It’s an age-old adage that planning a wedding isn’t a sprint; it’s more of a marathon and we’ve been aware of that now for several months. As we turn the corner onto the home straight though, it does feel like there’s a bit of a sprint finish on it’s way as there’s still a lot to do and wedding planning is now a daley focus. All that considered, it’s a long jump from what we had achieved 6 months ago to where we are now.

It was lovely to have a brief rest from the athletics of wedding planning a couple of weeks ago to watch the dress rehearsal of the Olympics opening ceremony (thanks to Tim for getting us tickets) and lap up some of the atmosphere. They had a bit longer to plan the Olympics than we’ve had for the wedding, a slightly different budget, and a few more people involved…but let’s dive into some of the stuff that we’ve been thinking about recently for KISTfest.

As you’re probably aware, we’re going quite freestyle in terms of dress code, but we would like my shirt to match the bridesmaids’ dresses…so off we went in pursuit of a shirt. It’s actually harder than you might think to find a shirt to match a specific blue, but we found an eventual solution after a bit of a steeplechase in getting a white shirt colour-matched and professionally dyed for just £20.

We’ve already blogged about the bunting – this continues to be an addictive pastime for me; it’s not my vault – I just love it! Anyway, once it’s done we’ll probably have about 1000 flags all strung up – the next challenge will be to decide how to divide it up between the marquee, fencing and orchard.

One thing that you might not be aware of is the sponsorship deal we tried to secure with LEGO for KISTfest. We would brand our wedding with their logo in return for a bit of money towards the cost of it. To be fair, it was a bit of a long shot – put simply we had no response, so unfortunately can’t use their branding. We even offered them exclusive gold sponsorship of this momentous occasion…but it wasn’t enough.

There have been many other hurdles that we’ve passed in the planning and we’ve tried to relay information to our guests as we’ve gone along. It’s great that so many of you are choosing to camp – we’ll have a field for camping then next to it there’s a track and field for parking cars. Before the big day though, there’s plenty of stuff for us to do with both of us boxing stuff up to move house, so I’d better get cracking!

“Hidden” in this blog post are several references to the Olympics; some more obvious than others. Can you spot them all?