It’s an age-old adage that planning a wedding isn’t a sprint; it’s more of a marathon and we’ve been aware of that now for several months. As we turn the corner onto the home straight though, it does feel like there’s a bit of a sprint finish on it’s way as there’s still a lot to do and wedding planning is now a daley focus. All that considered, it’s a long jump from what we had achieved 6 months ago to where we are now.

It was lovely to have a brief rest from the athletics of wedding planning a couple of weeks ago to watch the dress rehearsal of the Olympics opening ceremony (thanks to Tim for getting us tickets) and lap up some of the atmosphere. They had a bit longer to plan the Olympics than we’ve had for the wedding, a slightly different budget, and a few more people involved…but let’s dive into some of the stuff that we’ve been thinking about recently for KISTfest.

As you’re probably aware, we’re going quite freestyle in terms of dress code, but we would like my shirt to match the bridesmaids’ dresses…so off we went in pursuit of a shirt. It’s actually harder than you might think to find a shirt to match a specific blue, but we found an eventual solution after a bit of a steeplechase in getting a white shirt colour-matched and professionally dyed for just £20.

We’ve already blogged about the bunting – this continues to be an addictive pastime for me; it’s not my vault – I just love it! Anyway, once it’s done we’ll probably have about 1000 flags all strung up – the next challenge will be to decide how to divide it up between the marquee, fencing and orchard.

One thing that you might not be aware of is the sponsorship deal we tried to secure with LEGO for KISTfest. We would brand our wedding with their logo in return for a bit of money towards the cost of it. To be fair, it was a bit of a long shot – put simply we had no response, so unfortunately can’t use their branding. We even offered them exclusive gold sponsorship of this momentous occasion…but it wasn’t enough.

There have been many other hurdles that we’ve passed in the planning and we’ve tried to relay information to our guests as we’ve gone along. It’s great that so many of you are choosing to camp – we’ll have a field for camping then next to it there’s a track and field for parking cars. Before the big day though, there’s plenty of stuff for us to do with both of us boxing stuff up to move house, so I’d better get cracking!

“Hidden” in this blog post are several references to the Olympics; some more obvious than others. Can you spot them all?

Ladies and gentlemen, I fear we may have started something. Have you noticed that since we sent out invitations in December, the whole country has gone mad for bunting? I blame the Queen – she heard about KISTfest and didn’t want to be out-done, so suggested bunting for her Jubilee celebrations. Well, we’re honoured to be copied!

I have to say that I have been very pleasantly surprised by how eager and willing people have been to send us flags for the bunting. So far we’ve managed to sew about 600 of them onto bunting tape (it sounds more impressive than it is, as 30 flags make up about 7 metres) and we’ve got a whole lot more to go. The original plan was that Kiri would do all the sewing (because she’s the girl!) but actually we’ve now both got sewing machines set up (thanks to Eppie for the loan of one) and I’m quite enjoying being the modern man. I’ll admit I’d never used a sewing machine before, and I’ll also admit now that there’s nothing quite like watching the football/Top Gear/other manly programme whilst sewing. As one of my friends pointed out, it’s really a bit of a middle-class addiction!

A special mention should go to those who have sent us absolute wads of the stuff – Gill + Helen – thank you. On a rather more sad note, we should also mention the one that was stolen. When our car was broken into back in March, one of the items stolen was a beautiful bunting flag with hand-stitched detail made by Cat Hann. We hope the thief is enjoying it as much as we would have.

So (or should that be “sew”…?!), we thought we’d share some of the diversity of flags we’ve received:

• Locations – we’ve had flags made from material that’s come from all over the world, including India, Uganda, Germany, South Africa and East Sussex
• Events – we’ve had flags made from bridesmaids dresses worn at the wedding of my parents, bridesmaids dresses from my cousin’s wedding, the clothes I had to wear on my stag do (although I kept the bright orange shorts…) and flags made at HENfest
• Random – we’ve had too many “random” flags to mention them all, but suffice to say, keep an eye out for some rather non-traditional bunting!

