F irstly a HUGE thank you to all of you that applied to be a real blogging bride/groom for WWW. It was wonderful to hear from so many of you about your wedding plans :-) I wish I had space for you all to blog for me.

Let me start by saying this: I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have found such a perfect match as Jim. I wish you could all meet him. He really is one of the good ones. I'm sure we all feel the same way about our husbands-to-be but I do feel a little bit mean and selfish that I've bagsied him all to myself. Everyone should have a Jim.

I've been reading WWW ever since we got engaged (and probably a little bit before - sshh!), so I'm super excited to share our planning with you. Whenever I read WWW, it always makes me marvel at the wonder of what it means to get married. Each and every couple are unique and have their own style and character. It makes me realise that there are no 'rights' and 'wrongs' to getting married - as long as you have a certificate and a smile on your face at the end of the day, it's gone perfectly.

Jim and I met about 6 ½ years ago, and although I don't believe in love at first sight, he is the only man I've ever really fancied from the off. He was a tall, dark and handsome friend-of-a-friend who came in for a drink at the pub where I worked just as I was knocking off my shift. We got chatting and afterwards, when my friend asked if he could give Jim my number, I tried to play it cool and act all nonchalant... but then checked my phone as often as I could to see if he'd gotten in touch! Luckily for me, he did (I remember the text well: "Hi Holly. This is Jim, Sean's friend. How are you?"), we went for a drink and the rest, as they say, is history.

We've just moved into a lovely little house in the midlands, with our cat called Mouse. Jim's an avid volunteer for the National Trust and loves cycling to work. We've been known to run a marathon (or two!) together, which makes it sound like we're quite sporty, but more often than not, you'll actually find us slobbing out watching a good TV box set or letting our bums go numb at the theatre.

Jim proposed on my favourite day of the year: Boxing Day. Every year, all my Dad's side of the family get together to go for a walk up a set of hills near us, followed by a hot meat sandwich in the pub afterwards and some party games and a buffet at someone's house afterwards. The Clent Hills are just such a special place for me - it's even where my parents got engaged!

So I'm sure you're now thinking that Jim popped the question at the top of the hill, in the midst of our walk, in the exact spot where my parents had got engaged 27 years ago... that's what I had thought would happen too when I found the ring when I was tidying up on Christmas Eve! I know, I know... I shouldn't have been snooping but I was. I had a good excuse: we had decided to make each other presents last year for Christmas (something we do quite often) and I had decided to 'make' the bedroom tidy, as it's never been tidy the whole time we've lived together and mainly my fault. Little did I know that Jim was planning to 'make' me his wife. I was beside myself as I held this mystical ring box which seemed to glow. I even tried it on. I'd been hoping for a long time that Jim would pop the question, but suddenly, now that it looked like a real possibility - I felt very under prepared and overwhelmed! I rang my best friend - who guessed what had happened just by the tone of my voice when I said hello! I then had to shake off the horrible feeling this could turn into an awful Emma Thompson moment from Love Actually.

Needless to say, when a proposal didn't happen at the top of Clent, I was devastated - had he changed his mind? We went home and I sobbed. I told Jim it's because I didn't have the hot meat sandwich I'd been looking forward to all week, which he thought was adorable. He knows how much I love pork. In an effort to cheer me up, he knelt down at the side of the bed and pulled out the ring box, surrounded by one hundred little origami stars that all said "You are my sunshine" on. I cried some more, nodded and we spent the rest of the night celebrating (including sharing the news with my parents and FINALLY getting to eat a hot meat sandwich!).

We've set the date: 11 April 2015, our seven year anniversary! We love the symbolism of a spring wedding - new life, new beginnings, full of possibility and growth. Jim and I are both arty - he's a fantastic illustrator and designer with lots of talent whilst I am an avid crafter who's not as talented but likes to give things a go! You name it, I've probably tried to make it including teddies out of socks, doily covered jam jars, glass-painted tealight holders... the list goes on. We really appreciate things that are made, rather than just bought off a shelf, and would like our wedding to be littered with lovely personal, crafted touches.

I was never one of those girls who had always dreamed about her ideal wedding day. For me, I always dreamed about what it would be like to spend the rest of my life with that one special person, rather than how I'd spend just one special day. Luckily, Jim feels the same. Neither of us is religious, so we're not going for a church wedding and we have a very small budget which we're going to try and be very creative with. We have a venue and we have a photographer... but at the moment, that's about it! Needless to say, we're very excited to be getting married, but we've got an awful lot of planning to get done in the next eight months. Watch this space...!