MOMENTS Crete – Review

We have just received our lovely little memory stick with all our wedding photos on. This marks the end of all things wedding for us (don’t worry I’ll still be posting wedding related stuff).

I already reviewed our wedding planners on their facebook page and their website can be found here but I thought I would also write a blog post on them just incase anyone else considers getting married in Crete.

We sent out several different e-mail to companies we found online looking for a quote to arrange our wedding in Rethymnon. We had a range of replies, some of which were extortionate for the simple affair we wanted.

We went with MOMENTS because they were friendly, their website was clear and gorgeous and they never seemed annoyed no matter how many questions I asked or changes I wanted to make.They sent us clear invoices and outlines that let us know exactly where we stood. They were very accommodating and Caroline and Annika were really fab in their suggestions and ideas.

I won’t lie, it was a nerve racking decision to hire someone over the internet and not meet them until you are in Crete two days before your wedding – but I am so glad I did.

Caroline was a little delayed to our meeting at the hotel (literally like 5 minutes) but my husband to be was pacing the hotel balcony area sweating bullets. You see you pay a deposit and then you pay the rest before you go and so we were little bit worried it may have been one of those scams you always hear about. But she turned up and was friendly and instantly put us at ease! We made a few changes and she didn’t even bat an eyelid, just promised it would be done.We had one slight issue but that was sorted and fixed before we even knew there was an issue.  I’m grateful that Caroline sought to keep as much stress off us as possible and she really made our day wonderful.

Then on the day of the ceremony, we were running late and a button had come off my dress meaning that the zip wouldn’t stay up. Caroline was there with her emergency bag and her trustworthy partner helping to fix my dress issue, keep me calm and laughing so that I didn’t cry. All the while people are stopping and congratulating me, taking photos of me and at one point I had to move from having my dress stitched as a car was trying to get past.

She truly was fabulous!

The ceremony ran smoothly and afterwards she talked to my family and made them feel comfortable while photographs were being taken.

I would say that MOMENTS are fantastic value for money, have some really amazing ideas and genuinely couldn’t do enough to try and make the day stress free and perfect. Caroline really deserves praise for the hard work she does especially putting up with nagging brides like me!

The added touch of the memory stick and the note just reminded me why we chose MOMENTS and I will never regret that decision.

So what’s married life like?

I’ve been married for about 6 months now. Would it surprise you to hear that rather than the baby question (when are you popping a sprog out?) the most frequently asked questions we get are: So how is married life treating you? What’s married life like? How are you coping being married?

IT’S THE SAME.

My husband and I have been together for over 6 years and known each other for nearly 7. If our lives would have somehow magically changed (for the worst it seems people expect) then getting married wouldn’t have been the choice we’d have made.

Is it nice to be able to say ‘husband’ and ‘wife’? Yes, it feels amazing to say that, it gives me butterflies and I smile when I think about him as my husband. But I also felt like that with fiancé and boyfriend. But it’s only the title that has changed, not the man. It’s a little better now, because it has this weight behind it – the idea that we found our soul mates and bound ourselves up as one – but it doesn’t affect how I feel about him. It’s possibly one of the biggest decisions you can make and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

But you need to have a solid foundation, a good, strong relationship for your marriage to work. If we didn’t have that and then we had gotten married I could see why people may have thought married life would change us or our relationship. It seems people expect us to be miserable now we’ve tied the knot.

Maybe if we hadn’t lived together for over 5 years I could also see how others would think that marriage would hugely impact our relationship. But we did, and we waited to get married until it was right for us and until we were sure that this was the right choice.

Sometimes I would feel a little upset at how long our engagement was (over 3 years) but now I don’t feel that way. I feel more confident in myself and in our relationship. We’re more in love than we’ve ever been because we have this relationship where you can be cute, sexy and loving but also silly, clumsy and awkward. We communicate all the time – whether it be through talking, sweet cards (this is more of his thing than mine), whispering at night while curled up in bed or even shouting when we’re frustrated and fighting.

We have grown together, been there for each other and loved each other with all we have.

Why would marriage change that?

You used to be so pretty…

My dad stopped by earlier and had a look at my wedding photos. He didn’t actually come to Crete for my wedding so he didn’t know much about where we got married, what it was like and so on.

But he kept commenting on how I used to be such a pretty girl. But then I put weight on and this apparently makes me less pretty. I know that he means it out of concern for my health (overweight + arthritis isn’t ideal) and he didn’t actually upset me but it made me think about all the other people who’ve said that to me or who have said ‘You’d be sooo pretty if you just lost a few stone’.

Well, fuck that.

I didn’t used to be pretty, I AM pretty. Inside and out, because looks aren’t everything.

I know weight is a serious thing and I am trying to lose it. But for people to say things like that just makes me angry. It makes me feel like all they see is the weight, like it has consumed and subsumed me. It’s like I no longer exist outside the figures that tell you how heavy I am.

They assume that I must be unhappy because of it, that I must be miserable with myself and my life.

© hannamonika.com

 Do I look unhappy?

I am a big girl, but I also have a big heart and a pretty big brain. I am happy because I know how lucky I am to have a caring  family, amazing and mad friends and a husband who is always there for me and loves me no matter what.

He makes me feel beautiful, so you can keep your sodding ‘pretty’.

I want to share with you a picture my sister took just because it shows how much fun I like having and quite frankly, how I’m a badass.

If you don’t like your weight, the only person who can change it is you, the only person who should make a comment about it is you. Don’t let anyone else make you feel bad or like an inferior person or UGLY. They are the ugly ones to judge someone based on their appearance.

People come in all shapes and sizes – that doesn’t make them less ‘pretty’ or a lesser person.  Happiness can’t be measured in stones and pounds.

Wedding Pictures – a preview

I am too excited not to share some of the pictures with you. Our fabulous photographer Hanna did an amazing job so I needed to share. Plus I’m in love with them. Here’s a sneak preview – what do you think?

Copyright: © hannamonika.com

DIY Centerpieces

Fist let me apologise for the lack of posting. As some of you may have gathered from having a nose around my blog, I’m getting married. In two weeks to be more precise, so time isn’t actually my friend right now.  However I do have loads of ideas for this blog and will update whenever I get the chance to, but it will probably be like a flood of posts all at once sporadically every couple of days or weeks.

This week I have been especially busy as we’ve decided to make DIY centrepieces.  Again as many of you will know, we’re on a tight budget and things like centrepieces can become crazily expensive (things like candelabras for example) on the other hand as Girl Guide leader (it’s the British counterpart to Girl Scouts in the US) I’m pretty crafty and resourceful.  So when I was looking at crafts for my unit to make for Diwali I came across loads of pretty candle jars and decorative ideas.

**TIP** For anything DIY don’t forget Pinterest. Pinterest is your best friend when it comes to this kind of thing as people from all over the world add their own ideas or something they’ve seen which are then shared and can be saved for later.

So I decided that candles create a cheap but effective centrepiece. However candles on their own aren’t that ‘Wow’ especially if you’re using tea lights and not the fairly expensive pillar candles. So that done, I now had to decide how I wanted to decorate my candle holders and where to get them from.

Candle holders and jars are also an expense that you can save on – I’ve made mine out of sauce, pickle and jam jars. I wasn’t going to buy them for the sake of buying them or because they said a brand like ‘Mason’ on them.  Nope, this bride is a tight fisted one. So I’ve been collecting all these jars and decided to decorate using string and glitter. I then added ribbon and bows to the string jars to tie them into our colours and the rest of the decorations. Then I realised that the jars on their own lacked the impact I was going for and started looking for charger plates to put them on.

 

However charger plates turned out to be expensive when you work out how many for 12 costs (you can sometimes find them in Poundland so keep your eyes peeled) so I started looking at more natural bases like wood.  Wooden decorations and natural looking centrepieces are all the range at the moment within the wedding world; it looks so beautifully shabby-chic and vintage as well as being purse friendly if you look in the right places.

