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Hindsight Advice from DIY Bride Heartty Pat

Patricia and Stephan's portrait

I have a very special treat for you today! To kick off the week I have the lovely and talented Patricia from HearttyPat–one of my new favorite blogs–is here to share some Hindsight Advice from her recent wedding. Patricia's blog is full of sweet and stylish inspiration. It's also chock full of her many DIY projects, complete with tutorials. In case you missed that, one of the most amazing things Particia DIYed were her engagement photos! Pattricia's other projects were featured on some of my favorite wedding blogs. Her custom retro doily wedding invitations were featured on The Wedding Chicks and her Sundae Ring Bearer Bowl was featured on Ruffled.

In addition to blogging, publishing her work on other blogs, and planning a wedding, Patricia DIY'ed:

Hindsight Advice From Patricia at HearttyPat

Our dream wedding was to elope to a charming little chapel overseas and get married with my closest friends and immediate family around. No more than 10 people. But when it came to really planning a wedding, I found it really hard to 'uninvite' people. My list just keeps expanding, my husband's, on the other hand, was unchanged right from the start. Hence it was no longer economical nor practical to fly everyone away to our 'dream' wedding all at the same time, so we decided to save all that logistics headache and still have an intimate wedding right here in Singapore.

guitar boutineer

My husband grew up and works in a music industry and I love all things vintage, so it was obvious that our wedding theme is going to be 1950s Rock n' Roll – when music is still alive! I just love a good old school rock n' roll band and extremely excited with the possibilities that I can think of to personalize our wedding – plus all that dressing up! We were also tired of the usual wedding dinners held in hotel ballrooms and with the luxury of smaller number of guests, we were able to have our wedding outside of a ballroom and in the garden of an Irish pub. It's just more 'us'. I was also quite concerned about the wastage weddings usually rack up, therefore to keep our wedding as eco-friendly as possible, I chose to hand make most details in the wedding such as, the ringbearer, decorative banners, the girls' corsages, the guys' and musicians' boutonnieres, the table runners, bubbles bottles, wedding favors, my hair fascinators and birdcage veil, bouquet, invitation CDs and poster, with existing materials that I have. We even took our own engagement photos, which is based on a 50s diner theme that is so rad! In this way, I can easily control the look that I wanted and stick to my color theme (Turquoise and brown). Again, I was able to do all these due to smaller number of guests and a time frame of roughly 10 months.

3 things you're glad you did

hand crocheted doily favors

  • I was glad I DIY-ed most things in the wedding, even though some times the cost of making them is not any lower than if I had just went out and easily purchased them from the shops. Crafting was something I really enjoyed and it helped to add a nice personal touch to the wedding, when they say "handmade with love", it's not just a saying people put on a tag! When I was crafting those things, I thought of the people who are going to receive them and that made me a really warm fuzzy feeling inside because I love them so much!
  • I was also glad that we made the wedding small because we wanted to mingle with all our guests and not just have an impersonal dinner where our guests' closest interaction with us was watching us cut a cake on a stage. And mingle we did! It was so much fun!
  • The Photo Booth was also something that I never regret having, it was something I wanted right from the start and put my feet down to when it was almost scrapped due to a lack of space and the threat of a seasonal downpour. All of us got to be silly for that one night and we left really great and mostly hilarious memories behind those lenses.

3 things you wish you had done

green shoes wedding shoes and grey chucks

  • Though we got to interact with most of our guests that night, I personally didn't get the chance to go over to my relatives' that night to talk to them. I was simply too busy running about and table-hopping that they got missed at the end of the night. I wished I had created some form of system before and made sure that I didn't miss anybody.
  • I also regretted not taking any pictures at the hotel where we booked a night before the wedding in our wedding outfit. It is an really awesome boutique hotel where we spent the next 2 days together as a newly-wed but we got so carried away with the gate-crashing and tea-ceremony and getting to the solemnization venue an hour before guests were due to arrive that we didn't spare any more thought about the photo-taking.
  • And if you had read my blog, you'd known I totally destroyed my gorgeous turquoise heels which I searched, no kidding, all over the world to get, at my outdoor wedding. There were just too many stone cracks and pebbles path and I just have to repeatedly bang my head that I didn't buy the Heel Protector (SoleMates) which I discovered and shared on my blog months before the wedding! And now, there's just no way anyone can repair it.

3 things you wish you hadn't done

Happily ever after sign

  • Seriously, both of us can't think of anything we wish we haven't done. A bit arrogant, maybe, but my husband happens to be an excellent wedding coordinator and I, being a slight control-freak, made doubly sure that we don't do anything too ridiculously silly!

3 things you wish you hadn't worried about

bridesmaids help with DIY projects

  • Planning a wedding is bound to be a journey of little worries and obsessive over-thinking. Usually I'm quite relaxed and adapts to a "come-what-may" attitude. But i do sometimes beat myself up over the small things like wrong choices of colors (even if they are barely noticeable), and being obstinately single-minded about the tiniest details. While I don't think that these are bad in certain situations, being overly-obsessive is. They cause too many unnecessary sleepless nights.
  • I also hate it that a few months before the wedding, most of our conversations revolve about the wedding. It's important that we don't let the wedding planning takes over our lives as a couple and also as individuals.
  • Delegate work if there are to much for you to handle and trust the person you assigned to do their job instead of checking and poking your nose into what you had already given away. That can be a serious nuisance and misinterpreted as disrespect!

your very best hindsight advice

black and white image of bride and groom dancing

  • My best hindsight advice actually comes from my husband. Don't be too caught-up over what other people think, putting your guests' best interests above yours or worrying about whether they enjoyed themselves that you forgot to spare a thought for yourselves or even enjoy yourselves at your own wedding. It is after all, an union between you and your other half. Believe it or not, your guests do rub off your happiness.

Check out more of this amazing DIY Rock and roll wedding at HearttyPat

Photography by Jan @ some kind of Beautiful
Music entertainment provided by Compass Entertainment, with dedicated composition piece by Tze
Floral arrangement and venue decor by Spellbound Wedding