When we got married, we postponed our honeymoon. We thought we’d try to take things a little easy after the wedding and not rush headlong into a honeymoon trip. This allowed us to save up a bit of money and plan the kind of holiday that we wanted to embark on.

We leave for our honeymoon next week, and I think the one year wait was a great decision because we both feel really energised and excited about our trip! We’ll be visiting my family in Malaysia, then heading off to Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, Wales and London for a month. I’d love to hear your tips of places to see if you’ve traveled to these cities! We’re going to try and visit some of the neighbouring towns for short day trips.

This morning I was packing a few “creative things” to bring with me. I call it my creative pack…which I hope to take out and use on some occasions. Lots of rolls of films for my Diana Mini, our guidebooks, a sketchbook, a water brush pen (which holds water inside the barrel) and a small watercolour kit.

I would highly recommend the DK travel books, I think they are probably the best guide books out there, in terms of layout and coloured photos! This time we decided to buy the pocket sized version because from past experience, we always left our heavy travel books in the hotel! The pocket sized book narrows down all the information and places to visit in the best of 10. It still manages to pack in plenty of coloured photos and a pullout map. The only thing missing in the book is the lengthy introduction and history.

A bit of housekeeping, my Little Mo and Friends shop is shut and I won’t be taking any new orders until the shop reopens on 4th July. I know some of you have emailed me about wholesale orders, and I will most likely get in touch with you again when I return from my holidays. Thanks so much for your support! Hopefully I can share one last custom portrait that I’ve been working on before I leave for my trip! So keep a lookout!

WOW! How fast has time flown by? Today we are celebrating our first wedding anniversary and we are so excited!

After celebrating our share of birthdays and secret special days for the past 8 years, today feels somewhat different and significant. Quite a wondrous feeling actually. Big mo, I’ve LOVED every minute of being married to you!

We are off to the winery this afternoon, will blog with pictures when we get back:)

It’s been 6 months since we got hitched, and up till today I still get emails from those who’ve stumbled upon my blog asking me about my wedding shoes and a list of vendors. So I will compile my vendor list along with this post!

Here are my favourites from our photographer, Jen Regan from Anna Rose Photography.

For our summer wedding, we gave away orange paper fans from ebay, to cool our guests down.

My bouquet was an arrangement of orange mokara, orange calla lilies, hypericum berries, orange roses and James story orchids. Made by Karma Floral Design. I wanted something petite and beachy! My girls are just holding a few stalks of James Story orchids.

My dress is a simple white dress from Cue, paired with a white belt and orange ballet flats from Nine West. The headpiece is a birdcage veil by Bridal Affair. I got all this from wandering around in the city. I stayed away from Bridal shops because they were too expensive for my budget!

We had our wedding at the Kidogo Arthouse Gallery, it’s a lovely rustic limestone building perched right on the cliff. It overlooks the ocean and it’s nicely hidden away to give us a little privacy. We started off with a tea ceremony inside the art gallery and after serving tea to our parents, we moved out to the cliff to say our vows.

We gave away bubble bottles to our guests to blow. Inexpensive..and fun. The kids loved them the most. We wrapped up the bottles individually with our names in blue paper.

For our decorations, we got orange and blue paper lanterns from ebay. We sewed the table runners ourselves, arranged some orange orchids in ikea vases and added blue and orange paper napkins. I’ll let you in on a secret, the cutlery are actually plastic chrome cutlery! Even the wine glass is plastic! I’d rather put money towards our first home then splurging on china dishes!

I think it’s possible to hold a handmade wedding, that doesn’t cost a bomb. We kept ours really simple and minimal. I chose not to use any videographer, chair covers, flower petals or satin ribbons…in fact we didn’t even have a wedding cake! We also opted to have a buffet lunch instead of a sit down dinner meal, which really helped with the costs. Our Surf and turf buffet was prepared by All Suburbs Catering.

Well that’s pretty much our DIY wedding! I don’t normally post wedding related articles so I hope you enjoyed looking at all the photos! If you need any more info just email me or leave a comment here.

