It’s very lovely and sunny here at the moment making the evenings seem extra long, which after a hard day at work is rather nice. And something my guy love, love, loves.
So we've been heading out on lovely evening walks (maybe with a sneaky ice cream) and little trips to the golf course that’s five minutes from our house; where we attempt (very laughable attempts) to play. Always funny and the amazing views of the city we love in the early evening sun are rather pretty. Here’s hoping the warmth continues.

My little sister moved back to the hood this week after four years living in Cardiff and I’m well excited about it! She’s the funnest girl I know and I love spending time with her reciting quotes, doing stupid accents and generally messing about in a way that only we find funny or remotely understand. Plus she’s bought her beloved with her and he pretty much rocks too.
Welcome home my dear (West Country accent optional!)

Here we are on the annual family holiday to St Ives - all of our favourite place in the world! Looking a bit wind blown, but hey ho!

Browsing street-style blogs take up a lot of my time. Too much maybe. But it’s so much more inspiring seeing people putting together great outfits themselves as opposed to over-styled celebs or looks straight off the catwalk, don’t you think?

The likes of The Sartorialist, Garance Dore and Jak and Jil always produce the most beautiful pictures that are brilliant to look at and it’s never too long before I see snaps of some of my favourite ladies; Giovanna Battaglia, Miraslava Duma, Cat Power and Sofia Coppola, to name just a few. Oh, and Jane Aldridge from Sea of Shoes has to be another favourite. Crazy style maybe but something that should be admired. I’m feeling a bit green with envy just imagining the treasures each of their wardrobes hold!

And yes, I realise that I’m following a ‘I’m not buying things as I have too many clothes I never wear as it is’ post with a ‘how pretty are her clothes, I want them all now’ post! Whoops!

Our wedding was planned on a teeny budget and for what seems like forever we’ve spent any extra money before it was even earned. Now we’re good and married and looking to the future more clearly we’re on a mission to be debt free. OK so we’re not exactly in much debt, but it’s enough to hold off certain plans we have and we’d rather have the freedom to do such things when we want to rather than be dictated to by money, thank you very much.

So I’ve made a bit of a pact with myself to only buy things I a: see in a charity shop (which is one of my favourite ways to shop anyway, so that’s not too bad!) b: I’m in desperate need of (and I mean need. Not ‘want so much I’ve convinced myself I need it!’) or c: it’s just too much of a damn bargain to pass up.

In the last few months my boy and I (who also happens to love perusing a charity shop or two on a Saturday afternoon) have gathered some pretty awesome finds, so fingers crossed the bargain hunting luck continues and the savings stack up fast!

I love sewing projects. I’ve been taught to sew by my Mum, to knit (on pencils!) by my Nan, learnt bits myself along the way and took a creative fashion course for a bit of extra help. And I’ve managed to make scarves, tops and cushions galore. But with crafty wedding-related things taking over since Christmas it’s all taken a back seat. So I’ve cleared through the baskets of fabrics, buttons and wool and am ready to get started on another project. I’m really wanting to try out a quilt to mark the year of my marriage to that beautiful boy of mine, to pass down through the generations, so I think I’ll give that a try, largely inspired by the beautiful handmade quilts Kathryn over at Maggie and Sparrow creates; not that I have any delusions of mine being quite as amazing! Plus, having not knitted for a while, I want to start that again and have bought the perfect pattern for Christmas present ideas: hats, wrist-warmers, leg warmers and mittens. So dear family and friends - it’ll be knitted gifts galore this year :)

New glasses are a-calling. OK, so an eye-test is probably more important to begin with, but the prospect of new glasses is far more interesting and i'm super bored with my current pair. One problem. The only pairs that I actually like are expensive. As in Dior, Rayban and Chanel expensive. But, as the too-cool-for-school Chloe Sevigny is so fabulously showing, they look awesome, don’t you agree?

So, the essay-like posts have finally come to an end! Hoorah! And here in the Mallia household we’re settling into married life rather well after a month of wedding fun. The sun is shining and I’m slowly tidying away the debris left by the wedding bomb that appears to have exploded in our living room.
I’m clearing off shelves and have several bags of goodies for the charity shop and actually having a lot of fun doing it. Does that make me lame? I don’t think so.
IMAGE FROM HERE

We always wanted to get married outside. One problem. We live in England. Where it rains all the time. Even in summer you can no way guarantee a period of nice weather. Still we went with the idea and had a backup plan ready just in case. In the week running up to our wedding it was beautiful weather. In fact 7 days before we had the hottest day in May on record. Blistering sunshine continued until Friday. Then on Saturday morning we awoke to rain. Big, grey, rain-filled clouds hung over our venue. The weatherman assured us that by midday the rain would clear and it would stay dry until the evening. Sorted. We were getting married at 2.30pm so it would be dry enough for everyone to walk over the grass, so the ushers laid the chairs out beautifully.
Then at 2.25pm (seriously, no exaggeration) the rain started to fall. And then it poured. It was a case of everyone grabbing chairs, running into the marquee and my cooler than cool guy (my Mum always says “he’s so laid back he’s pretty much lying down” and this behaviour continued as wedding disaster loomed) arranged the chairs so all the VIP guests would be sat at the front of the marquee, with all the other chairs flowing around the bottom half of the tables for the rest of the guests. Disaster averted.
When I walked down the aisle there was a definite higilty pigilty look about our congregation and you know what? I really rather liked it. Loved it in fact. It truly added to the relaxed feel we always wanted for our day.
So thank you lovely guests for being so easy-going and for not complaining about the soggy bottom situation. And thank you Mother Nature for rewarding our patience and understanding with an hour of dry weather. The perfect amount of time it turned out to walk around a meadow and have pictures of just me and my beloved, as well as a few shots with some rather special family members xx

Me and my boy have lived together for 6 years (including 3 of at uni) so when it came to a wedding gift list, the traditional department store idea wasn’t really appropriate. We kinda wanted to get vouchers towards our honeymoon but weren’t sure how people would react to giving us money, so I was pretty chuffed when we found out about Buy Our Honeymoon over at Broke Ass Bride (a truly brilliant and unique blog!) We got to write our own gift list and the money was transferred into our Paypal account. Perfecto!
So thank you lovely guests for sending us off for two weeks of bliss in the Dominican Republic. It was heaven on Earth and after all the chaos (albeit most fun chaos ever!) leading up to the wedding, there was nothing more delicious than getting to spend 14 days just me and my love.

Those last couple of pictures...with a couple of cigars to take home and our fedoras just lying there, we couldn't miss the opportunity for some gangster-esque shots!

I just wanted to put a little note on here about my hair. Simply because it looked so amazing I figured it deserved a post all by itself. Thank you to beautiful Amy who did exactly what I asked for and I'm really not sure how many people would know what to do when I asked for a ‘rusticy’ kind of style – luckily she knew that by adding some plates and keeping it a bit messy she’d achieve the look perfectly! Everyone thought it looked so fab and so did I. And so did my groom who said the plaits gave it a very ‘Milk-Maid in the Barn’ look – rustic-style achieved, I think you’ll agree!

I love, love, love flowers. Seriously. And my guy buys me a bunch every few weeks because he knows how that warms my heart. I’m sure there’s nothing prettier than having a bunch decorating the shelf. And, for me, the brighter and messier the better. I’m a big fan of that whole “I’ve just walked through a meadow and picked this bunch” look. So that’s what we decided on for our big day. Plus we decided to do all the flowers ourselves.
This meant my sister and I heading to the Bristol Flower Market at 4.30am on the Thursday before the wedding, filling my car to the roof with flowers and stuffing the 130 or so jam jars we'd collected.
Everyone commented on how amazing they looked plus it was lovely to see all our guests go off with a little bunch to decorate their homes with at the end of the party.

When it came to decorating the marquee we hired we knew we wanted to inject some serious colour and the mix of deep purple, green, burnt orange, hot pink, bright blue and yellow carried on through the whole wedding.
From the moment I saw Martha Stewart’s pom poms I knew they’d be perfect and thanks to some bargain tissue paper purchases on eBay they turned out to be the cheapest decorations you could hope for!
We loved the garlands you often see at Indian weddings but real flowers were out of the question and all fabric versions we could find were at least £10 each – we needed around 150 so that was a big no-no.
Then one day I was walking past Monsoon and there they were; the perfect garlands in the ideal colours, used in the store’s window display. So my Mum and I spent a week calling every branch in the country gathering them together. They were an absolute bargain plus all the money we paid went to the Monsoon Trust, which helps disadvantaged women and children in Asia. So that’s pretty cool :)
And apart from the odd few we plan on keeping as a memento, we’re going to sell them on eBay and make a bit of dosh. Hoorah!

ps can i just say how much I love that my guy chose pink socks to wear on our wedding day to perfectly match our colours! It made me smile a lot when I got a glimpse of those beauties!

