Wedding Reception Preparations

We arrived home from America on the morning of the 3rd January to find that my sister (and

Michael's now sister-in-law) has taken time to decorate our house for us coming home.  She had bought us a bottle of Prosecco and stocked our fridge & cupboards with food and treats as well as lots of other bits and pieces.  It was the best thing to come home to and kicked our week of celebrations off perfectly.  Arriving home as husband and wife was great - seeing our little furry family again made us so happy!  Our first day at home consisted of us curling up in front of the fire with our blankets around us because we'd run out of oil! Brrrrrr. Michael was back to work the next day - I had separation anxiety for sure - newlyweds don't like to be apart from one another apparently.  Took some getting used to being on my own for 12 hours straight again (how pathetic!) but I was able to launch myself straight into the remainder of the plans for our wedding reception which was booked for the 9th January.  My lovely pal Sian came round to visit and very kindly offered to bring my wedding dress to the dry cleaners for me - total angel, thank you Sian!

 

There was so much to do, so much still to be bought and I spent an entire day shopping for the last bits and pieces.  I also had to spend time at the computer designing and printing quotations and signs for the dozens of photo frames I wanted dotted around the reception room (and if you've ever attempted to use my printer you'll know how testing that task was...) I bought over £100 worth of sweets and cakes for my sweet table; madness I know, especially as on the night I forgot to tell the hotel staff that there were extra sweets & cakes under the table to replenish the bowls with and to this day our house is coming down with leftover sweets and cakes! 

 

Mum and I went to the flower wholesaler to look at flowers and other bits relating to them - this was a fun day!  We ended up sourcing little silver pots to put little bunches of gorgeous white roses into, and me being ever the awkward one, I asked that we spray paint the pots black!  So Mum and I stood in her garage spray painting the pots and other bits that needed painted (okay, okay, Mum did all the work and I watched and bored her with tales from America). Mum added rows of little silver diamonds to the top of each pot which really finished them off nicely.  I didn't actually get to see the finished flower arrangements until the reception night and I just loved them.  I brought all of them home (over 30 arrangements in total) and they still look amazing almost a week later.  White roses are just so classic and elegant, perfect!  I also had to transport all the stuff that I was storing at my Mums house back to mine so that I could prepare and pack it all for bringing to the hotel with me on the Friday night.  Saying that, I was quite organised and everything was done on time without much fuss, thankfully. The hardest part was packing everything into my little Peugeot but we got there alright :)

 

Michael and I took an evening out for a mini road trip to Magherafelt (about an hour and a half during rush hour from Lisburn) to collect a polaroid camera and stand that we were renting from a small wedding design company called Ooh La La.  We met Rachel at her house; she was so lovely and her camera was a really fun addition to our guestbook table - we love the results, the pictures are too funny and the best bit was that we get to keep all the digital images as well as the sticky-back print outs that are in our guestbook! I also borrowed a large digital photo frame from my Mum which we planned to show a slideshow of our travel photographs and pictures from our wedding day on.  Michael and I picked out about 100 of our favourite photographs for the frame which took up most of one evening. 

 

Music is a really important aspect of a party, obviously.  It helps to set the tone of the evening, raises spirits and gets everyone in the party mood.  We decided to begin our evening playing an assortment of jazz tracks over the sound system while our guests were arriving and getting settled at their tables.  While picking out Jazz music, Michael and I stumbled upon a few artists/bands on Youtube that did jazz covers of popular songs.   By the end of it, we had jazz covers of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Fall Out Boy and even Rage Against The Machine - we were quite pleased with ourselves!  On the night, everyone loved the music and the next day I had messages from friends asking for links to the songs.  It was such fun to see people's reactions - I'd be over talking to one of my guests when suddenly their head would cock to the side and they'd go "....is this System of a Down?" haha! 

 

Our DJ's were Mark and Chris from Bespoke Music Solutions and they were fab guys to work with.  We had sent them a list of songs we would like played and they were so in tune with the music we loved.  The guys pride themselves on their refusal to play any wedding cheese which was perfect for us - for me, nothing ruins a wedding party like 'Rock The Boat'. Cringe! These guys come highly recommended - they even gave us a discount because they recognised that we're big music fans which was amazing.  Our friends Stephen and Tina have already booked them for their wedding this summer so it will be great to see them again.

 

I am proud to say Michael and I did all the decorating ourselves - the hotel did offer but we wanted to do everything on our own.  We unpacked the car and put everything on all the tables and decorated the entire room to our own taste. It was actually a really fun activity and it felt great to step back and see our ideas come to life.  The only part that was missing when we finished was the flowers, which Mum brought in while I was at the hairdressers and I didn't see them until I entered the room with all my guests later that night. One of my favourite bits of décor was a chalkboard I had bought and had my sister design.  Laura has the patience of a saint, something I do not have whatsoever and was able to apply her artistic abilities to create an amazing sign that looked as if I had bought it from a shop.  I bought the chalkboard online and bought some gold and white chalk pens for her to work with.  I wanted a kind of Welcome Sign of sorts, something that told my guests that there wasn't a set seating plan and that everyone was to sit wherever they wanted.  I liked the idea of everyone smooshing in together, when in reality everyone kind of stayed to their own groups anyway!