A word of advice to all the brides out there planning their wedding, just remain steadfast and calm about your budget! Pick a charming location that doesn’t require much decoration and add in a few personal and unique touches. Have fun!

For more pretty pictures, you can check out some of these blogs that featured my wedding too:) Ruffled.

Remember our little outing at the woods, a few days before our wedding?

I received the rest of the photos. Here are some of my favourites!

I like this picture best. Every time I’m happy or sad, this is the incredible person I’ve hugged so much, for support. I hope I’ll always be there to hug him too when he needs me!

Thank you Jen for these wonderful photos! Do check out her blog, Anna Rose Photography to see her amazing portfolio.

We also got the rest of our wedding photos, so I shall share some of our favourites in my next post:)

Photos of our blue and orange wedding, captured by our photographer Jen Regan from Anna Rose Photography.

Have I said how amazing her magic fingers are? Yes I have:)

Thank you Jen for spending the day with us! You can see more of our wedding photos here. And the art gallery we got married in.

Gah! It’s finally over and we can go back to our quiet lives! One of the scariest things about getting married is coming dressed up and being conscious about the fact that everyone is looking at you! I really hope that I didn’t look too out of place with my dress choice. Truthfully it was the only white dress that I could afford for our handmade wedding. I dressed it up with a flower headpiece and orange shoes. That’s it!

The night before our wedding was pretty crazy. We spent many long hours at the art gallery setting up the tables and chairs and doing all the decorations by ourselves. I roped in mum to iron all the table cloths and got my friends to fold the paper napkins. Rich also decided that we should have blue bubble bottles instead!

The flowers were a different drama altogether. The florist rang up to say that the flowers we ordered wouldn’t arrive for the wedding so we used what they had left in the shop; orange mokara orchids, red and yellow James story orchids and orange calla lilies. As for the vases, I just made do with what I had lying around my house and in the art gallery. Truth be told, I was starting to think we would never get any rest! By the time I got into bed it was 3am and then the alarm clock woke me up 2 hours later for the wedding!

As it turned out, everything was so fun and the wedding really reflected our personality and our handmade spirit. We didn’t order a wedding cake so we got everyone to bring a home made dessert to sweeten up our day.

We’re just so glad to spend the day with our closest friends and family. I’ll share more pictures once they are ready!

Jennifer Regan from Anna Rose Photography took some couple portraits of us before the wedding. We had so much fun. You can see more of our photos here.

She must have magic fingers…and my man looks good too!

Check out her beautiful work on her fan page. She’s pretty amazing.

Hello! Today we spent the day making paper lanterns and hanging them up at the art gallery. Luckily my brother in-laws came to help us and we got the job done pretty quickly.

These blue and orange paper lanterns for our wedding are so budget friendly and they came in a big pack. Oh and I bought them from ebay too. Can’t beat that right? I think they look pretty cute side by side.

Tomorrow I have to arrange the tables and flowers…and we should be good to go on Sunday!

Hello! Happy 2010!

I had such a great holiday. We spent time with the in-laws during Christmas and I ate turkey 3 days in a row!

We also watched a boxset of Rodriguez movies (big mo’s idea). We watched El Mariachi, Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico all in one day. What were we thinking?

New years was a little quieter and between the two of us we made udon, drank some Tiger beer, played Katamari Damacy on playstation and put on a funny dvd.

This week our friends and family are flying in from overseas for our wedding. Things are getting a little bit crazy…I can’t believe this is my last week and by the end of the week I’ll be writing Mrs on forms. So so weird! I also kinda wish I could roll all my anxiety away like a Katamari ball.

Anyway folks, happy new year and here’s wishing you all a great 2010, filled with lots of love, joy and creativity! I also hope you’re using your Little Mo calendars!

I made orange labels for our mini champers. They are not real champers though, they are actually filled with bubbles. Big mo’s mum thought it would be fun to blow bubbles at the beach. She bought us 70 bottles. Yes I spent the day wrapping up 70 bottles. Never again.