Happy Easter!

Summer arrived early this year with temperatures hitting 37 degrees yesterday in Seville!    

This weekend we are closing our offices for a few days and we are also very excited to welcome our Easter weekend wedding to Spain.

It is going to be a weekend of beautiful blue skies and sunny days as our clients celebrate their marriage overlooking the Mediterranean. 

We would like to wish all our clients, suppliers and friends a very Happy Easter and hope you get lots of chocolate :)

Image found on Pinterest from Colin Cowie.

Confetti for Weddings

For personal reasons I have had a blog hiatus but now we are slowly coming back from a difficult time and welcoming 2015 with more fabulous ideas, inspirations and real weddings from Spain.  

We are going to share many of our insider tips for a more Martha style blog this year and show you how we create our details for our gorgeous weddings.  

So we start this year with confetti as I am always amazed how many of our clients overlook this element for their wedding day.  

It is often a last minute addition to their wedding day decor lists but, for me personally, it is one of the prettiest and celebratory items you can include for a bit of sparkle and fun.

There are so many wonderful ideas out there so we thought we would share some with you that we also create here in our studio.  You can step away from the rather overdone confetti cones and introduce something much more creative and fun!

We are in love with these confetti wands including of course a touch of glitter.  

Glitter could of course be a bit messy for a wedding day, I spend my life covered in glitter!, so why not add in some sequins or as we did earlier this year for one of our weddings in Toledo some glitter baby pom poms.

Confetti bags are always a lovely alternative to cones and easy to pretty up with personalised wedding stamps or printed labels.  Fill with biodegradable coloured paper, we often use heart or butterfly punches to create our clients confetti but do make sure the paper does not run and create nasty stains before adding it to you confetti mix.

Lightweight paper, such as tissue paper, works well as it stays in the air longer. 

Confetti bars are set for 2015, a fun idea as your guests gather for your ceremony.   

These are along the same lines as a candy bar but using containers filled with different items to make up confetti, you could use rice, sequins, pom poms, coloured paper, glitter if you wish to get messy, lavender, rose petals, the list is endless!  Confetti bars can be styled and colour themed to match your wedding so you could create the vintage look or have a fabulous retro riot of colour.

A good idea for guests to use to create their confetti mix are sturdy cupcake wrappers, we created some this year using gold card cupcake wrappers and it worked a treat!

This idea maybe difficult to create though if you are having a church wedding but confetti does not always have to be thrown at the ceremony, you can plan it back at your venue for when the bride and groom enter or later as you leave.

Do always check with your venue though before planning the throwing of the confetti, many venues and churches sadly have banned it, due to the mess, but if you can throw some sparkly things around go for it or just save it for another occasion!

All images were found on Pinterest.

Romancing Ronda

Here at Reviva we have had a wonderful winter using our quieter times doing our favourite past time of travelling around Spain looking for more fabulous wedding venues.

We adore the real Spain and this is Reviva Wedding´s forte, to escape the crowds on the coast and head inland to the Andalucian countryside to create very individual and magical weddings for our clients.

We were quoted last week by one of our wedding ministers as the Queen, or Fairy Godmother, of Sevillian weddings and we love nothing more than escaping to the Spanish countryside full of olive trees, bright blue wild irises in the spring, fields upon fields of sunflowers in late June followed by fluffy white cotton fields, it is a stunning country and our road trips around Andalucia are always memorable occasions where we come back with a lot of photos and lasting memories. 

It is a truly magical place to be.

Over the past three years we have created quite a few weddings in Ronda, so recently we decided to concentrate on this pretty, historical town to see what else we could find as we have a few weddings booked here for this year and next year.  

We always love to get to know the location really well and need to find out as much as possible about the area if we are hosting our clients weddings there, whether it be the best tapas bar, a fabulous restaurant for a rehearsal dinner or even a recommended local hairdresser.

During our trips and research this winter, we have been fortunate to meet many charming business owners who are bending over backwards to promote their beautiful venues and the surrounding areas, they have welcomed us with open arms and much enthusiasm. 

Ronda is famous as the birthplace for bull fighting and it´s historic bull fighting museum, it retains it´s historic charm and has some fabulous to die for shoe shops and last but not least some wonderful restaurants and tapas bars!

There are beautiful venues located within this area from exquisite and beautifully presented boutique hotels to the famous Parador overlooking the deep El Tajo Gorge and stunning private villas and venues.  Ronda is a town full of charm and fun, cobbled streets and a pretty park filled at the moment with magnolia trees.