 

Little details included all the sweets being American brands, we had a bowl of Big Apples to symbolise New York and we had lots of little yellow taxies hidden around the room.  We didn't want a New York themed wedding, but a lot of our décor was in an art deco style that gave it a subtle New York feel. I had little famous love quotes printed and put into little silver frames on each table, as well as a large frame with the words from our wedding ceremony printed out and framed. The most important part for me was that the room was filled with candles - and it was.  There were large candelabras on each table and x6 glass candle holders surrounding them.  We had candle sticks on the sweet table and in the drinks reception room.  The room was filled with mirrors and glass and this really made the candle light look gorgeous, we loved the effect and anyone who's ever been to our house knows we love our candles! In the Reception room I also had little paper hearts scattered over the drinks table. These little hearts were cut out of a copy of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and I just loved them.  It would be pretty much impossible to tell what book they were from but when I told people they just adored the idea and some people took little handfuls of them home to keep :)

 

Mother had the genius idea of putting little baskets of toiletries in the ladies bathrooms and they were such a hit with all the girls.  I put a little sign saying "For any emergency repairs, with love from Rachel x" and they were completely raided which was brilliant!  We just put in things like deodorant, makeup wipes, nail files, all the usual girlie bits and pieces. Was a fun little addition to the vanity table in the bathrooms.  Our guestbook was a fab little find that I stumbled across on Notonthehighstreet.com, it was called Be Our Guest by Illustries.  Sometimes it's hard to know what to write when you're presented with a guestbook but all the pages in this one have little prompts and fun things to fill in and write on. It's made such a great keepsake and is such a fun read, especially with all the funny photographs stuck in next to each entry.  Well worth investing in!

 

When it came to food we just wanted to keep it simple.  I ordered chicken goujons and chips and vegetarian spring rolls and chips all to be presented in a single cone per person.  I also ordered little pizzas (a nod to New York cuisine!) and sausage rolls etc.  On the night, the cones were placed beside the food so everyone could help themselves but this actually lead to all the non-vegetarians eating all the spring rolls as they weren't set out separately or labelled so the poor vegetarians went without for the most part!  I was completely unaware of this until afterwards and felt terrible!  Thankfully, one of the vegetarians raised this issue with the hotel and they brought him out his own plate of veggie ravioli free of charge!  The hotel were fab, they couldn't do enough for us and we couldn't have asked for more.  I didn't even SEE the food on the night, I was too busy chatting to everyone so I don't even know what it looked like - but the hotel staff came to me and asked me had I eaten and when I said no they put a plate together for me and told me to ask for it when I was ready.  I forgot all about it of course, but I really appreciated the gesture.  The regret was instant come 1pm and I hadn't eaten a thing all day and my uncle ended up ordering us a Dominos pizza at ridiculous o'clock. What a legend!

 

Once the reception room and the drinks reception room were all set to how we wanted them, the hotel locked the doors so no one could peep in and it left Michael and I to go and get ourselves ready.  I had a very relaxing hair appointment at 2pm with Leighann at Andrew Watson Hairdressing and she worked hard on my ridiculously long locks to produce a gorgeous bouncy curly blow dry!  A quick stop into Tesco on the way back to the hotel to buy the apples and some beer for Michael and I made it back for just after 4pm.  I couldn't resist a bit more primping in the reception room so by the time I got back to our room it was after 4.30 and Michael was pulling his hair out worried that I had done a runner (my phone had run out of battery around 2.30 and no one had heard from me since) so once I calmed the Drama Queen down we poured ourselves a drink and started to get ready.  Well, I got ready, but Michael decided that this was the perfect time to start writing his speech.  Typical.

 

We had a family drinks reception planned for 6pm for our parents and siblings so it was a bit of a rush to get ready for then.  Michael and I barely had a chance to look in the mirror before we ran out the door around 6.05. Michael gave me a kiss in the elevator during a tiny moment of calm before the storm; we both took deep breaths before stepping out into the Reception area dressed exactly like we were on our wedding day in New York.  We were immediately sucked in to the madness, pulled left and right from the second we stepped into the hotel lobby - I won't lie, my main concern at that point was getting a glass of Prosecco in my hand!  We had booked a little room in the lobby called "The Study" which was a cosy room with a fireplace, lots of candles and a big window looking out into the cold winter night outside.  I had picked Prosecco with blackberries and raspberries as well as big ice buckets with a selection of beers & ciders as well as dinky little glass bottles of fizzy drinks for the kids.  We had a lot of canapés too, far too many though as there were tonnes left over - I think most people were too nervous to eat as it was all families meeting each other and seeing people they hadn't seen in a very long time!  I kind of wish I could have nipped back and scoffed some more because the few that I did have were lovely, and quite Northern Irish!  They had some with potato bread as the base which was weird, but I liked it.

 

It really is the little details that make it and I think our night had plenty. I was so happy with how everything went and I think Michael was impressed at the level of planning it took to pull the whole thing together so perfectly.  I did work really hard on it and I feel very happy that it all went so well.  I actually feel sad to not have a project to work on anymore so any friends and family planning a wedding, feel free to include me!!