so, its time to plan your wedding

Myself & my Fiancé Samuel have been engaged now for a little over a year and a half, some may think this is quite a while, some may be thinking its way too soon to start planning a wedding, but hey were doing it and we have a little over a year left until the big day!

Once you have been engaged for a while the fuzzy warm feeling soon passes and the realisation that you have A LOT to plan, make, organise, do etc becomes very overwhelming and you may catch yourself in a huge ball of WTF, so before you find yourself drowning in taffetta and confetti, grab yourself a cup of tea, glass of wine, maybe even grab the bottle and have a read through my advice & tips for brides to be.. 

Theme

This might not seem like the obvious choice for where to begin your planning but it can actually help more so than you think!

We wanted a 'rustic barn theme' so that whittled a lot of potential venues down and made the start of planning a whole lot easier once we had decided a theme!

There are a lot of different choices and styles for wedding themes, personally we kept our choice true to our personalities, but if you are struggling for ideas, Pinterest is the best place for a whole ton of theme inspo! 

Venue

You've chosen your theme, this is where the fun happens and you can finally go and visit your potential venues!

We settled on the first and only venue we saw purely because it just felt right, but you may be a very indecisive person and struggle with choosing the 'perfect' venue, have a look at local venues to you, fitting within your theme: i.e 'rustic barn weddings in Kent'..

I suggest whittling the list down to your favourite 3-5 venues and view those only to begin with, just to not over complicate things.

Liase as much as you can with the wedding planners that are dedicated to those venues and search for someone who is helpful, yet assertive as you know she/he will get shit done on your big day! 

How you gonna do it?

Now this relates purely to how you are as a person, are you someone who loves being crafty? 

Are you a super organised person who has to have every single things absolutely perfect and wont have it any other way? 

Maybe you're super relaxed, yet know what you want and will happily hand everything over to a wedding co-ordinator? 

Having your decision on how your going to go forward with the whole experience is invaluable, personally I have struggled to decide how much control I want over the day, i'm a complete perfectionist & also very crafty, but how much homemade is too much homemade.. 

Budget

This is one of the most important aspects of the entire day, and will also help you decide the last section, do you have an unlimited budget and money is no object when it comes to your big day or are you a budget bride and saving every month to have the wedding of your dreams (yep I'm the latter)!

Sit down with your fiancé and grab a notebook and draft out every single thing you want to be a part of your wedding day and a rough estimate of how much you want to spend on each of those things, total them up and work out if that is an achievable amount for you to spend on the day itself, this is more for the bride who has a budget but it helps either way as it will just set you out for exactly where you need to be savings wise! 

Once you have totalled everything up divide this out over the number of months before your big day (minus the month before as most vendors expect payment upfront around 3-4 weeks before the wedding date) and this will be the amount you need to put aside every month! e.g £5670 ÷ 15 months = £378 per month!

With our estimation's we made them slightly more expensive then we would expect to be paying, therefore allowing us to save extra and then use anything left over to go towards our honeymoon, savings, houses etc etc!

Don't sweat the small stuff

I know this probably sounds so much easier said than done, so I went to Facebook and asked fellow brides and brides to be, the all important question, what advice do you have for us wedding planners?

The feedback I had back was invaluable and the majority of ladies said "not to worry so much over the day at hand & to enjoy it!

Don't worry about others expectations, who to invite (it really is who YOU both want there, not who is expected to be invited), who will and wont sit with who and all the other little niggly things we know and expect that come with wedding planning!

Instead celebrate the enjoyment of the build up, cherish the engagement photos with your partner, have girly evenings with a bottle of wine making table decorations, invites and bouquets, browse pinterest and dream up your perfect wedding day and then take all the inspo you can and turn it into your own take on those beautifully edited photos!

Wedding planning is hard, and hell i'm a long way off of even being close to the finish line yet, but i'm definitely taking as much advice and help along the way I can and I hope that i've helped you in the process too! 

Let me know about your own wedding plans, ideas & what you have in place already, i'd love to hear all about your stories and make some fellow wedding planning friends! 

Vintage wedding makeup

So i rarely ever divulge into sharing my personal/work related areas of my life through this blog and ive been thinking recently that i really should, as some people may know i work as a freelance makeup artist and have done for around 3/4 years now and the basis of my work is weddings, and when it came to this wedding i just couldn't not show it to you guys!

The beautiful and very colourful bride Clare was seriously one of the nicest people ive ever met, with the most amazing tattoos and vibrant personality, i knew from the minute i met her for her bridal trial that her wedding was going to be amazing and i definitely wanted to be a part of it!

On the day i had Clare and her three bridesmaids to do, who were equally all as lovely and entertaining in there own rights and definitely made the early morning start a bearable one.

