Smashing the Glass | Jewish Wedding Blog
Inspired Jewish Weddings
Wedding favours grant you the perfect opportunity to bring out your personality, and they give your wedding guests a lovely reminder of the big day that they can take home with them once the festivities are over. Be as creative and as inventive as you like, or keep it simple and fun! Here are my top ten favourite favour ideas!
FAVOUR IDEA #10
Cheeky and fun – give each of your guests a lottery ticket and one of them could be quite the winner on your big day!
Today’s post is written by the super talented contemporary wedding photographer, Emmie Scott. Emmie lets us in on 5 tips from the top on what to look out for when choosing your wedding photographer.
It is not uncommon at a wedding to have a guest walk up to me and ask me “can you Photoshop my wedding images? My photographer got drunk at my wedding and all my pictures are blurry”. Or something to that affect.
As a wedding photographer who takes their profession very seriously, there is nothing more frustrating and upsetting.
There is a lot of advice out there for engaged couples on how to choose a wedding photographer but I feel that much of it is misguided.
Don’t take the following advice for granted. Your photographs will continue to live on once the memories have long since faded. All the guests have left, the marque has been brought down, the food has been eaten, paper details have been thrown in the bin: your photography will last and continue to bring you joy forever more.
I am going to let you in on not only how to choose your wedding photographer but how to choose the right one for you and what to expect so that you can avoid any rogue traders.
When the mega-talented Jewish wedding photographer in London Rahul Khona got in touch with me to shoot up a photography storm, I was really into the idea of capturing some images of my work / home space, as well as a few portraits.
I adore blogging and running a business from my home in Kentish Town, but inevitably, the boundaries between work, motherhood, marriage and ‘me’ time are a continuous blur. It’s something I’m used to though, as prior to setting up Smashing The Glass, I was running a freelance design business for 12 years, and working from home for about 50% of my projects.
My work space reflects my design background – there are Apple products everywhere, Pop Art influences, art books, sketch pads, pens and pencils, and a sense of clean aesthetics (that makes me sound really w*nky, doesn’t it?!).
Yes that’s me up there, holding up a Wedding Blog Award, montaged over Halle Berry winning an Oscar. I was going to montage myself over Gwynnie with her Oscar and make a joke about teary speeches, but her flat chest and pale skin were never going to match my features, so Halle will do nicely. I’ve always wanted a Bond girl’s body so that’s one wish already come true!
But I digress… the wish I’m really after is to win the Best Newcomer category in Wedding magazine’s highly regarded Wedding Blog Awards. I’ve been working hard on Smashing The Glass for exactly a year now and I started it just after my wedding when I realised that there wasn’t any one place that brought together creative ideas for out-of-the-ordinary Jewish (and Jew-ish!) W-days. It became — and still is — the UK’s only Jewish wedding blog, and the only blog worldwide focussing on original and unusual Jewish ‘I-Do’s’.
I’m super proud of the blog, and the reaction and overwhelming support I’ve received in this first year, and I’m so addicted to working on it that I wasn’t even able to keep away in the early days after I’d given birth to my baby daughter, Sacha late last year. Everyone would tell me “rest when the baby rests” but as I snuck into the bedroom, the laptop would come out from under the bed… I just couldn’t keep away from my other baby — my e-baby!
Now my darling daughter is 7 months old and I am able to spend much more time on the blog. So much so, that in a couple of weeks time I am relaunching the site with a rebrand and lots of new features including a greatly enhanced Smashing Suppliers section. I can’t wait!
But the heart and soul of SmashingTheGlass.com are the Real Jewish Weddings. It’s hard to pick a favourite but I have a very soft spot for this outrageously cool London Jewish wedding, this gorgeously-designed music themed wedding, this Wedstock-themed wedding featuring a bride who made her entire dress out of paper; this breathtaking ‘HinJew’ wedding at the Mandarin Oriental where the bride and groom intertwined their Indian and Jewish heritages incredibly beautifully; the New Years Eve fancy dress wedding held in an Arthouse cinema; the ’surprise’ brunch wedding for just 20 guests with the ceremony held on a street corner… I could go on and on! The common thread throughout these, and all STG weddings, is that they are as unique as the couples that planned them.
I also regularly post wedding planning articles and have blogged about everything from what are the best chuppah entrance songs, to tips for getting great wedding photography to how to incorporate ‘Jewish’ into a non-Jewish or interfaith wedding, and of course lots more. I love helping my readers plan their weddings whether it be through the real weddings, inspiration and ideas that I publish or the advice that I write, and if you enjoy reading STG I would be so honoured and thrilled to have your nomination. VOTE HERE or click on the logo button below. (The ‘Best Wedding Blog Newcomer’ category is second from the bottom.)
Thank you. I’d be so very delighted to genuinely hold that award up high after Thursday 26th June when nominations close!
