Guess where we are featured! In Style Me Pretty Little Black Book

Many moons ago when I started Reviva Weddings I spent hours scouring the websites for inspiration and fabulous ideas, I fell upon many beautifully created websites sharing love for all things weddings and styling.

One of the first websites, I recall, was the Knot followed closely by Martha Stewart Weddings.   

Snippet and Ink had some beautiful inspiration boards and as I worked on my own business I often browsed the internet looking for the latest wedding trends and fashion.  

I soon recognised some of the Wedding World Web leaders as being Junebug Weddings and Style Me Pretty and never in a million years did I think I would ever achieve being accepted and featured on both these amazing websites as one of their recommended Destination Wedding Planners and Designers.

My love of all things Spain, combined with my professional design and styling skills, I am fortunate to have created an amazing business whilst bringing up my smallest daughter and juggling two teenage daughters, which I am hugely proud of, delivering beautiful weddings to our wonderful clients time and time again.

So after many years of hard work, I am known for burning the midnight oil, I am thrilled to have achieved so much and absolutely love what I do.

Plus I am also known for scoffing wedding cake samples, trying to steal cupcakes, standing on my soapbox about commissions in wedding world, earned the honorary title of the Fairy Godmother of the Costa Del Sol who waves her magic wand hence my magic sparkles on our Blog that follow the cursor, surviving on less sleep than Maggie Thatcher and drinking coffee until it comes out my ears :)

I am now delighted to have Reviva recognised as one of the most creative and innovative Wedding Designers and Planners in Spain.

We are squeaking with excitement to be featured in Style Me Pretty´s family on their Little Black Book as recommended Wedding Planners and Stylists here in Spain.

I would also like to thank our team who have supported me and helped me to get where we are today, including Carla, Isabel, Loraine and Anoulka, an amazing array of hugely talented girls who are all passionate as I am about weddings, along with the fabulous suppliers, venues and photographers we have the pleasure of working with, without whom we could not create our weddings and showcase our hard work.

 And last but of course the most important, all the beautiful brides and their handsome grooms and lovely families who have trusted us to create their magical days.

I sound like I am standing on the stage for an Oscar, but we are proud of our achievements however will not cry or waffle on about our families!

The images on this post are a sneak peek from a beautiful wedding we planned and styled at the iconic Marbella Club two weeks ago, more to come on this wedding and our thanks to Agata Jensen Photography for a sneak peek of this beautiful wedding :)

A Beautiful Wedding and Candy at Cortijo Bravo Hotel, Velez Malaga

As our weddings started to get well and truly underway in May, we were very excited about decorating Michelle and Andrew´s wedding at the Cortijo Bravo Hotel in Velez Malaga. It is a beautiful venue and a fairly new one for us to decorate which is always exciting as we like a challenge so we did head off earlier this year to take a good look around this hotel to see what we would create for our weddings booked here this year.

Michelle and Andrew´s wedding started with a beautiful church ceremony in Nerja and then back to the Cortijo for a wonderful night of festivities and entertainments organised by Moira at Perfect Spanish Weddings.

The venue do supply some flowers so we woofed (I love this word!) everything up by supplying glassware which we filled with water, pink crystals and floating candles and then added in the pink roses we had ordered from the hotel, we also bought our mirrors and finished the centrepieces off with tealights and scattered the tables with crystals.

Peonies are delightful at this time of year and perfect for huge fluffy balls of loveliness, we created Michelle´s bouquet with ivory peonies and the bridesmaids in a fabulous combination of pink. They were delightful and huge! We were not allowed to decorate the pew ends at the church with our bows, which was disappointing but soon made use of them back at the venue by using them on the orange trees on the terrace so all was not lost!

Our highlight was the Candy Bar, there was a big clap all round from us and the staff, at the hotel, when we switched the fairy lights on, I think they were wondering what we were up to and it looked fabulous. Anoulka had done a fabulous job creating all the candy bar signs and Jeremy and Rob did get a look in later in the night when no one was watching!