We have a new selection of charming wedding venues located around Ronda catering predominantly for smaller wedding parties of about 50 to 70 guests who wish to host an intimate and see the real Spain style wedding.  

We can offer private catering with our exclusive caterer in many of the venues starting from 70 euros per head including cocktail and canapes and three course meal with wine.

If you would like more information please do contact us at info@reviva-weddings.com

Images courtesy of Anna Gazda at Limelight Photography.

A Wedding Stylist and what we do!

I saw this wonderful post on Burnett´s Boards tonight on Facebook and fell in love with the sequin dress and glorious tropical coloured bouquet so thought it would be great to share this with you on our Facebook page.

Dare I say having clicked through to the actual link I was left slightly disappointed as there were many elements of this photo shoot that were wrong.

I maybe disliked for sticking my neck out here but from a stylist´s and perhaps a bride´s point of view I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts.  

Before I detail a few things I would be the first to say that anyone that creates photo shoots to inspire us are fabulous and we are completely in love with the images we have shared above, they are beautiful and up to date with the wedding trends.  

It is also very easy to critique other peoples work but I am looking at this from a professional stylist´s point of view to share advice as to where you can overdo it or go wrong and merely to point out a few helpful hints to brides.

To see the whole shoot do visit Burnett´s Boards Indie Wedding Inspiration to see what I will explain.

We are in love with this bouquet, it is a beautiful, colourful masterpiece but from a practical point of view if you look at the last photo on this post you will see how big the gathered stems are and the model here is using both hands to hold it up and they are still not wrapped around it.  

Whilst it is lovely to have a bouquet like this for you wedding, imagine having to hold something like this all day, it is huge and heavy, you would be surprised, so when thinking about your bouquets do be practical as to what can be achieved on the day.

The cake is also divine but here in the Spanish heat anything that is made from butter cream or chocolate will melt and any naked cake, i,e without icing, will dry out so do bear all these things in mind when swooning over Pinterest!

I was also slightly flummoxed when reading this post as I scrolled down from the beautiful images of the gold sequins and fabulous, albeit, large bouquet and then came to the spray painted gold pineapple, black studs, random earrings and head dress, none of this matched the actual theme and seems to just be thrown in.

Perhaps I am wrong and would welcome feedback.

If you are planning your wedding and are not sure how many elements, style, etc to incorporate we would recommend the services of a wedding stylist who can offer you not only beautiful styling but practical advice when planning your day.

We can be bossy but we will quickly eliminate the details that just don´t do and bring an elegance and charm to your wedding day!   We can do black studs but won´t combine it with a broderie anglaise head dress!

Merry Christmas from Reviva Weddings

As we all shut down now for the holiday season, we would like to wish all our clients, past, present and future a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We would also like take this opportunity to thank all the amazing suppliers we have worked with this year.  We appreciate all the hard work and dedication from you all and wish you a peaceful and Merry Christmas.

xx

French Jewish Wedding at La Cabane by Evenpic Photography

I love this time of year as we wind down from our wedding season, it allows us to meet new suppliers, plan photo shoots and generally catch up with all our friends in wedding world and have a rest!

It is so rewarding and satisfying to have time to sit and look back at our achievements and the beautiful weddings we worked on this year and pat ourselves on the back. Our winters are spent putting the foundations, designs and more exciting ideas together for our future weddings and events.

We are delighted to have had such a successful year, we love our 2013 couples and it is so rewarding to see such beautiful photos of such special days.

We would like to share this gorgeous Jewish wedding held at La Cabane at Los Monteros Hotel with you from Evenpic photography, a fabulous photographer based here in Malaga. 

We have been taking the time to introduce ourselves to talented professionals over the past few months and I had seen Fran and Elizabeth´s beautiful photos from Evenpic and was keen to meet with them and what a charming team :)  

It is always important when  you meet with a potential photographer to see entire portfolio of weddings and not just selected shots they have chosen, so having met with Fran I was thrilled to see beautiful wedding after wedding captured so perfectly from the getting ready to the party and dancing :)  

We love this French Jewish wedding Evenpic shot at La Cabane, so as an introduction to their work, we are delighted to share this fabulous wedding with you.

The wedding was planned and designed by Annie Heitor from Weddzy in Paris

In case you are past wedding stage and onto baby stage Fran and Eli at Evenpic have Babypic which we think is just too cute to not shout about!

