wedding party london

After tying the knot in Northern Ireland with the family, we were all set for our London bash. Ireland was absolutely perfect, it was so important and romantic to share this with our nearest and dearest.

For the London do, we had a meal at Hoxton Apprentice for 35 guests and we were lucky to have close friends travel all the way from Dublin, Madrid and NYC...plus of course the folks that came all the way from Perth.

For our party we decided on a DIY vintage wedding and had been preparing for ages.

The venue was Shoreditch Town Hall, which was perfect. I'll let the pictures and captions speak for themselves...

We set up long tables and bought bird cages from eBay, as well as plenty of vintage tea sets and cake stands. Shell spent many weeks during the summer folding paper cranes with floral paper.

The flower vases were a collection of tins from the local shop, which were painted white with ribbon on the bottom. We got all the flowers from Covent Garden Flower market the previous day.

One of Shell's students made the little birds, we told her what our favourite birds were and she made them specially. We had sparrows, blackbirds, woodpeckers and the cutest bird in the world- a splendid fairy wren...Our local dry cleaner on Kingsland Rd started selling a few vintage items and when I collected our outfits on the day I picked up the little framed bird pic for £2.50.

The rooms looked amazing, it was everything I had hoped for....I was in heaven..all my closest friends, celebrating with my girl.

 Our friend's aunt made the bunting, it was amazing quality and set the room off perfectly. It was lovely to have people we know involved in the process.

We paid attention to every detail and tried to make and collect everything ourselves. This little suitcase was from our trip to Hastings and Shell made the little bunting sign. I adored the hydrangea flowers beside the case.

The bar was a highlight, we'd spent a lazy summer picnic brainstorming ideas with our friends and came up with 'The Bird's Nest Bar' We'd had a few last minute changes and we'd been ordering all our Majestic wine the week before literally as we were about to leave the house to fly to Ireland. We also ordered loads of gin and spirits and did a DIY bar, with a friends daughter helping to serve people. It was a huge success and we had no worries or problems... happy days.

To be continued...

first dinner in tokyo

I have had so many amazing things happen in the last 6 months and have many many many blog posts to share. But as I sort out my photos from honeymoon in Japan I wanted to share the first meal we ate in Tokyo...

Shibuya Crossing, busiest in the world

We arrived in Tokyo on Sunday morning and we were thrilled when we released the Nartita Express from the airport went direct to out hotel. After checking in and relaxing a while we explored the area. We were two wide eyed westerners in crazy Tokyo. There was music blaring and people everywhere. We found looking for somewhere to eat a bit intimidating as we couldn't read Japanese and had no idea what kind of food they served. In the end we stopped by a place, a waiter was outside and we asked if he had 'begetarian' thankfully he did. We took a seat at the counter, had some beer and consulted the English menu he found us.

We skipped the horse sashimi and ordered tofu, rice, miso and mushrooms

We've since found out that it was a Izakaya, which is a pub that serves food. I only took a couple of snaps because I was still feeling like a fish out of water!