My cousin is getting married. It’s very exciting, obviously. The way she asked us to be bridesmaids was the best and most amazing, I may add a picture… I think I will. Although, she isn’t actually getting married until next June so we do have a while to wait, but it is still very exciting. So, on March 12th, we went to a wedding fair in Manchester. It was absolutely massive. I had been to the Cake and Bake Show/ Ideal Home Show in the same place in November or December, I can’t remember. Anyway, this wedding fair. She (the infamous cousin who I promise is getting married, I’m not crazy, I don’t often frequent wedding fairs) had gone to another one, a smaller one, in January and she had told us about all the cake she had tried and the different cocktails vendors were practically forcing down your throat. We had been expecting there would be the same thing here, and there would have been SO MUCH MORE because of the sheer size of Event City. So, excitement abound and all that on the way to it – singing in the car, talking about the wedding fair… How does one get excited for something like this? I don’t know, but we were.
Our little group consisted of only girls – none of the boys wanted to come, shocker I know. So there was me, two of my fellow bridesmaids, the bride (obviously), her mother, my mother, and my auntie. We had an awesome day planned: we were going to gorge on free samples of cake and drink a fair amount – and by fair amount I mean a lot.
We were given goodie bags as soon as walked through the door. Unfortunately the goodie bags had just one magazine – literally one magazine. A band that you could hire were singing their hearts out in the corner, so much so you coulld hear them all around the place. Absolutely amazing acoustics in that building. We got our picture taken in a vintage-y photo booth place, we sat in some amazing wedding cars and the guy gave us haribos. After that everything pretty much blurred together. There were about two places that offered samples of cake; all the cakes they had brought looked like icing covering polystyrene, and barely any of the drink places offered samples either. We had about two free samples of some form of champagne. But it was lovely, it really was, more because we had a nice day than there being lots of things for us to do. There were loads of places to buy dresses though, and the catwalk show. That was brilliant.
The catwalk show was one of the first things we saw. We sat down about 12:20 and a woman wandered onto the runway to talk about finding a venue and costs and blegh. Since my cousin already has a venue, we kind of blocked her out, chatted, and looked through the magazine we’d been given. At 12:30 it started. There is always a problem, I think, in men’s fashion shows because to be brutally honest, all of the suits looked the same. One of themhad a cool peacock feather patterened lining which was cool – without that I wouldn’t have said they even changed their suits! I’m sure they did, but there is so little difference in them I barely noticed. The dresses though. They were absolutely amazing. Some of them were so stunning; there was one that was literally a leotard and a see-through skirt – one of my fellow bridesmaids desperately wanted that dress and practically screamed it at all of us. One of the models we nicknamed the “sassy bride” because she was just the sassiest. There was no way she wasn’t a dance; she was spinning round in massive shoes and just being super sassy. Some of the dresses were nice, some weren’t but I suppose that that is my opinion, someone must like them.
After a prosecco lunch, we wandered around the stalls a bit more. After accruing more leaflets than I have ever been given before in my life, my cousin and her mum left us to go try on a dress. We had found one after the runway show that was exactly what she wanted. Because she’s getting married outside, she wanted a tea length dress, one that couldn’t get mangled up in whatever could be on the floor in the forest. According to her though, it was wrong. It didn’t look right, she wasn’t comfortable, she didn’t like it; I don’t know, this is all second hand. The consultant lady – is this what they’re called? I’m going to call her a consultant – brought her a different dress after she had tried on the first. It was tall and form fitting as far as the description went. When they found us again and we were talking about it, her exact words were “I looked gorgeous” so now this idea that she had in her head has completely gone.
So while we didn’t get as many freebies as I thought, or cake and alcohol, it was really a lovely day. It was nice to meet one of the bridesmaids I didn’t know and it was just a lovely day out, spent doing girly things. One place did try and get us to try on the most hideous coloured wedding dress I have ever seen though, and someone tried to get me to spend £100 on a hair straightner… Even though I am only 20, everyone was asking when I was getting married and I was handed so many magazines. It was a lovely day that I got to spend with my family doing something we would never normally do.
The car ride home though was more exciting: a tale of a hire car, an amatuer acapella group, and a broken clutch. 
This was how she asked us to be bridesmaids. The little note was in the bottle – a message in a bottle!!! She’s so damn creative.
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