Sometimes planning our wedding can just seem overwhelming and it's at those times I step away from worrying about the big details, and spend a little time focusing on small things that will make our wedding all the more personal and that will make us happy even if no-one else realises how much thought has gone into them. After all what is a wedding if not about the couple getting married?

Unfortunately we are rather cash poor, but fortunately quite time rich, so I am spending my time handcrafting many items for our wedding. From creating all our venue decorations to making my bouquet featuring French Beaded roses - a new craft I learnt just for my wedding (picture attached). So when another attack of the "help will my wedding be as great as I hope" struck, instead or worrying about the venue/entertainment/food, I cleared my mind and turned to another decorative aspect that would allow me to unleash my creativity, de-stress and get something useful done.

I have a collection of jars that I really love and wanted to use them as the centre pieces on the tables at our venue. As nice as they are they need to be filled with something - after all that is their purpose in life! So I swapped my tiara for my thinking cap and set to work on some ideas for filling them.

The wind was blowing against the windows and the sun was fading. Cosy indoors I was thinking about the leaves falling from the trees and the abundance of "helicopters" that litter the ground beneath the Sycamore trees in the park. I had visions of jars full of acorns and conkers but our wedding is next spring, so autumnal themes aren't much help! Friends suggested all the best jars contain sweets, but as a diabetic buying lots of sweets could be one temptation to many for me when the wedding stress kicks in! So I went back to basics: What is a wedding if not about the couple getting married? Inspiration struck like a bolt of lighting, and I ran off to tell my fiance my idea... he thought it was great, and I hope you will like it too.

We won't be buying anything to go in the jars, or worrying about the contents matching our colour scheme. In each jar we are going to put one special object with a label explaining just why we chose it and how it is special to us. It will be rather an eclectic bunch of things but each one will bring a smile to our faces. Like the little brown teddy with one leg shorter than the other, which we found on a bus trip many years ago and adopted in pity. Or the dragon ornament in our collection, that has been broken and glued back together almost as many times as we have moved house together, but still has pride of place on the shelf. Small things with no intrinsic value, but with great stories and memories attached to them, that we will enjoy sharing with all our guests on our wedding day.