For Clare the look was very simple, a bold statement red lip, i used Lancome's La Laque Fever which literally doesnt budge so perfect for a wedding day where you know topping up makeup throughout the day probably wont happen! 

For the base i used Dior Skin Foundation, which is a lovely lightweight dewy foundation, i then powdered down the TZone with Clarins - Everlasting Powder Foundation, added a touch of Mac - Dolly blusher with Kevin Aucoin Celestial Highlighter in Candlight on the high points of Clares face.

For the eyes Clare wanted to keep it really simple with a bold wing liner and fluttery lashes, for this i used the Naked 2 Pallette and just used a light dusting of Foxy all over the lids with Mac Fluidline in Blacktrack for the liner, using a Mac liner brush to give a full but very neat winged line, finished off with Clarins Waterproof Mascara and Ardell Demi Wispie lashes. 

I thouroughly loved creating this look for Clare on her big day and am so pleased with how her vision has played out on camera in these images, incase your wondering the beautiful photographs are the work of a very talented photographer from Kent named Emma, you can view her work here.. and between you and i, i have her on my list for my wedding, her work is literally stunning! 

If Clare isn't hugely proud of how amazing there wedding turned out to be then what about a magazine wanting to feature your wedding in their latest issue, how amazing is that, the piece will be in Rock N Roll bride, how bloody cool!

Thats all from me today guys, let me know what you think of this sort of post and if you enjoyed seeing a little insight into something different on the blog?

Lots of love, Frankie x

Freelance Make-up Artistry, My Story..

So i figured ive been blogging For a while now and i haven't ever really gotten into much about my personal life, of course there has been little snippets along my blogging journey but never deep enough to get much of an idea about myself, so i thought i would write a post about being a freelance makeup artist and how i went about doing so, here goes..

From an early age i'd had a deep routed love for makeup, i don't know if its because my dad never wanted me to wear the stuff or if something had swayed me down that road without me realizing, its strange because my mum absolutely hates makeup and i think in the 40 years of her being on this earth ive seen her wear eyeshadow maybe once or twice, i think maybe the fact that i was swerved away from makeup made me really intrigued into why i wasn't being told to avoid it, its like when you tell a child to stop biting there nails, they do it even more, i think i had this reaction to beauty products.

It was when i first moved out of home that i knew i could finally get into working freelance as i would have the time and space to dedicate my time to it, and the fact that i had moved from the countryside to a town made it more accessible for me to reach a bigger client base, i decided i was going to trade under my 'real' name, Frances Clarke as to me it sounded more professional than Frankie, i kept it simple: Frances Clarke Makeup Artist.

I designed and produced my own business cards and basically handed them out to everyone willing to take one, hairdressers, salons, barbers etc, and of course family and friends as they talk about you work to anyone who will listen :)

These were fairly cheap to create, i designed them on VistaPrint and i think it cost around £11 for 500 cards!

I then decided i should start up my own website, i brought a domain name and created my first ever business site, you can find it here: www.francesclarkemua.co.uk it features my portfolio of work, prices and an information section of what i can possibly do for you!

Getting my name out there at first was a slow process, i advertised through my facebook, and created a facebook page for my business for people to like and i regularly updated it with my photos of my work, questions and answers, and just simple marketing to get my name out there, it definitely helped alot as many of my friends and friends of friends got in touch with my for bridal makeup and proms etc, currently so far i have done 3 weddings, 2 proms, handfuls of birthdays and general makeup for girly nights out, ive also hosted my own pamper party at my home where i had lots of friends and family come for an evening of makeup, nails and hair, it was a fantastic evening and definitely spread my name out there even more!

Even though i havent ever had any 'official' makeup artistry training i feel i am doing well as ive only been doing it for just under a year now, ive had such good feedback from clients who have hired me and have also had a few come back to me for other occasions, i definitely do want to go and further my skills by doing a course but i just have to figure out some time in my busy lifestyle to be able to go and get it done.
I do currently work a 9-5 full time job in an interior design showroom, aswell as blogging in my spare time, i have a very hectic schedule but i love it and thrive on the fast pased lifestyle, eventually i would love to fulfill my dreams of being a fulltime makeup artist/blogger as im way to creative to be sat in a showroom all day with someone elses creativity to market!

Onwards and upwards, i will leave you with some examples of work i have done recently so you can get an idea of where i am in my career now..

I hope you enojoyed reading this post and for any of you wanting to get into a career in makeup artistry please dont ever hesitate to email me: frankiebooxx@gmail.com im always here to answer your questions, i will at some point be posting about my makeup artistry kit and what you need to start out in the business, for now i shall love you and leave you, speak soon!

Lots of Love Frankie xXx