It’s going to be a brightly coloured event and we’d like to thank you for your part in making it so colourful. Now it’s back to the sewing machine for me…

Right, Steve says I’ve got to write my own blog post for this, so here goes…

Having heard all about Steve’s stag do and the clothes they made him wear, I was feeling quite nervous about my upcoming hen weekend… as it turns out, I really needn’t have been. I made the wise decision to ask Jema (my wonderfully organised and grown up big sister) to co-ordinate the event and, although I spent a suitable amount of time looking daft (the interpretive dance I did contributed highly to this), on the whole we girlies had a refreshingly laid back weekend with lovely food, lovely scenery and extremely lovely company. Staying true to my values, we got in our cars and set out in search of a youth hostel in a remote part of the Peak District, then we just hung out really. I thoroughly enjoyed spending quality time with my Henettes…

Tradition states that I mustn’t reveal what happened on my hen weekend… but I don’t like doing as I’m told, so completely ignoring that rule, here’s a list of activities we enjoyed;

Eating, drinking, badge making, 3 quizzes (one of which involved me doing forfeits when I got the answers wrong), walking, bunting making, games and a hen hunt.

All that action was great fun but I appreciated doing nothing much (or rather not doing) most of all, I loved the instant community that we became. The highlights of the weekend for me were;

Having all those amazing people in one place and finding time to catch up with them, laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, observing my friends getting along well with each other (as many of them hadn’t met before), taking in (and exploring) the beautiful Peak District landscape, listening to a playlist my Dad put together especially for the event, and eating (yes, I know I’ve already listed that once, but it really was exceptionally good food!).

A big thank you to all involved in making it such an awesome HENfest, especially Jema who put tons of work into it. The event exceeded all my expectations and I had an amazing time.

If you’d like to see more photos then feel free to visit the HENfest gallery

One of the many lovely traditions associated with weddings is that of the stag do – a chance for the men to be manly without any girls. With a best man like James, I knew that he wouldn’t allow for any girlishness and he didn’t disappoint.

Now I know it’s not traditional to share what goes on at a stag do, but what I will share is that it was better than I could have imagined. It was bushcraft weekend including making a shelter, gathering firewood, skinning and gutting a rabbit, making fire with flint and steel, making fire with a bow, cooking and eating said rabbits, cooking and eating mealworms (I now accept that I need more insects in my diet) as well as a lovely pub meal, a few songs with a couple of guys from my uni barbershop group and a trip to church on the Sunday morning. One of the highlights was waking up at sunrise and looking out from the bivvy bag at the dew-soaked grass. Awesome! The down-side? Well, I ended up wearing clothes that I wouldn’t normally choose…but it’s alright – a nice lady at church said that her daughter wears wacky clothes like that normally!

Big, big thanks go to James and Richard for their fantastic organisation and to Nick for expertly and patiently teaching.

Thanks to our official wedding photographer, Tom Dauben for this lovely photo of me – which seems kind of appropriate for this upcoming weekend too!

If you wish to see further photos of me in my “natural” attire, there is a gallery of stag do photos – thanks to Tim Wakeling and Dad for these photos.

As all good wedding planners do, we picked a venue for our marriage service then invited too many guests to fit in it. That’s not what good wedding planners do? Oh. Oops. Actually, it wasn’t quite like that, but play along with us for now…! Basically, the situation is that we have loads of guests, a small village church and our reception venue next door. Rather than try to cram everyone into the church, we’ve decided to be a little geeky and set up a video link which I (Steve) thought would be relatively easy.

The general idea that I had was that we have a video camera in the church and a projector in the marquee in the wedding venue with “a link” between the two. Now in my mind that link could take one of two forms:

1. A cable directly between the camera and projector
2. A cable from camera into a laptop, then to another laptop attached to the projector, either via ethernet or a wireless link

Now the second option just sounded too complicated, so we did some de-risking with the first option and found out that in terms of cabling we could use video phono (analogue) or HDMI (digital). After getting some advice from Andrew Lipscombe, the guy who’s doing sound at our wedding (one might say it was sound advice…get it?!) he recommended we went with digital up to the projector to cut out interference, so we then had to work out how to make HDMI stretch 50 metres. If you’ve read up to here, you’re probably really interested, or really bored, so in either case I’ll throw in a picture of our plan:

The next thing was to get a projector that was powerful enough to show in a marquee and with this one I’ll cut the story short and say that basically our cheapest option was to buy a projector which we’ll then sell on afterwards (let us know if you’re in the market for an Optoma Ep782 DLP 4700 lumens projector in the Autumn…). We did have suggestions from certain friends that we should get one with a TV tuner so they could watch the paralympics instead of the wedding, but we think we’ll give that one a miss.

