Our Wedding Day: The beginning of a long wedding career!

By Carina Monteith • 7 years ago

May
2017

Carina Monteith from Team Bride celebrates her nine year wedding anniversary with the story of her own special day.

Carina’s Wedding Day

I was always one of those girls that dreamt of her wedding day. My first Barbie doll was the one with the white plastic wedding dress and I loved her. For a while she had to make do with marrying my older brother’s Mr. T doll but one fine Christmas Day Santa Claus granted mine and Barbie’s wishes and brought us Ken. The fairy-tale was complete!

Finding my own Ken took a little more than putting a letter up the chimney and staying on the ‘nice list’ but that’s a story for another day! I met my Ken doll when we were both 15 and (skips all the awkward bits) we married 13 years later. May 31st 2008 was our Wedding Day and it really was the best day ever. The sun was out, the drink was flowing and everyone had a smile on their face, it was awesome.

It was 2 years planning and we had the date booked with the hotel before we even announced our engagement. I always remember us going to see Tommy Gallen at the Villa Rose and booking our reception from the plans he showed us as the Villa Rose wasn’t even built at that stage. Tommy was nearly as surprised as us that we decided to book there and then!

I was the original DIY bride. You lot think you came up with all the ideas to save money but you didn’t see me in action lol.

I made table runners, centrepieces, beaded napkin rings (that our guests wore as bracelets for the night!), mass booklets, pew ends and even decorated our cake. I was a nut job! There are professionals on hand to do this for you – use them!!

Carina decorated her own cake

By the time you buy all the materials, make everything without killing your fiancée and assemble it all for the big day – what are you really saving???

My advice is to keep DIY to a minimum or you’ll only add to your own stress!

The girls at work laugh at me when I say, ‘We didn’t have that in our day’ but it really was a different story 9 years ago. Social media was almost non-existent and all my inspiration came from bridal magazines – I had 100s of them!

I think there’s too much pressure on brides these days to compete with Suzie up the road. My honest advice is to relax and focus on what’s important to you.

Our friends and family still talk about how great our wedding day was as it was a bit of craic with good food, fab music and we were lucky enough to have the sunshine all day – sure what more could you want!