Alice in Wonderland Wedding - A Few Details!

It is not often you are given two weeks notice to put together a wedding :)

We all knew Nigel and Olivia from Chez Vous were getting married and Reviva Weddings were pencilled in to oversee the day.  

But with all of us working in the events and wedding industry, our work and weddings ran away with us over the summer as normal and lo and behold with two weeks notice we managed to pull off a most fantastic wedding for one of the most hard working persons I know apart from me!  

Nigel, from Chez Vous Events, had approached me earlier this year to help him coordinate and style his wedding.  He wanted us to oversee his day to make sure it all went smoothly and to style everything, adding in the details and fun elements and wave my magic wand over his special day. 

I was very honored that Nigel had chosen me to help him with his wedding.

I really wish I had had the luxury of spending more time on this fabulous theme as when I finally saw the venue, two weeks before the big day, it just screamed magical fairy garden, Alice in Wonderland theme.

So we quickly set to work to achieve as much as possible in such a short space of time but of course I knew we would do it and come up trumps!

Much frantic ordering was done over the internet however sadly some things did not show up in time or indeed are still not here.  

I did order some themed tags from a site called Folksy from a girl called Rowena who runs Crafty Pagan Designs, but they never arrived and I have not had a reply from my emails asking where the order is or if I can have a refund, how disappointing is that?

But many fabulous suppliers came up trumps, including the wonderful designer Angela from Red Star Designs on Etsy.  Angela created a really cool Alice in Wonderland menu for me based on my brief and some lovely Drink Me stickers which we placed on small milk bottles and mason jars for the guests welcome drinks upon arrival at the venue along with paper straws.

Luckily for us arty crafty girls here at Reviva, especially my daughter Isabel, who is the real talent behind our styling team, the rest of the decorations were created in-house.

It did involve an all nighter to complete everything the night leading up to the day as we were busy with weddings all week before and after!  

Isabel handpainted and wrote the fabulous signs with directions and quotes which we placed around the venue, along with some giant paper flowers.

We created table names with white roses supplied with pots of red paint and brushes for the guests to paint the roses red.  It was funny the next day to see what the guests had created!

All the tags for the placecards were beautifully hand written by Isabel and attached to some really cute vintage keys, courtesy of Jess, and these were displayed with the menus on each place setting.

I arranged for Nigel to create a large entrance door to the reception and we styled this with different height logs, clocks, moss, a giant key, a mini door and more signs.

We went shopping and found some beautiful pink and gold vintage style teapots and teacups from the designer collection Carolyn Donnelly Ecletic at Dunnes. 

They were perfect for this theme and Nigel and Olivia´s florist filled them with flowers to use as display props on the buffet tables.

The gardens were turned into a Fairy Wonderland using upturned logs decorated with moss and tealights along with our mini silver candelabras adding a magical touch as guests wandered through the maze of this quite extraordinary venue.

Loraine created some lovely woodland twig displays to decorate the buffet tables using moss, plants and flowers along with mini vintage clocks and more silver candelabras and teapots.  

The star of the show had to be the cake by Sweet Things By Fi.  I quickly drafted in Fi to make the cake as I knew it would be amazing and she would be excited with this brief. 

Fi of course came up trumps and the wedding cake was absolutely delightful.  It was beautifully decorated with stop watches, mice and vintage style teacups.

The other star of the show, and we will have more photos soon, was my fairy berries, which amazingly were ordered from Washington on the Tuesday and were here on the Thursday. A big hats off to this supplier as it was going to be a risk to get them here on time but I was determined!  I think in the mist of memory a bit hats off to to DHL as well!

We will showcase more of Nigel and Olivia´s wedding soon, I am rather looking forward to seeing Nigel´s wedding car which apparently was a giant hotdog on wheels?!

I would like to send my hugest thanks to Joseba Sandoval and his beautiful wife, Mar, who bravely came along to photograph us setting up this wedding.  

We were running at this point on pure adrenalin, having been up all night, and they were patiently following us around and around the venue trying to take photos of our details.  

I have worked with Joseba now a few times and I am sure he thinks I am completely mad!

My hats off to Joseba and Mar, they are a gorgeous couple and amazing photographers and had they not patiently followed us around for the afternoon we would not be able to share these images with you.

If you would like to see Joseba´s beautiful weddings please do hop over to his website.

We will post more of this wedding soon, these are just a few of the details we created for the day that we thought we would be fun to share with you :)