in Ocean Terminal {they have every kind you could want!} Sailor Jerry Rum for Murray; Jim Beam for Andrew; Southern Comfort for Jake & Macallan Single Malt for our dads {who also got hip flasks with their initials!} I mentioned before that we also got them a funny gift of Storm Trooper Lego cufflinks from Etsy seller Crimson King . (Image from here ) They were so...

We gave the bridesmaids, best man, ushers and parents their gifts at the rehearsal dinner night before the wedding so I didn't want to share what we got them before then. I'm going to start with the bridesmaids gifts. All of the gifts could be used on the wedding day; we got them jewellery, a hair comb; a clutch bag and a pashmina. We also got them a letter tag of the first initial but that was just for the gift boxes {and hopefully they will hang them on their Christmas trees}, rather than for the wedding. The girls dresses had rhinestones on the back so I wanted to find jewellery that had some crystals incorporated. I didn't just want crystals though so started looking for pearl & crystal earrings & necklaces . After a lot of searching {almost every set I found just had metal backs and I was looking specifically for sterling silver, since that's all I can wear myself}, I found a lovely delicate set, including earrings and a necklace, on Etsy, from seller K...