The Quadrante by Douwe Egberts - for coffee lovers!

The Quadrante by Douwe Egberts

Now I really like coffee.
I need one every morning to give me the strength to leave the house and battle my way through the commuters in the London Underground.
So, when I was sent The Quadrante - by Douwe Egberts who make the Senseo coffee pod machines in association with Philips - I was delighted.
With its sleek lines and edgy curves, the machine not only looks great in my kitchen but actually makes two coffee specialities in less than a minute.
All you have to do is fill the large eight-cup water tank and then simply pop a Douwe Egberts coffee pod into the tray. Within a minute you will have a quality cup of coffee ready to drink at a good temperature.
There is a wide variety of pods available from the Douwe Egberts Senseo Coffee Pod range.
These include, Moments Morning Americano, Classic Roast, Medium Roast, Dark Roast, Decaffeinated and Brazil.
There are also tea pods and various types of hot chocolate etc available (next on my list to try).
You can buy the pods from Amazon.co.uk
The Quadrante is an ideal gift for busy coffee-loving people.
It is available to buy from Philips.co.uk at a very reasonable price of £99.

The nightmare wedding invite challenge

Now, I never knew making a wedding invite would be so time consuming and so stressful.
After months of researching invites on the internet and being sent dozens of invites from specialist wedding companies, Andy and I decided to go it alone and make our own.
Our reasoning for this was...
a) To save money
b) To make our wedding more personal to us
c) I wasn't 100% happy with ANY of the invites I had researched, most seemed to be plain and dull

So, after much consideration we decided to make scroll invites.
Easy, right?
Er no, it wasn't!
Having an image in my head of what I wanted the invites to look like was a lot easier that actually trying to turn that image into reality.

After buying the scroll postal tubes from a company in Essex we came across our first battle.
We couldn't find the exact paper I wanted to use!
Now most people would think this would've have been easy but by god it wasn't (well to me anyway). We bought loads of different textured paper and I wasn't 100% sure about any of them.
Finally after a good one (or four) months we (Andy) found the paper I was after.

Then came the difficult decision on deciding how the invites would look.
We bought some gold ink for the printer and sat down one evening at the computer and got to work on the design of the invites.

That process can only be described as being a nightmare!

Andy hard at work

The font, the size of the font and the actual information we wanted on the invite was so difficult to decide. We experimented with what seemed like hundreds of different looks (and had quite a few arguments!) until finally I was happy with a design. 

We then had to print each invite out, cut each one into shape and glue ribbon onto them. Again, a nightmare.
Finally we wrapped each invite up, tied ribbon around them and added a few gold heart confetti pieces to each tube.
Then, the real nightmare came.
I decided I DID indeed love one of the sample invites we had made about 10 hours previously on a DIFFERENT textured paper!!

The final design

But by this time it was too late to go and change all the invites and I had to bite the bullet and go with what we had made.


That decision was the best one ever.
I now actually love our invites.
Even though they took so long to make, were more expensive than if we would have bought them, and nearly caused me and Andy to call off the wedding (well that's obviously a joke but at least that gives you some idea of how stressful it all was!!), we have truly unique invites and I wouldn't change them for the world.

So the moral of the story is, go with your heart and not your head and don't bother being practical and making sacrifices. If you have something in your head persist and you will get it.

Goodbye for now! xxx

A pleased and relieved Naiomi

P.S: 11 WEEKS UNTIL THE BIG DAY!!!!!