From the moment we got engaged we knew that our wedding budget was pretty darn small, but you know what – we would have never spent the supposed national average many couples do, no matter how much money we had.
One of our best buys was our wedding cake. £25 for three tiers of fruit cake wrapped in white icing at our local supermarket. Add my Nan's vintage cut glass cake stand and the most amazing 1950s cake topper I found on eBay in the US and we ended up with a beautiful cake.
We also spent many a night crafting nearly all the decorations for our wedding and our guests complimented us at every turn, which left a nice warm feeling in our tummies. But hubby dearest and I can’t take credit for all the DIY creations – we had a pretty brilliant team of rather creative friends and family helping out too.
From my sister’s brilliant stationary and my Mum, Nan and Grandma’s sewing talents to the beautiful poems my new Mother in Law wrote for us and the delicious cakes that a whole bunch of amazing people baked – it all made the day perfect. So thank you lovely ladies xx

On the mission of creating the perfect invites, the next aspect was the illustrations. I sent my sister, Dora, a mammoth email with all the designs we'd seen and that we liked aspects of as well as the colour palette we wanted and an explanation of the look and style we were aiming for. About two weeks later we got exactly what we wanted. I set to work on the back of the invite using my faithful InDesign and soon enough our invitation was ready to go. And everyone loved it.

I sent Cori from August and After an email once the designs were done to thank her for the help her blog had given us and when I visited her site a few days later, you can imagine how freakin' excited I was to see our invites staring back at me. So thank you Cori. I'm sure I'm not the only bride-to-be to have found your blog and been reassured that planning a wedding with a difference on a teeny budget isn't a completely mad idea, and is in fact a rather lovely one.

Next up was our invitations. My favourite blog when planning our wedding day was August and After - hands down, no other contenders. Cori's blog offers a big bag of treats if you're looking to plan a down-to-earth and natural-style wedding. We uncovered some great ideas thanks to Cori that we eventually used in our own wedding, the first of which were her own engagement pictures and invitations.

When it came to our invitations we seriously wanted to steer clear of any pastel coloured calligraphy designs and were struggling to find anything else that appealed. Then one day, when I was rummaging through a load of papers in the cupboard, I found an old invitation I'd been sent to an exhibition at the V&A for The Art of Lee Miller. Now this was a cool invitation and once my guy had approved it, we set out to turn the general design into something that could work for us.

We knew we could count on Dora for any illustrations we wanted, but what picture to use? Then I saw Cori's DIY pictures; some natural shots of Cori and her boy Evan in the woods. So lovely. So with a little persuading my guy packed up the tripod and a couple of outfit changes and we headed off to the woods. We got some brilliant shots. I mean, seriously. Some are kinda cool (aka Rayban Wayfayer and hoodies) and some were slightly Twilight-esque (although don't tell my hubby - that would not go down well!)

But the one we both really loved had a definite whimsical, hippy-style, 1970s album cover feel about it. And it was actually rather perfect. With a bit of editing when we got home (a smidge of sepia and a few scratches here and there), we had our invite image.

When we were planning our wedding, I scoured numerous blogs on a daily basis for inspiration and unusual ideas that would sum me and my guy up and be perfect for the laid back, brightly coloured, unique day we envisioned. On so many occasions I was tempted to start my own but with a full time job, crafty projects-a-plenty to prepare for the wedding, a fashion and textile evening course at college and some sneaky snuggles on the sofa with my love to fit in, I just didn't find the time. Of course the problem with starting a blog after the wedding is that I have so much I want to reveal from our whole wedding process. I figured the best place to start is at the beginning, so first things first - our Save the Date cards.

From the moment we got engaged, we knew what we wanted our wedding to be. Young and fun and everything that went with that, so when it came to designing our Save the Date cards we knew we wanted to reflect this. After all this will be the first glimpse our guests will have of what our wedding will be like. So we called in my sister Dora; AKA an artistic genius who had just finished a Fine Art degree. We planned to put her talents to good use across all our wedding stationary and so we talked to her about what wanted and came up with the idea of doodle style postcard with a graffiti hint to it. Then I put a beyond simple font on the back. Perfect.

* when it comes to the perfect time to start a blog, dear readers, it turns out the during the World Cup is it. With my boy determined to watch as many footie matches as possible I can spend guilt free hours on the computer. Luckily for me our computer is in the living room, so I can still get the odd sneaky kiss!

Three weeks ago I married the boy i've loved for nearly 10 years, from way back when I was 16 and he was 17. The boy who's become by best friend and the person I have the most fun with in the whole world. Our wedding was a day packed full of love and was more awesome than we could have even dreamed. Our beautiful family and friends helped make it a day that was totally unique and one that we'll remember forever, and for that we love them even more.

This blog is all about creating the wedding day we always hoped for, what modern married life is like for two little love birds like me and my guy, what inspires us, what makes us laugh and what adventures we find ourselves on.