Here are my wedding centrepieces, I’ll take a picture of them at the reception too so you can see them in all their glory. I found a man whose hobby is carving and wood craft and his Facebook page is All Carved Up and he charged me £20 for 12 slices, all sanded and oiled. Now if you’ve already looked online for wood slices you know that the nice ones can retail at that per slice. So I’ve had quite a bargain!!

 

 

If you want me to put together a tutorial on how I made the candle jars just let me know and I will do. You can decorate your jars however you want and the wood slices just give them that added something that makes them look cute and quirky!

Quick sum up of price:

PVA Glue – £3 for 250g

String – £1.20 per 3m roll (I’ve could’ve got it cheaper but was lazy)

Glitter – £12 for 250g (I have covered 8 jars so far and not even used a 1/4)

Jars – Free, just used what I had at home and got others to save theirs too

Wood slices – £20 from a local man

Candles – £2 for pack of 20 tealights

So 12 centerpieces for under £50!

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Hen Party

So as some of you may have gathered on browsing my blog that I’m getting married soon. I recently had my hen party, very recently, still hung-over-kind of recently. Hen parties are one of those strange things, and if you don’t understand what I’m on about then maybe Bridal Shower or Bachelorette Party helps. Hen party seems to be the British name for it but it’s strange because none of them are the same. For example, if you go to a baby shower then they are all pretty samey but with hen parties you can have anything from spa weekends, cocktail making classes, cake decorating sessions all the way to weekends in Europe, boozy nights out and whipped cream covered strippers.

I, being an unclassy booze hound, went for a night out with my friends and family. Now that wasn’t simply enough for me, so I had a theme – Alice in Wonderland but all Disney characters were invited to my Wonderland. But still not satisfied with just drinks and dancing I had pre-drinks at my house and the yummiest meal ever at a restaurant called The Smoke Haus.

The Costume

I made my own costume. I am a plus sized woman and finding a costume I liked was really difficult. I found a blue skater dress at a website called Pink Clove. They are a small online retailers that I’ve only just discovered, but I was extremely pleased with my dress and it was fairly inexpensive costing me only £24.

I then bought a two pack of black pillows and a pack of white pillow cases from Tesco. The black pillow cases made my bow, my hairpiece and the strap for my apron. The white pillow cases were used for the apron and the chest piece. Buttons, both plain and the clock ones were bought, alongside the lace and sequins from Hobby craft.

Now I can’t sew, so my glue gun was my best friend and I was surprised at how easy I found it to use and how well everything stayed. Despite me falling over in a club, dancing like a looney and pulling it off drunkenly when I got home – everything was still in place the next morning.

 

 The first picture is when I was fully sober, the second not much.

The Accessories 

I made felt hearts and hot glued sequins on to them to tie in my shoes. I also made a bow for my hair using a black pillow case and a clock button from Hobbycraft. I learned how to make the bows for my outfit using this video from YouTube. My mother went as the Queen of Hearts and I also made a paper rose/card hair piece for her which I glued onto a comb.

The Decorations

Decorations were fun to make but also difficult – after all I am a bride on a budget! So while I didn’t get many photos of them I did get some pics of my favorite ones. I made a hanging banner/bunting type thing out of jumbo cards bought off eBay and paper roses that I made myself from a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. My sister and I made table pieces out of cards, a mix of normal and jumbo ones, and teapot cut outs we found online. We also bought inflatable flamingoes from eBay and printed out quotes which were placed around the room.

A Special Hen Party Gift

One of my friends, Ash, is the most thoughtful little bugger you’ve ever met. For my hen party she bought me a gift even though I wasn’t expecting one. She gave me an Alice in Wonderland themed teacup and saucer, complete with vintage style bottle and ‘Drink Me’ label filled with rum! My favorite! Thank you Ash 🙂

Alternative to Tiaras – Hair Combs

 

Not every bride dreams of being a princess on their wedding day, some don’t want all the glitz of a tiara, like myself. That’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with liking something different so this post is going to explore some of the alternative to tiaras.

