Our Secret Paradise on Palawan

I finally got my film photos developed from our trip to Palawan! I love how they turned out. I even got an accidental-but-really-cool-looking double exposure:

We stayed at Secret Paradise resort, which was like enjoying all of the good things about camping and none of the bad (well, some of the bad - we were attacked by mosquitos a lot). Can you see the 'resort' below? look closely, where the beach meets the jungle, towards the left of the picture... see the little huts? that's Secret Paradise! You can also kind of see in the water that there's a reef under there... the cove has two reefs that you can literally walk out to for snorkelling. It's full of beautiful fish, including lots of cute clown fish families and there are often turtles hanging around! I only saw a turtle from the shore, but my friend ran into one when she was snorkelling.

They have these cute little outrigger canoes for guests to borrow and paddle around the cove - there are other little beaches to visit, all owned and protected by the resort.

This is our little hut - note the small lake behind it! We arrived in a typhoon and the area behind our hut flooded. This is probably why the mosquitos were so bad, they're probably better in the dry season.

We took an island hopping trip one day on this beautiful boat. It was by far the best day of our stay and the best thing about Secret Paradise. All beach resorts offer island hopping trips, but most of them involve stopping at the same islands as all the other tour companies, rigid schedules, and mass-produced lunches. Small resorts often hook you up with other resorts so you form a bigger group. This trip was just Jess, Caitlin and I, the two guides, and we hardly saw another person all day. We saw a group of around 8 tourists when we stopped for lunch, which just made us appreciate our tour even more - our lunch was cooked freshly for us by the guides (it was delicious!) and they'd brought lots of cold beer for us, which the other group was a bit jealous of!

The day involved a short walk to a secret waterfall. We passed through a beautiful little village along the way.

At the bottom of the waterfall (below) was a perfect little pool to swim in. It was cool, clean and we had it all to ourselves. The guides let us stay as long as we liked and we enjoyed every minute of it. It was beautiful.

At the end of the week, Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan hit and our blissful getaway came to an end. I wrote more about the typhoon situation here.

After spending two days shut inside a Puerto Princesa hotel, I've never been so happy to get back to Manila!

I had more posts planned for this month, but I'm using James' laptop and it doesn't seem to like me so I'm not sure when I'll post again - I might have to give blogging from the iPad a try. We're flying home to Australia tonight and staying for the next few weeks. I am SO excited. If I don't get time to post again before Christmas, have a lovely Christmas or just a great Wednesday, if you don't celebrate Christmas. OK, I'm off to pack!

Film photos around Makati

If you're reading this, I'm at the beach. Yay! I don't like taking anything fancy or expensive to the beach so I decided to take my little film camera. I haven't used it for a long time so I got some film to do a test roll to check that it still works and I still remember how to use it. I took most of these around our building and our neighbourhood because I was keen to use up the film fast. I'm hoping we get clearer, sunnier days in Palawan because this camera LOVES bright blue skies (see this post). Unfortunately there weren't many blue sky days in the week that I was taking these photos, but that just makes them all moody and artsy, right? Yeah. Artsy.

New things

I've been really busy with custom jobs lately, and I'm absolutely loving it. I used to get really stressed about custom work being too time consuming and not leaving me any time to work on my collections. The solution should have been obvious, but it's taken me awhile to come around to it - why worry myself with producing seasonal collections when my income comes from a steady stream of custom work? Especially as I've been getting more and more bridal jobs, which I love doing.

So, things are going to change around here! I won't be designing regular collections anymore or producing ready-to-wear clothing. I'm dedicating myself completely to custom work - specifically to bridal. I love weddings and have a million ideas flying around my head for gorgeous vintage-style cocktail, bridesmaid and wedding dresses!

When I went shopping for my own dress (ok, we just went to play in the bridal shops - I was always going to make my own dress), there were really hardly any options with sleeves, nothing remotely 60s style, and when I mentioned the idea of a short dress I either got a condescending laugh or was shown mid-calf 'ballerina length' - cute, but mid calf is still long in my book! I want to fill that gap and make the dresses you can't find in the bridal stores. If you're dreaming about the perfect dress and it doesn't seem to exist in real life, I'll make it for you.

As you can see from these pictures, I don't just do bridal. I love variety and I'll make anything. But bridal is definitely the direction I'd like to move in and so that's what the website will be focused on. I'll still blog about cool sixties stuff and travel - because without those things I'd be posting even less than I do now - but the main website home page will be that of a bridal designer. Just wanted to explain everything so you don't turn up in a month's time and think you've ended up on the wrong page!

I'm SO excited about taking the business in a different direction and working towards a big goal. That black and pink notebook (above right) is my 'Bell Street Bridal' book and it is filling up fast with ideas, plans, sketches and scribbles. I'm having fun.

Thailand & Hong Kong Disneyland

For our honeymoon, we just wanted to go somewhere nice and relaxing on the way home to the Philippines. We decided to go back to Koh Kho Khao, a resort in Thailand we'd stayed at a few years ago. We had a great time then and were really excited to go back. I'd been thinking about the food at their restaurant ever since! We also thought we should have a couple of nights at a nice hotel in Sydney before we left, and James suggested stopping at Hong Kong on the way back from Thailand. Of course, I turned that into a Disneyland trip. It was awesome.
I hardly took any photos of our trip because we kind of had photo fatigue after the wedding, and all the destinations were kind of familiar to us anyway. Also, who wants to worry about their camera while at the beach or on rides at Disneyland?
So, here's a very brief photo recap of our trip.