So, technologically, we should be sorted now…well, once we’ve got a screen. The one thing we have yet to work out is what to do if someone in the marquee knows of any reason in law why we shouldn’t be married…

Let us tell you a tale of 3 little pigs, but please be warned, these are pigs destined to be eaten, so those of a squeamish nature please look away now.

Once upon a time there was a young and beautiful maiden (Kiri) who was betrothed to a courageous IT worker (Steve). They wished to have hearty food at their wedding, so in the December before they were due to be wed, at a village celebration they approached the local pig farmer. Happily he agreed to let them sponsor a piglet through its life and suggested that the beautiful maiden should visit yon farm to select the piglet.

One cold afternoon in February (the EXIF data of the below image says that it was 16:02) the fair maiden did venture to the farm and, after consideration chose the piglet. This piglet was strong. This piglet was aggressive. This piglet was ginger. This piglet had sticking up hair. The friendly farmer confirmed that the maiden had chosen well.

Upon informing the brave IT worker of the choice, the pig was duly named “Chester” and his fate was sealed. Or was it?

Let us look at another part of the story now, for we said this was a tale of 3 little pigs; not just one. Our second pig is destined for the village’s Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and once again belongs to the same pig farmer, but is slightly smaller. This pig will be roasted in June on the same pig roaster as Chester (but 3 months earlier) and is estimated to be just the right size for the roaster by then (a maximum of 70kg). Chester has 3 extra months of frolicking and foraging and therefore will probably be too big. In the meantime, his punk hairstyle has made him popular in the village where he has the nickname of “Punky the Wedding Pig”. His size (and fame?) may have actually saved his bacon.

And so onto the third pig. There is indeed a third pig. There’s always a third pig. His/her name is unknown, but he/she is smaller than Chester/Punky and the Jubilee pig. He/she is the chosen one.

A story about three little pigs would not be a proper story without a wolf, but unfortunately as there are no wolves in this country we’ll just have to stick with a picture of Ruby, the friendly sheepdog from next door!

I recall a story from the book “Paddington Goes to Town” in which young Paddington Bear is asked to be an usher at a wedding. He takes his job of “ushing” everyone so seriously that the whole congregation is eventually totally silent. Now that’s not what we’re hoping for from our ushers, but it’s a nice story anyway!

We have, however, ended up with a group of ushers who, once their names have been concatenated, end up sounding like some kind of superhero; Timtom Samtimjake. But what would a superhero do at a wedding? Perhaps fight off bad weather, ensure no-one’s glass is empty, banish Dad-dancing (although actually we want plenty of that at our wedding!) and keep everyone entertained with shows of superpowers (also known as open-mic stuff).

Anyway, these main men on the day (accompanied by the best man James and the two Fathers) will be recognisable by their shirts:

• Purple
• Green
• Red
• Blue
• Mustard

The same 5 colours as the website…the same 5 colours as our wedding logo…the same 5 colours as…ummm…something else. Coincidence? Well actually, yes. But “ush”, don’t tell anyone!

We thought we would provide a few more details about our planned road trip; our full honeymoon that we’ll take once we’ve been married for a short while. The plan is basically to jump in a camper van (preferably one we’ve bought rather than hi-jacked) and head off on an adventure around Europe. We’ve got a few ideas of what we’d like to do/see (involving creativity and community), but we’ll go there with an open mind. So, step one is getting a camper van, and as you’ll see from the image below, that’s sorted!

Now all we need to do is shrink ourselves to fit inside it. Actually, with a van that size, stuff Europe – we might as well just have a bit of a drive around the English countryside!

More on the road trip at a later date – if anyone has tips on buying a camper van (although possibly more of a motorhome, as pictured), please let us know!

Well actually, the process began on 9th September this year when I proposed to my wonderful fiancee (although she wasn’t my fiancee at that stage!) on a beach down in East Sussex. It was worth getting my knee soaked in the wet sand, as she said yes. Some of you will have seen the ring…others will not have seen it yet, so here it is below:

It’s not the most traditional ring ever – in fact, you may even go as far as to say it’s the least traditional engagement ring ever. In either case, it’s very “us” and Kiri didn’t want a diamond. What’s great is that with a lego piece instead of a rock, you can change the colour of the “jewel” depending on what you’re wearing, or even put something crazy (like a lego man’s head) on it! Similarly, our wedding won’t be that traditional, after all, we’re not very traditional people! We aim for it to be creative.

Today we’re preparing to send out invitations (you’re probably reading this as a result of receiving one) and we’ll try to keep you updated on progress with wedding preparations through this blog.