We love the photos of the terrace that we decorated with lanterns, fairy lights and candles. It was a gorgeous wedding and lots of fun was had with the photo booth supplied by Jeremy, a gorgeous wedding cake from Fi, and dancing all night with fantastic music, lights and sounds from Rob the DJ. The A team were out in full force and here is our lovely email from Michelle and Andrew that was posted on our Facebook page

Hi Laura, sorry it has taken so long but I just had to thank you for helping me create my dream wedding. Your attention to detail goes way beyond what I had even imagined and it was only when I looked back at Jeremy´s photos I could see the extent that you and your team went to. Thoroughly breathtaking. The flowers were amazing and just what we discussed and of course all my guests are still talking about the sweet table (can I add they lasted the whole week we were here in Spain) such a treat. You were like my fairy godmother that waved her magic wand and made all my dreams come true, once again thank you so much, Michelle and Andrew xxx

Our thanks to Jeremy again for sending me these photos so we can share these fabulous photos of our work with you

Gorgeous French Style Shabby Chic Wedding at the Hacienda San Jose

Wedding world has truly descended here in Marbella now we are into the lovely month of June and yesterday someone switched on the heat button! May was still slightly iffy but thankfully all our weddings came through unscathed and our beautiful French style shabby chic wedding was no exception and the storm held off until the early hours of the morning at 4am, long enough to everyone to have a fabulous day:)

Over the past month we have created some beautiful weddings and now we are receiving the photos we will be able to share these with you. We loved this wedding we created and designed with Sarah´s ideas to pull them all together. We were working away to create fans and parasols for the church in Marbella, the cocktail blackboard, to the gorgeous table centrepieces with those die for fluffy hydrangeas, beautifully simple yet stunning. The bridal flowers were a shabby chic ivory rose bouquet and the bridesmaids were the huge ivory fluffy peonies that smelt divine.

Anoulka created our fabulous flip flop sign for our basket and we are in love now with our new Mr & Mrs signs for the backs of Fiestasol´s new style chairs!

Cake Marbella provided yet more yummy cupcakes, without again making extra for us!! I will have words and apparently the garden was twinkling in the evening with all our lovely fairy lights, lanterns and candles, a truly magical wedding for a truly special couple and our warm congratulations to Sarah and Daragh.

Our thanks to Owen Farrell for sending us these delightful images of the day, without these we could not share our work with you.

Our thanks also to Heather at Fiestasol who yet again, as I practically live with them in the summer!, delighted the guests with Heather´s efficient planning and catering.

Destination Guest Book Ideas

I am seeing some hugely creative ideas on the internet for guest book ideas, from vintage typewriters set up on tables, so let's hope all your guests will type out a personal message and hopefully despite their drunken haze be able to hang this from a beautifully decorated wishing tree or be able to assemble scrabble pieces in a cohesive form :)

I of course love all these ideas as they are hugely creative, but let's be honest, they are not practical from a European wedding point of view.

Let's face it most of your guests by the time they are presented with a guestbook to sign would have downed the best part of a bottle of champagne or sangria and will not have any co-ordination to test their keyboard skills on an old typewriter or delicately hang perfectly formed cards on a tree.

A destination wedding as well also poses the problem of getting everything home. It is all very well to make up a park bench and have your guests write on it and put it in your garden, but if you are getting married in Spain or Italy it is going to cost you a fortune to get this creative artifact to your homeland.

Having been working on this idea with some of our brides for our weddings this year, by far the better options are to have a photo or video booth, this can be set up for you here in Spain by our wonderful Becky Sharpe, she created an amazing video booth last year for a wedding here.

Or to have a wishing well such as a birdcage where guests can post their messages into this (hopefully!) and you can take them home and mount them into your wedding guest book, a normal shop bought guest book just set out or another lovely idea I have suggested this year for our brides is to go onto a site such as Blurb and create your own personalised guestbook.

This is a fabulous idea, and if you take a look at the Blurb site, for example, you can create and design you own book.

Upload photos of you and H2B, some fabulous photos of the country and venue you are marrying in, in our case Andalucia, perhaps photos of your guests as well could be fun and leave blank pages for them to leave their messages.

You can also add in questions for them to answer such as, where do you see us in 25 years time, any tips for a happy marriage, etc and see what messages and replies you get!

I love this idea as it is creating something truly unique for your wedding day and such fun to look at afterwards, you could even follow this book up with another one about your honeymoon and the first year of married life, a sequel!

This is also an easy option to get everything home and to be practical, as much as us creative divas love to think we will create a fabulous scrapbook after the wedding, there are many of us that will become bogged down with work and back to a 'normal' life and this will take a back seat and may never get done.

By creating this personalised book with photos and fun questions plus the guests comments it is already done and dusted will save more time and effort when the honeymoon period is over and normality returrns.

You will have a wonderfully personalised guest book on your coffee table without any effort on your part apart from having created it in your wedding excitement and another lovely part of building up to the day!

I have certainly got some of my brides thinking about this idea which is very simple and not expensive and yet fun to do so I hope I have given you some inspiration too for your wedding day by creating your own personalised guest book idea.