Creative Brides Vintage Village at the Bluewater Wedding Fair 2014

On Thursday 6th February, Frida picked me up from my sleepy state at 4.30 a.m. to travel to New Covent Garden Flower Market to carefully select some beautiful blooms for our stand at the Creative Brides Vintage Village at the Bluewater Wedding Fair.

It's cold, raining and very dark, but as soon as I get in that car, Radio 1 is pumping out some tunes and already we're giggling and chatting away about our antics over the past few days.

We arrive at the market just after 5 a.m. and as is always the tradition - head straight to the cafe in the centre.  Two Americano's one with milk, one without.  It's buzzing in there already and the lovely man at the counter is always cheerful and chatty.  Frida manages to point out some mascara that I've skilfully painted onto my top eyelid in the dark this morning - that's what she's there for!  I manage to tell her how cute she looks in her red Converse and leopard print hat!  She laughs....as usual!

We always like to do a tour of the place first, check out who's got what!  We have our favourites of course, which it would be unfair to disclose - but it's still good to get a butchers at what is out there.
We start to gather some large blooms in a variety of pastel colours - continually running through in our heads the items that we know we need to produce.  Then comes the foliage - lovely Porters has a fantastic range and always served with a smile.  We gather some delightful greens - always soft and with texture and movement.  We don't do stiff foliage!  We did find some beautiful Magnolia which gives amazing lines and once in bloom is really beautiful.

We did about three trips to the car and finally decide that we think we have everything we need.  By now, it's light, we're hungry and now start to feel tired!

Here's a little video of the blooms and Frida's cute hat!

I feel my video-ing skills need a little practise - but hey!

So, we travelled back to Tenterden and worked on our designs all day - three staple items, coffee, Radio 1 and Diet Coke!

Friday 7th Febuary - we're up early, load the car and off we head to Bluewater to set up ready for the 5p.m. start to the three day fair.  All goes smoothly and to plan despite the sixteen trips backwards and forwards to unload the car - our biceps pumping!

What did we produce?  Here are a selection of photos taken by the lovely Rebecca Douglas of our Vintage Village stand.  Hope you like them!

Meet Geraldine.......our spray painted polystyrene model

A big thank you to Clair at Creative Brides for hosting a fantastic three days.  We met some lovely couples and some very talented suppliers.  We rounded off the successful weekend with a fantastic glass of red wine and a yummy burger at GBK!  Finished off the event nicely ;)

Our first blog post!

Wow!  Frida and I had always talked about having a blog and here we are, our first post!  

If I'm honest with you, I'd hoped to have read up a little on writing a blog but it hasn't happened to any great degree.  I had a brief look online at a blogger blogging about bloggers that blog, but other than the importance of content I decided the best thing was to just crack on.

Frida and I have been working together for three years running a small but busy freelance florist company.  We had managed, at the time of starting up our business, with a great deal of difficulty, to put together our own website with a large DIY website provider.  It wasn't easy and we passed the job between us like it was a hot potato!  It did its job at the time but as the business grew, our own homemade website really wasn't hitting the spot, so we decided this year to take the plunge and invest in a professional website - hooray!

So......drum roll please........the new website www.fridaandsophia.co.uk is now up and running.  It's been six months in the making, as it took us that long to find a web designer, come up with an idea of what we were trying to achieve, get together with the lovely Rebecca Douglas for a photoshoot, choose our content and then tweak, tweak and tweak!

Our favourite part of putting together the content for the website was most definitely a warm, sunny day in Tenterden at our workshop, conveniently situated in my parents' garden!  Rebecca arrived late afternoon which meant we had the lovely warm light of the slow sinking sun and with her wonderful calming aura made us both feel at ease, even whilst we were having our mug shots taken!  For those of you who do not know us personally and just to set the record straight, I'm the blonde and Frida is the brunette.

We thought we'd share with you some of behind the scene shots that Rebecca took.  

It doesn't take a lot for us to get the giggles

This was one of the last ones Rebecca took,
so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open!

As I'm typing this I'm beginning to wish I'd read the blogger blogging about bloggers that blog so I knew how to finish a post!  But I didn't....so please take a look at our new website and feel free to comment we hope you enjoyed our first blog post, we're looking forward to many more.  F&S