Haircombs

Now if you still want glitz, but don’t want the all of the pomp them maybe hair combs are an option for you. They can be particularly beautiful and delicate, they will also go with a veil and create an air of elegance. Click on the pictures to go to the websites.

             

Silver Pearl Crescent Comb – Ivory & Co.

This is one of my favorites off the Ivory and Co. website, it is classically beautiful with  it’s intricate pattern and stunning flowers set with real freshwater pearls and cut solitaire stones.

The website states that this comb can be worn ‘above bun or around a side bun as a crescent shape’ but it can also be worn in a side sweep hair style curling over the shoulder.

Price: £125

http://www.ivoryandcotiaras.co.uk

Sophia Freshwater Pearl Hair Comb – Alan Hannah

 Although this comb is made from glass crystal do not let it deter you. The Alan Hannah Devoted range at Debenhams is simply stunning! The simple elegance of this comb, combined with the trio of flowers creates a clean sophisticated look which would be perfect for the bride who isn’t looking for a huge fuss!

This again can be worn with a bun or a lovely up-do, but also with a side sweeping style. It’s a bargain steal from Debenhams, but the designer is also available at John Lewis.

Price: £40.

http://www.debenhams.com

A Girl’s Guide to Wedding Dress Shopping!

Firstly let me say congratulations on your engagement and upcoming wedding. Weddings can be a huge amount of stress but it’s also important to savour the special moments that will occur throughout the planning. Wedding dress shopping is one of those bittersweet experiences, you get to try on all these beautiful gowns and find your ‘one’ but on the other hand you can’t have them all!

It can also be a bonding moment if you decide to take some relatives or friends with you. I chose to take my step-sister and my mother with me, their reactions and honesty was what I needed to keep me grounded. They ensured that I didn’t just choose the fluffiest, laciest and most expensive dress but instead the best one for me!  My mother even cried when she saw my dress, my ‘one’, she is not an emotional woman so this was a big deal. You can always make a day of it, maybe visit a few bridal shops in the morning and go out for lunch  just to relieve some of the pressure.

One of the best ways to get a rough idea of what you like and what you don’t like is to have a browse online. If your local wedding dress shops have a Facebook page or website pop over and have a browse. It also allows you to see if it is worth visiting a particular bridal shop or if you’d prefer something different. Wedding Fayres are also good as they often have fashion shows to showcase the latest bridal collections and are a good source of inspiration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tips:

• Don’t wear any fake tan, strong deodorants or perfumes – you wouldn’t like to smell the previous bride would you? Or see streaky marks from another excited lady? No? So please bear this in mind and keep the dress as beautiful as when you saw it, ready for the next eager woman.

• Don’t worry too much about your underwear for the first fitting – here you are just trying on loads of dresses and getting a feel for what suits you, don’t stress about undies until later fittings.

• Please get in touch with your dress shop – as a plus size bride to say I was nervous about finding a dress is an understatement, however a few quick Facebook messages to arrange a viewing and let them know about my curvaceous situation was the best thing I could’ve done. Maria was the most amazing lady and reassured me of the sizes and reminded me that often the dresses stocked are in smaller sizes but that doesn’t mean a thing as they are personally made once you place your order.

• Listen to the bridal consultant – sometimes what suits you may be a dress that you never dreamed of trying on. If the consultant suggests you try on a dress that was maybe off your radar do it! Be brave and try something new which may surprise you; it will also help you see which styles suit you, should you want to order something online or from another retailer.

• Don’t stop until you find ‘the one’ – try on hundreds of dress if you must, but please don’t get fed up and settle with a dress that you’re not entirely happy with. When you find the one that makes you feel beautiful, your eyes water as you imagine your future husbands reaction and that you don’t want to take off then that’s ‘the one’. Buy it and don’t second guess yourself because if you do that then it wasn’t the dress for you.

 

So here’s all my advice for wedding dress shopping, I hope this helps you in your hunt for the dress of your dreams. 🙂