Our wedding is this year! Hurrah! I've got high hopes of keeping my new year's resolution this year: "get married". We had a lovely christmas-time seeing family and relaxing. Most of my wedding preparation this month has involved swooning at other people's weddings online and spending time on pinterest. As a crafter who sells her work, I'm finding it difficult to ignore my instinct to shy away from using anyone else's ideas; my inbuilt fear of copying! I'm also one of these silly people who tends to not like things once they're popular, but I'm gradually accepting that lots of the most popular wedding decoration ideas are things that I really love and that other people love too - because they're good. Which is lucky because a lot of my belongings will fit the diy vintage-y wedding décor perfectly. The venue is so beautiful that decorations are more of a fun optional thing to consider than a necessity.

I read some great advice by a real bride on a blog about planning a wedding ceremony (I've long forgotten where I stumbled across it I'm afraid) and that was to base your decoration ideas on things you already own - both to cut costs and to make it personal. This seems like brilliant common sense advice. Luckily I'm quite a hoarder of stuff. I have loads of stuff. Unfortunately I don't own a hundred champagne flutes, napkins, or anything quite so useful, but after digging through my belongings I am pleased to say that lots of it will come in useful. By thinking about which of my stuff to try to use, I've thought more about making the wedding personal and got a clearer idea in my head of what elements of us I'd like to incorporate. I've got lots of scraps of fabric, which is good because I gather that bunting is pretty much essential at any diy wedding. And even some useful vintage mismatched cake plates - another wedding must-have. So using my own belongings as a base I've begun to visit our local carboot sale and charity shops and let my inner hoarder go wild. After all wedding hoarding is all about volume. We're going to hire the crockery and cutlery for the meal, but I'm collecting plates for cake - which is fun! We're going to combine the two ever popular flower arrangement ideas - jam jars and bottles, so I'm collecting nice examples of each, which is an excellent excuse to buy more exciting jam in snazzy jars.

We did start some important wedding prep back in September: we went foraging for blackberries and made lots of blackberry whiskey. It was such a bumper year for blackberries that it was hardly any effort at all, I seemed to grab a handful on nearly every trip to the park during autumn. As well as being something which tastes good, the whiskey will also mean something to us - when Rose was a few months old we foraged for blackberries in some woods with her strapped to my chest, and made some excellent blackberry whiskey which we drank that Christmas. We did try to go to the same spot again this year, but Rose fell asleep in the car so Dan parked up and had a nap while I climbed in hedgerows! There's still a slight question mark over whether it'll be used for reception cocktails or wedding favours, but the first bottle has been sampled and it tasted good. We had a glass straight with lots of ice, which was a bit strong for me, so I had my second glass with tonic which was amazing. The recipe says that it gets even better over time, so by June it should be liquid heaven. I quite like the idea of using it for a simple cocktail as it's a lovely colour.

We have been putting off deciding whether to do a "save the date" card for ages, along with putting off sorting out the invites, so long that we've forced ourselves into needing to do one or no-one will know they're coming in time! We went for the most low budget DIY option I could possibly think of: a photo of a photo, sent via email instead of post. I thought if we were going to make something ourselves for it then we'd better go for a super cheesy super cheap thing, otherwise it'd have looked rubbish. I had the photobooth idea in mind for a while, and I'm glad we did it. I'm sure it'll make people smile and hopefully it'll give everyone the chance to book the day off work if they need to. We're mostly sending it out to people who're invited to the daytime part of the wedding because I was worried that if we sent it to evening guests then they'd think they were coming all day and then be disappointed when they got the real invite - is this what everyone does? Sometimes I feel like I'm out of my depth in what you "should" do at a wedding, the whole thing is like a foreign language - I hadn't even heard the phrase "wedding breakfast" until a few months ago, and still keep forgetting that's what the meal's called.

Well, here's the result, Rose steals the show somewhat, in fact it looks like an announcement that I'm going to marry Rose! :

Next on the list has to be invites. I have three ideas in my head, but really need to decide what we're doing and get them done! I'm quite fussy with what I like design-wise. I know a lot of people who could make us amazing invites, unfortunately we can't really afford them, but I worry that if we try to make something ourselves I'll be really disappointed by the outcome. I mostly just need to decide and get on with it. I've got a spare calendar which I'm using just for wedding stuff, so I look forward to ticking things off on time. Here's to a smooth and organised 2014.