UPDATE: 

Gotta love how our theme was Lovebirds and there are NO PICTURES of the birdsnests we slaved away on to create or any of the bird aspects at all. HAHA! Oh well. I can't say that I am honestly upset in the slightest. I wish I could show you what we did, but I can't change the fact that we can't so you'll just have to trust me that it all worked out in the end!

I've only just gotten to a point in my wedding where I feel like I have a solid enough plan to share my ideas in one place.

Wedding Theme

Our wedding theme is Love Birds. I know it's not very original, but we really do *love* birds, and everyone knows it. We feed the lorikeets and the cockatoos every day when we're together and plan on having an aviary full of little finches and canaries at our new home.

(Yes, this is a picture of me within 10 minutes of waking up..with no makeup...in my pjs. But I love those little lorries!)

Ceremony Ideas

We are getting married in the Mackay Botanic Gardens at 10am on July 4th. We wanted to avoid the monsoon season at all costs, and by getting married in the morning, we're avoiding peak rain time. We've had to be very flexible after our original financing fell through and we're having to pay for everything ourselves out-of-pocket.

We're steering away from the conventional and will be having an afternoon tea reception. Picture 3 tier serving trays full of tasty treats as centerpieces with scattered feathers and petals and little bird figurines with a bit of moss and ivy here or there. I'm not really having "colors" persay, because there's so many that I'm using. It's more like a color palette I'm trying to stay within. I'd like there to be a sort of indie-vintage feel surrounding the whole day.

We plan on choosing 4 exotic whole-tea-leaves from The Tea Centre in the Brisbane Arcade. We're waffling between setting up a self-serve tea bar where people can simply scoop the tea of their choice into filters and return to their table, or having little tea bowls on each table for people to choose from. I LOVE the idea of the little tea bowls on each table, but if everyone at one table really loves one tea and they run out....there's not going to be much by way of refilling it. So I'll probably be stuck with the tea bar. It could be cute!

We're also going to cut down some branches from whatever tree I find that looks good (manzanitas don't exist in Australia. BOO.) and do the whole tea-light-in-the-tree thing, with a few little birdies in the branches and maybe a nest or two. We won't use them as centerpieces, rather we'll set them up around the room to add ambience. If we do the tea bar, it will probably be featured on that table.

To cut on costs, we really want to keep live flowers to a minimum. I mean, I LOVE flowers, don't get me wrong. My dress is COVERED in them, but I think I'd really regret dropping thousands on flowers a few months down the road when I have nothing but pictures to show for it. For every purchase we make, we are asking ourselves how we can reuse these items later on. Needless to say, we're not spending a lot of money on random expensive decor items.

I don't care about chivari chairs, chairh covers or the shape of the forks and other things like that. No one else is going to remember the chair covers, so I'd rather spend that money on food!

Inspirations: