Firstly a huge congratulations to my beautiful daughter Matilda and her now husband Yulan - what an incredible day that was! Matilda asked me if I would help out with her wedding and of course I was absolutely 100% excited and on board. They had decided the day was going to be fun with lots of dancing and partying so had the idea of disco. Now that’s a brief I can really run with so we sat down together and went through all the adobe fonts and Matilda liked quite a few which gave me some scope to play around. I loved the font ‘funkydori’ which was not only fun with a 1970’s age of disco vibe, but also has a range of glyphs to play around with, check out the ‘Y’s’ on the image below of the website I created for the event.

First step was putting together a website with all the information for guests, I animated all the fireworks so they ‘went off’ as you scrolled down the page. I got the invites printed and then turned the kitchen into a production line while I re-trimmed and scored them all ready for posting, Matilda had ordered the gold envelopes which kind of dictated the size of the cards, nice big and square. Amazingly the postage within Australia was exactly the same as the international postage ($3 each) due to the unusual size. A tip for the uninitiated is to make sure you write 'CARD ONLY’ on the international ones - I forgot to do this and had a few restless nights wondering if they were going to be returned, they were not! Phew!

I discovered that Australia Post will print personalised stamps (you can’t use these for overseas addresses unfortunately), so I got a photo from their first date and set up the addresses to be printed on label paper. To be honest this was perhaps the most frustrating part of the whole job as it was difficult to use the clunky template that was online - but after a few attempts I got there.

Matilda’s wedding dress was found in an op shop on the South Coast and needed some adjusting, initially she thought we could just take it up but we ended up spending a couple of weekends tinkering with it to get it just right. We removed some lacy sleeves and the bodice so we could take the skirt up at the waist then added horsehair braid to the bottom of the lace to make it sit properly. There were a few nervous moments when I was putting the zip back in but after a couple of attempts I got it right.

My other daughter Elinor arrived a couple of nights before the hen’s party with some ideas for games they could play on their weekend away. We had a lot of fun coming up with the ideas, and I especially enjoyed this one - ‘Guess Which Celebrity Couple?’ I confess I got a little carried away, I even put their faces on a portrait of the royal family he he he.

The day before the big day we got up at 4am and went to the Sydney flower markets as we were doing all our own flowers. The reality of 6 bridesmaids came home to roost and I was a little panicked about my $500 budget. I needn’t have been, we got the perfect amount and all the bouquets were spectacular, very proud of myself and Ellie on this one. It was really special to be with my daughters and all the bridesmaids who have been friends since year 7 and make up all the bouquets.

Turned out there were also some last minute emergency graphics needed. I didn’t have my computer but luckily Matilda had a subscription to Adobe and I had put all the hens weekend graphics on Elinor’s google drive so I was able to put them together - now that was a bit stressful but we got it done! Everything looked so fabulous on the day, and the reception at the Polish club in Ashfield went off without a hitch. Matilda wore my wedding dress to the reception which was just really really special to me. She rocked it!