Our invites have been sent. Phew! Posting/handing them out was the nicest thing ever, and has made me so excited to see all my lovely family and friends in one place saying nice things about me. I put the invites off for a while and I found getting them finished quite stressful, so it's a huge relief to have that massive job ticked off. In the end I decided to go with one of my original idea for the front of the invite; a photo of a cross stitched design stitched by me, with a simple bicycle border. I've never cross stitched before, so had little idea how much swearing would be involved every time I noticed I'd made a mistake, but I love that I've learnt a new skill and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Because of my lack of cross stitch prowess I asked a super talented craft pal called Sarah Fordham to design it for me, she has a book out called X-stitch if anyone else fancies turning their hand to a bit of stitching!

I'm definitely going to use the bicycle border and my new cross stitch skills (hah!) for other things in the wedding too - maybe the cake table or sign for cards. I think it fits perfectly with both of our interests - Dan loves bikes and I love sewing, so hopefully we've found a nice theme for the wedding which sums us both up.

And I asked another talented friend Helen Entwisle to design the back of the invite for us, including a little note with RSVP details to save on having yet another thing to get printed. I did have lots of ideas of designs I could try myself for a RSVP card, but I fear that by the time I got around to making them we'd already be married, so I'm pleased that Helen suggested including it on the invite. Helen designs and screen prints a plethora of wonderful things, I wish that we could have afforded for her to screen print our invites, but because of both time and money constraints we had to just get them cheaply printed instead. Helen also has the nicest handwriting I've ever seen.

As well as getting the invites finished and sent, this month has been all about the flowers. I'm attempting to grow some of the flowers for the wedding. We don't really have a garden, just a small yard, and I have whatever the opposite of green fingers are, so this plan is ambitious at best. I've sowed the seeds, watered the little fellas indoors for a few weeks, thrown out the failures and squealed at the green shoots, and the little seedlings are now outside going it alone. So fingers crossed for kind weather, and that the "very easy to grow" descriptions on the packs were accurate. I've mostly gone for packs of mixed wild flowers, and also some sweet peas. Here is a photo of my wedding flowers so far, with my little helper moving a strawberry plant just into shot in the bottom corner!

My little helper has been my main time constraint, I'm sure I don't need to tell most people that parenting a young child is a full time job. Most evenings I sew orders for my craft business, so wedding stuff has to be done in daylight hours with Rose climbing my leg. This photo of me trying to get a picture of the finished cross stitch pretty much sums up the level of professionalism I've brought to the project trying to juggle childcare and crafting:

The other big thing I've done this month is to get my dress adjusted to fit. It took three weeks because I could only visit the tailor's once a week after work, but it feels great to have finally ticked that job off too. It was also the first time I'd seen myself in the dress in a full length mirror, and I like it much more after seeing it all at once. I did find the experience of standing in the middle of a shop having the dress pinned to me while in full view of the public incredibly awkward, hopefully I can work on feeling more confident - I'm sure a killer pair of heels will help. Speaking of which I've not worn heels in at least 5 years, so I need to choose and buy some soon so that I can fit in some strutting practice! I did try the dress on with heels before going to get it altered, to check the length was right, and I managed to put my foot through one of the layers of the skirt! This is indicative of how poor I am at looking after nice things, thankfully there was a spare bit of fabric from the top which could be used to hide the tear really well (I can't go into more detail about this without giving away the style of the dress), and now I'm going to be extra careful with all our nice wedding things. I even have the dress hanging on a hanger in my wardrobe - previously it has lived under the bed folded up in the box it was shipped to me in; yeah I'm not very good at being a girl.

I plan on the next month being filled with experimenting with a lot of my DIY ideas for things like signage, place names and general decoration bits. I've also seen some nice possible veil fabric so I'm going to have a go at making that; I did buy a very cheap veil from Ebay but predictably I got what I paid for: it looks very cheap, so I'll be using that as a sort of template. I'll report back with how that goes! I'm also going to make a final decision on Rose's dress, I've seen one I might buy and jazz up a bit with a collar, but the internet is so full of tempting amazing dresses that it's really difficult to decide. I'm just not cut out for the many many decisions which need to be made in creating a wedding!