our wedding D: ready

With my favourite girls around, plenty of pampering going on, MTV in the background, delicious finger food for lunch and a little bubbly later on, the morning of my wedding felt more like a sparty than anything else. (Confession: I've never been to a sparty and never, ever thought I'd use the word, it just slipped out!)
I'd been up since 8am and Sebastine had started my hair at 10. I'd planned for everything to happen way ahead of time, as I tend to get a bit stressed under pressure. Before I knew it all the girls' hair and make-up was done and Ian had arrived. I'd also managed to do my mom's make-up somewhere during this pleasant passing of six happy hours! Ian quickly snapped the girls in their cute t-shirts while Sebastine finished my face.

And with heads...

As soon as I was all made-up, I was overrun by the paparazzi and striking cheeky poses. I felt fabulous.

Oh, the silly little blue ribbon around my neck? My mom gave it to me in the morning, kind of as a joke and I just tied it on. Liezl later gave me a garter with blue ribbon which I wore for my something blue, just so as not to tempt fate or challenge superstition.

This is my favourite, favourite, favourite getting ready picture!

Even though we were still very early, we decided to get dressed so Ian would have plenty of time for portraits. I remained the calm, zen, blissed person I'd been all morning. This was quite unlike me, and a very welcome surprise. I'm never hyper or overly anxious, but do tend to worry about little things. This day however, I gladly left it all in the hands of fate and the professionals I'd employed to run this show.
My dress just slips on, so I was decent within a second and nonchalantly started adding my accessories. This is the crazy beauty of wedding photographs and photographers: none of these shots are posed, I was just doing my thing. The girls were all in the bathroom getting their dresses on, hence the photogenic solitude.

I was just in my dress when there was a commotion at the door. Alwyn of extraodinary florists Okasie had arrived with our bouquets.

I must admit, I'm not really a flower gal. Our first meeting with Alwyn had entailed a detailed questionnaire which forced me to look up the names of flowers. So I told him what I liked and disliked, but after that left it all up to him. I think I'd given the key words modern, romantic, simple and stylish.
We'd also never chosen an official wedding colour scheme, as I like a different colour every week. When we printed our invites I rather randomly picked a chartreuse accent colour, as I was feeling it right then. My gorgeous, comfy shoes just happened to be green. Because I couldn't commit to a colour, we'd decided on white flowers for the tables. So in-between the green invite, the green shoe and since even all-white flowers have the green of stems and leaves in them, the wedding went green by default.

A few days before the wedding there was still a chance that the bridesmaids would each wear a different brightly coloured shoe and I considered giving them coloured posies to match. But then we went with black (and purple and green...) so I told Alwyn and once again, left it all up to him. I do love the bright green. And there's even hints of purple!

My bouquet was softer. Just lovely.

Finally, all were dressed, made-up and flowered. We took all these pictures at Old Oak Manor, where I'd slept. Very convenient.

My dear mom had been collecting confetti for months, but I told her I'd ordered all white petals from Alwyn. So we decided to use her's right there and then, and created my favourite pre-ceremony petal shower pic!

I was happy. Can you tell?