The view from Koh Kho Khao's beach restaurant.


We were upgraded to a little bungalow right next to the pool! We were actually upgraded at every hotel during the trip. Yay honeymoon!

 
We did an island hopping day trip to the Similan Islands. We even went snorkelling, despite my fear of scary things in the ocean. We didn't come across any scary sea monsters, only lots and lots of colourful fish, so I'm glad I did it. It was fun! I guess it's only in Australia that everything in the ocean can possibly kill you.


I think this was the island we stopped at for lunch.

In Hong Kong we stayed at Disneyland Hotel, which was perfectly lovely and fancy and magical, just what you want on a honeymoon! Here it is looking all foggy and mysterious in the morning.

We found a lovely card in our (upgraded) room, and Mr & Mrs Potato Head badges!

... which I insisted on wearing, of course! We got special treatment all day.

Minnie Mouse was particularly excited for us and gave me a big hug!

 
A concierge at the hotel helped us with directions in the morning, and noticed our honeymoon badges so he made us Mickey Mouse wedding rings out of pipe cleaners and proudly presented them to us the next day! It was so sweet.

We actually ended up having dinner that night with all the characters, completely by accident! I thought they only appeared at this restaurant at breakfast, so we figured we'd go there for dinner. We walk in and there's Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Donald... the whole gang! We'd left our camera and both our phones in our room so just ended up having funny non-verbal conversations with them all and kept eating our dinner!

We intended on spending the next day wandering around Hong Kong, but ended up spending half the day dealing with not-fun visa stuff. That was boring and doesn't even make a good story, but we will definitely return to Hong Kong again soon with more time to see everything!

Our next trip will be our first Philippine holiday, a trip to Boracay in a few weeks to celebrate James' birthday. I can't wait!

The Great Big Wedding Post

Our wedding was held three weeks ago at Victoria Park, Sydney. It's a beautiful big park just up the road from where we lived when we first met six years ago. We got engaged two months before moving to the Philippines, so I planned most of the wedding in that time. It was fun to plan and ended up being a fun, happy and relaxing day. All of the beautiful photos were taken by my brother, Mark. He's actually a pilot but he somehow finds time to also be a really great photographer. You can check out his flickr photos here.



I designed and printed our own invitations to look like old library books.



This is my bridesmaid, Jess, and I hanging out in a park (not the 'wedding park') before the wedding. I normally like being ready early and arrive places exactly on time, so this whole 'the bride is always late' thing was pretty frustrating to me. Of course she turns up last - she has to wait until everyone else is at the ceremony site and ready to go!



This little dog came to say hello while we were waiting. Note the pretty bouquets - Jess and I made our own. I love how they turned out! This is also a good point to mention my shoes. They were made by Golden Ponies, who I have raved about on here before - it is my absolute favourite brand of shoes to buy from. Thank you, Erandi, for making such cute, comfortable and affordable wedding shoes! Everyone was complimenting them.



...and we're off! Here's my dad and I walking down the aisle - well, across the park anyway.



Our gorgeous wedding spot. We 'planted' hundreds of fake flowers in the ground to create an 'aisle' and it looked amazing! The flowers, chairs and lots of other decorations all came from IKEA - I used to work there before I moved here.



We ended up with a perfect day, weather-wise, but there was just a bit of wind!



Discussing how to go about cutting the cake - this was deemed necessary after my brother's wedding last year. He and his wife tried to cut into the cake and discovered that the icing was very thick and completely solid, resulting in hilarious photos of him hacking into his wedding cake with a very determined look on his face!



A close up of our lovely book cake made by Glamour Cakes. It was so exciting when the cake arrived, the house just filled with the smell of sugar! It tasted amazing too. The chess piece cake toppers were partly inspired by our tradition of playing chess on holidays, and partly by me thinking 'hmmm, maybe we should have cake toppers... these will do!'
We had the cake and a champagne toast in the park after the wedding ceremony, like a nice afternoon picnic!



After mingling with our guests for awhile, we headed off to take photos around the park.



As I've mentioned before, I made my own dress. I'm so happy with how it turned out! My mum made my veil.





Jess and I were determined to play on the swing set in our pretty dresses. I love this photo with the boys holding our bouquets!



Walking down Glepe Point Rd to our reception at Sappho, a beautiful little second hand bookshop with a cafe & bar out the back. They serve tapas for dinner at night, and they created a delicious tapas menu for our reception that kept everyone very happy all night. I'm still thinking about all that good food!











Our 'guest book' was a library catalogue drawer with dividers that said things like 'Advice for a happy marriage', 'Good jokes', 'Things James should know about Ali'/'Things Ali should know about James' etc. People got really enthusiastic about filling out little index cards and filing them into categories, and they were hilarious to read the next day!



We did our dance to 'You Never Can Tell' by Chuck Berry, inspired of course by the twist scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction. This photo captures all the things I love about Sappho - books, plants, coloured lights, and crazy graffiti all over the walls.



Like any good party, everyone went home with a lolly bag. I may have taken two...