Sorry, this pre-wedding report report has turned into a bit of an epic tome; and it's not even the proper report - props if you make it to the end!
Background:
OH and I have been together for nearly 7 years now; we met at the last night of my friend's club. It was his first night out after his first marriage had ended where he thought he'd like to meet someone.
He met me 
Fast forward to January '13, he asked me to find a diamond 'for his friend'. Not the best at subterfuge, bless him! So we picked a stone and then I had to forget all about it until he proposed on my birthday 
In August of last year, after looking at close to 20 venues, in 2 different locations, we finally picked a venue, the beautiful 
Wethele is beautiful, but I 'ummed' and 'aahed' for a while, as I just don't really like marquees. But I knew it was the most practical choice as we had 7 small children in the wedding party, so having rooms there was amazing. And the people were wonderful, and the grounds, but - argh! Marquee!
So I came on here - and someone said something so perfect, everything just fell into place. 'Marquees make me think of Alice in Wonderland'. LIGHTBULB!
Alice has always had a fond place in my heart; I had a Mad Hatter's tea party for my birthday the year that we told everyone I was pregnant with our little loony, and I've always loved the books. (It was around this time I started on my presents for the BMs from 
It was important to me to try and minimise the impact of the wedding where I could, so from the start we decided that we would reuse old teacups and candles, and add plants as much as possible and make everything so that people could take away pieces from their own table as favours if they wanted. We'd just renovated a house and had a garden to fill with plants, so the idea was all the plants that weren't taken by guests would be brought home and planted in our garden.
So: each table different, made with as little 'new' stuff as possible, on an Alice theme, that could be used as favours and to fill up our newly cleared garden. Easy right? 
I kept the theme quiet for as long as possible - especially from my mum as she's a real worrier/stress head and I needed to feel confident that I could pull it all off before involving her. I started buying lots and lots of teacups, teapots, childrens' and dolls' tea sets, candles and bottles. Then I started skip hunting for unwanted wood that we could saw up into sections to create height to the centrepieces on some tables that didn't have teacup towers. All I had was this sketch:
At the same time, I made some collages to send to my cousin for invite inspiration, and told my parents the theme. They took a while to get their heads around it, then started picking up teacups and ivy etc for me whenever they saw it, which was pretty awesome 
The invites came back and looked AMAZING, and the bar was suddenly set very high for the rest of the venue stuff!
Then I had a massive dress panic and had to focus on getting a plan b in place, as the factory we were using was no longer able to make the pattern in time for the wedding - my cousin's amazing partner and my friend from work stepped into the breach and helped make this dress into something better than I ever could have dreamed - more on that later!
Back to the DIY! We worked out we'd need 17 tables; so 17 different centrepieces, including one REALLY long one for the top table. In Feb, my parents went away, so I took over all the boxes of teacups, saucers, candles and the like and unpacked them. The unpacking alone took hours! There was a lot of stuff
At this point, I still wasn't entirely sure that I wasn't completely mad and that everything wouldn't just look like a jumble sale gone terribly wrong, so I took some time and came up with a couple of designs, which I flashed here a lifetime ago, it seems! 
I was quite pleased with these, and came up with the basic format: each table had 3 candles, one of which was to be tall, at least one plant and 2 receptacles for flowers. This helped me to focus what I was doing as I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all (and still worried about what my parents would think, as I did want them to like it!). But they liked them, so everything was packed away and forgotten about for a few months - apart from the occasional binge on teaups on ebay
Next up was the jewellery: aside from our rings, I had to make 6 necklaces, 4 sets of cufflinks and 4 tie pins. This took a little while, but I was pleased with the results 
,
especially as I hadn't had anything laser engraved before (the 'we're all mad here' pins and cufflink backs). The BM necklaces were fun to do; I made them from offcuts of silver chain (I like to re-use), parts of previous jewellery collections and vintage silver charms (did I mention, I LOVE ebay?). I wanted each to be different and capture a little of the personality of each BM, whilst still being Alice and working as a set. I was quite pleased with how they came out in the end!
At the same time as the jewellery, I was working on the rest of the print stuff with my cousin, the design of the cake:
and what to do to brighten up my BM and FG dresses
I went to 
By this point, the wedding was a month away; I'd drafted in 2 BMs to help me with sewing, glueing and organising as I had started to realise that I'd taken on a bit too much - especially when 150 menus and 300 drink tokens arrived that still had to be cut by hand....
I also started buying the plants that we would use in the centrepieces and started planting them. I did this twice, as I didn't like the first lot of plants I bought (yes, I'm an idiot)
It was around this time that I had a boudoir shoot with the lovely daffodilwaves, which was an awesome day out with my CBM (who was also my MUA, handily!). We snuck to Birmingham one Sunday when OH was on his stag - he had no idea! I have to say, this was a great thing for me to do; I was getting a bit down with the constant wedding slog, and it was great to do something related to the wedding that was FUN and had a great outcome before the day itself
If you're thinking about doing this, all I can say is - DO IT!
After my nice day out having pics taken of my pants, I realised that I had 3 weekends left till the wedding. PANIIIIIIC! I still hadn't got any further with the centrepieces, so I unpacked everything and chucked it all over my basement. 
I started grouping things together and it became clear that despite 6 months of obsessive hoarding, I didn't have enough stuff
Luckily, we had a mini Easter break to see FFIL and I trawled the NINE local charity shops with FSIL for 3 hours and got pretty much everything else I needed to finish the tables! 
As I was still so behind on wedding prep, I left OH and our little one in Notts and came home early and had 2 days to blitz the centrepieces, and I finally felt that I was getting somewhere; each table was coming together at last!
My dad, bless him, had been experimenting and had discovered that the teacup stacks could be glued with a gluegun and then taken apart, meaning any stacks that were left could be taken apart and either put back on ebay or donated to the charity shop.
So we glued. And glued. And glued. And then, we were nearly done! Dad helped box each table up, and that was that.
In the meantime, I was having weekly dress fittings with my cousin's partner to get the dress finished. It finally arrived at my house, in one piece, 5 days before the wedding. Cutting it a little fine, but so awesome none the less! CBM and I set to adding some small silver sequin flowers to the skirt and it was done - and we finally told my mother she had been right all along and that working with a factory was a bad idea - she had no idea that we had been secretly making the dress for the last three months!
Three days to go: we realised that the cravats we bought were no good as the boys had the wrong shirts! 
So I had to call *another* friend who came and turned our cravats into ties with his ninja sewing skills. A lifesaver!
At the same time, another BM was glueing 100 pillow boxes together and filling them with confetti and at last - WE WERE DONE! Apart from the top table decoration which I had forgotten about :/
Queue panic, grabbing anything I had left, photographing it and chucking it in boxes and hoping for the best!
The next day - two days before the wedding - I was due to leave with my mother, but there were still so many things to do, she ended up going with the dress and I stayed behind to help make the last few things and prepare the instructions for the venue so they knew how to dress the tables. I had aunts making teacup chandeliers, and cousins making 'Down the Rabbit Hole' signs - chaos! But we got there
So the day before, at the crack of dawn, my dad collected me in his van, stuffed with teacups and off to the venue I went.....
