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Five Fun Favours For Your Wedding

August 18, 2021 by Erica Hughes Leave a Comment

Weddings are so fun to plan, but one thing that is more fun than most other things involved in the planning process is the wedding favours. Do you remember being a child and having a birthday party? You’d send your friends home with a party bag that’s full of fun things and chocolate and bubbles, etc. Well, wedding favours are the grown-up version of that!

Wedding favours can be pretty much anything, but they have to capture your wedding day. They’re the perfect way to send off your guests and whether you do it with little bags of sugared almonds, or you send guests home with personalised alcohol gifts and a wedding cupcake, they will always remember your wedding day based on the favours you choose. You can choose practical gifts or fun ones, but just make sure that you have enough for each guest plus extras, plus something different for the children in the wedding guest list. Some of the best gifts that you’ll ever choose are listed for you below.

Photo by Ibrahim Boran from Pexels

Bottle openers. If you’re going to send away your guests with mini personalised alcohol gifts, you’ll need to ensure that they can open them up, right? Well, a pocket-sized favour like this one can be engraved with your date of your wedding, your new surname and you can make them about you. If you are both into fitness, perhaps your bottle opener is shaped like a dumbbell. If you both love holidays, then a suitcase shape would be perfect.
Wedding cakes. We all know that tiered wedding cakes are an inconvenience – although they are beautiful. Cutting them up and wrapping slices of cake into napkins? Not the best idea when you’ve got people partying the night away. One of the most popular wedding favours come in the form of cupcakes, or perfectly individual cubed wedding cakes shaped like gifts. You can buy some chic boxes and ribbons and have fun individually packing them up for your guests.
Swag bags. This one is really budget dependent, but if you have the money to send away designer bags with swag and vouchers inside, that’s a luxury wedding favour to offer your guests. You can do this one on a budget and use mini rucksacks to carry the swag.
Pick n Mix! Go a little old school with this one and set up a pick n mix station. You can tailor your sweet choices to match your wedding colours, and you can leave a bag and a scoop at every single chair so that everyone can go and help themselves, filling their bag! This is a delicious way to send your guests away, and everyone will remember it!

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of options when it comes to wedding favours and there’s no wrong options for your wedding day. Whatever suits you is what will work the most and you should let everyone know your choices – just in case of any allergies hanging around!

Getting To Know Birmingham #Ad

August 16, 2021 by Erica Hughes 2 Comments

Over the last year I’ve spent a much greater proportion of my time either at home or fairly close to home. During the lockdowns I’ve been out on walks to explore the area. I’ve discovered and explored some places close to me that I didn’t know that much about. Given that holidays abroad are hard to come by and even holidaying closer to home is proving difficult due to high demand, it makes sense to make the most of what’s on your doorstep. So getting to know Birmingham better seems to be a good idea.

Birmingham Museums has just launched an exciting new book –Things to Do & Places to See in Birmingham & the West Midlands. It follows the success of their best-selling book, Walk Birmingham, and is now on sale via the museum’s online shop. It’s a handy guide to discovering – or even re-discovering – the region. It features some 400 odd hidden gems from Birmingham and beyond including historic houses, nature reserves, parks and more.

Now I was born in Birmingham and I’ve lived in the area all my life. So I think I’m quite knowledgeable about places to see and visit. I had visited a lot of places in the Birmingham part of the guide, but there were plenty more that I hadn’t and some that I hadn’t even been aware of their existence. It’s not just Birmingham that’s covered in the guide: there’s Dudley, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Walsall, Coventry and Solihull. I’d been to quite a few places in Sandwell and Dudley in particular, but again there were quite a few places I wasn’t aware of. In the other areas there were even more places I had yet to explore.

Format wise, the book is divided geographically by the various council areas and then within that there’s an alphabetical listing. Within each council area there are listings for museums, historical properties and art galleries: visitor attractions; entertainment and performing arts venues; parks, gardens and nature reserves; and libraries. Each entry gives an overview, provides contact details and there symbols to indicate the facilities available. There are lots of lovely pictures of the various places featured. The book is A5 sized, so it’s convenient to take out with you if you want.

Walk Birmingham is a handy book that will easily fit in your pocket when you are out on a walk. It details 20 walks in Birmingham, often picking out historical details or areas of interest. The only walks that I’ve completely walked the routes of were the Medieval Birmingham and Harborne walks. I’m familiar with bits of other walks too. Exploring Birmingham is a lot easier when you are on foot and have time to have a good look around.

Each walk features a map, photos and a written description. There’s also a information panel giving key details like post code, length, duration, bus routes, parking and facilities. I’m already plotting my next walk to explore a new area or see bits of the city I’ve not seen before.

Disclosure: I was sent these books for the purposes of this review.

5 Ways To Refresh Your Blog’s Branding

June 8, 2021 by Erica Hughes Leave a Comment

Regular readers will know that from time to time I like to give my blogs a bit of a transformation. Even small changes can make a big difference. If those changes are enough to increase traffic and to encourage readers to stay on the blog longer, it’s a win as far as I am concerned.

So here are the 5 changes that I’d suggest considering for your blog, which will refresh the branding of your blog.

5 ways to refresh the branding on your blog

Photo by Brooke Cagle on unsplash

Design an attractive header

Having a header image is a good way to start. This could be your logo, or something that illustrates what your blog is about.On my family lifestyle blog I started out with a fairly generic image that I got off a free images site. Then I changed my image to a hand drawn one that I commissioned from a fellow blogger. That picture depicted me and my son walking to school and I felt it needed updating again when he got a bit older. I have had three header images for that blog in ten years. I will probably look to change it again in a year or two.

Change your theme and your fonts

This is a really important part of my blog’s look. Many web hosting sites have a wide range of free themes available at the click of a button, and the majority of them are absolutely fine, but, the trouble with free themes is the fact that there will be a lot of other blogs also using that theme, this makes it more difficult for you to make your brand stand out from the crowd. If you have the budget to do so, I suggest looking around for a paid theme . The best ones will look great and will give you opportunities to easily customise your look. As there will be fewer sites with the same theme, you are more likely to stand out.

Adding a carefully chosen font can give your site a real individual look. Check out a handwritten script font website to make your words make more of an impact.

Add your most popular posts to a carousel

My theme has a carousel feature and recent posts are featured in carousel at the top of the page. Your readers will have the chance to explore more of your content after they have finished reading the article they came to your site for. The carousel is a prominent feature that viewers see when they land on my blog, and I hope that the content that will interest them.

Create categories to aid content navigation

To allow your readers to navigate your blog easily, divide your content into categories. You can assign each blog post a category before it goes live. The categories will most likely also form your menu too! For example, I have categories for Reviews, Food etc, and it means that anyone wanting to read about those topics can very easily navigate to the right section.

Use strong imagery

Finally imagery is key as it creates interest. Images keep a viewer locked into a blog post, they inspire, they help you connect with your reader. Make sure that each and every one of your blog posts uses imagery.

So those are 5 ways you can refresh and update your blog’s branding.