Valentine’s day is around the corner so I thought this was the perfect time to tell you more about our wedding and have a wedding theme week on the blog.

You can read the other posts about venue options, the dress, DIY wedding favours etc.. It’s a bit different from the usual content in the blog but I hope you’ll like it. I don’t intend to vary from the blog’s main focus often but once a while, it’s fun. I would welcome your feedback on that actually.

Planning your wedding online

What you might not know about me is that I work in digital and am a bit of a geek. I love tools, apps, websites etc.. so I ended up planning and buying pretty much everything online for the wedding, even the dress!  Its an incredible time saver and apart from one mistake, it was really successful. Here are the sites and tools I used. It may inspire you for your wedding or for a special occasion too.

• Mobile applications – WeddingHappy and WeddingBudget: simple but easy apps to track your to dos and your expenses
• Wedding website – WordPress: didn’t see the point of buying one of those specialised wedding websites when you can easily create one with wordpress.
• Google docs – has a series of templates that are good for big weddings.

Which sites to use for your dress, venue, stationery…

Venue – Hotel Endsleigh, Devon

This one was easy thanks to all the continuous search I do on hotels! We had only two choices in mind: Endsleigh in the UK or Chateau Rigaud in France. In the end, the UK was a better destination for all but Chateau Rigaud is such a dreamy place. You can rent it for the summer too.

If you are looking for a venue for an intimate wedding where you can accommodate your guests, make sure to check my guest posts on 8 more places on Bloved on Friday.

I also recommend Coco’s beautiful and stylish venue search website for those of you getting married in the UK.

Stationery

I designed all our stationery using a variety of online tools and apps

• Pastelise – to turn a photo of the hotel into a painting
• PicMondey – to then cut out the background and have our logo
• GoogleFonts and Dafont-  to source two different font, one of them looking like handwriting
• Invitations –  MOO: I used this wonderful service for printing the designed invitations, RSVP, tags for the favour bags and thank you cards.

My attire

• Dress – The Fold and Club Monaco
  this was my biggest mistake and biggest success. I wanted a short dress so I Googled “short wedding dress London” and found a designer specialised in this kind of attire. After a good start, it went pear shaped. Fortunately, the day was saved by a stylish online store called The Fold. You will read more about this tomorrow.
  I also ordered a dress for the evening from Club Monaco. Their online store doesn’t deliver in the UK so I had a friend in NY receiving the dress and forwarding it to me.

• Earrings – Sarah Hickey
  I came across Sarah Hickey via one of the three key wedding blogs I read regularly. I ordered them only a week before the wedding and they arrived promptly.

• Shoes – LK Bennett
  I had a pair of navy blue stiletto hills in my size (I’m a size 2) from them so searched their site for the same pair in beige/nude.

Favours and candies

• Wedding favour – my only piece of DIY ! I have written a how to post for my crafty and creative friend Kate’s blog which will be published on Friday too.
• Candy bar – sweetcandy, frenchclick and aquarterof. Three different providers as the candy bar needed to be in green and white and raspberry and have a mix of French and UK sweets to please everyone !

Entertainment

• Pirate hats and pens for the young children – Wedding in a Teacup
• French and English conversation books – a fun visual guide to French and a little English conversation book !  The night before the wedding, we had Fish and Chips for diner and mixed the English and French families. As they are not all bilingual, those books were handy and a good source of fun.

What I didn’t do online

• Underwear – the underwear department at Selfridges was really helpful and you can try various brands. You can of course browse selections at Walcoal, Woolford, etc.. Even Amazon has low-cut bras etc…
• Dragées – sourced by my mother in France, of course !
• Mademoiselle’s dress- at John Lewis. It was such a great part of the experience for her. She loved trying beautiful dresses and she of course looked gorgeous on the day.
• Make-up and hair – I did my own make-up and the hairdresser was recommended by the hotel.
• Flowers – we were lucky that the in-house florist, Amada Randell, was the nicest and most talented lady ever. She is a RHS Chelsea Gold Medallist 2014. Look at this bouquet and the flowers on the table.
• Wedding rings – we decided to use a local jeweller who offered us a great personal service.

Last but not least, how to find a great wedding photographer

Our photographer was  Sam Gibson and I found him via Google too !

I did a Google search on “Endsleigh wedding” and found a couple of local photographers.  Sam’s talent was obvious from his portfolio and I also loved his way with words as you can read in his blog. We exchanged emails and had a Skype conversation (as he lives in Bristol).

It was great to be able to find a local photographer and yet kind of “meet him” via the wonders of the internet.  We are so pleased  with his photos that tell the story of the day so well.  All photos today are by him.

I hope these sites and tools will be helpful to you if you plan big celebrations. It doesn’t have to be a wedding !