*PR sample

Hello lovelies,

I've got another special watch post for you accompanied by a nice nail polish and outdoor shots! I've been offered to test out and show you new wooden & steel watch by Nature's Time. It is a new watch company with great mission. Every watch purchase helps 6 bullying victims. They've partnered with Free2Luv as they fight bullying through community outreach, awareness campaigns, and events.

About:

Nature's Time was created in the heart of San Francisco by founder and active Registered Nurse, Christian Panaligan. Christian was motivated to influence a change after hearing about heartbreaking shootings and suicides linked to bullying. The advent of cyberbullying has made the problem even worse.  As a bullying victim himself, Christian's escape was nature where he found strength and beauty there. He's integrated the idea of nature into his vision: to create a beautiful fashion accessory, using natural materials, with the goal to spread compassion and awareness to victims of bullying. 

"Through nature, each and every one of us is connected and it's our time to start making real impact for each other. We don't know what tomorrow will bring, so why not make the best of today for the good of society?" - Christian

Let's have a look at the watch:

Every Nature's Time watch is made out of wood and steel. I've picked bamboo on silver, a beautiful combination of a warm golden shade of bamboo and silver steel. These colours makes it easy to combine with both silver and gold accessories!

The watch came in a branded black box and it is beautifully made. There are no rough edges or splinters coming out of it. I found it easy to resize as well because the links use pins instead of screws. I'm also very glad that the watch has a date window on it because that's something I really appreciate in day-to-day life.

Now it's where it gets a bit complicated. Nature's Time is launching a campaign on Indiegogo.com today, May 11th 2015 and it is starting with releasing the men's watch first (prices start at $89 for the first 50 contributors during our Indiegogo campaign - retail value $179). once they get the funding they need they will release the watch for women. I'm not entirely sure why to make it so complicated but they must have their reasons.

My watch is a first design - a prototype and there is only 50 made in total. After these 50 pieces are gone only the final design with a different clock face will be available. I've seen both designs and I personally prefer this prototype design, the final design is more modern-looking which might appeal to you. Here are pictures of the men's and women's final watch design for you to look at:

It's definitely a great project to support with a strong anti-bullying message and I just wish the purchase would be a little bit more straight forward. Check out their Indiegogo.com campaign and get a watch for yourself or your partner while they are heavily discounted!

I personally love the trend of wooden elements in watches and even though I already own few I was so happy I could try the Nature's Time watch as well and share it with you.

For those of you wondering about that minty green nail polish I'm wearing - it's KIKO Perfect Gel Duo in 677 Milk Mint ;)

Have a lovely day! Lucie x

*PR sample

Hello lovelies,

I'm back with the second instalment of My Wedding Diary and this time I'll be talking about wedding invitations. Before I settled on my current invitations, I have browsed every possible UK website there is and some US ones too and have seen hundreds, maybe thousands of wedding invitations designs. I've seen many that I liked, few that I loved. Unfortunately I didn't fall in love with the price. We are doing our wedding on quite a small budget so I had to be very mindful of how much I spend on invitations. Because of our tight budget, I started to look further away from the UK, on some Asian websites. I remembered that I worked with Light In The Box in the past, reviewing some nail art products and that they offer wedding products as well. I shouldn't have looked...But I'm glad I did! They have some amazing stuff for weddings including beautiful invitations. That was exactly what I was looking for.

I'm going to be completely honest with you as always - I reached out to the Light In The Box representative I had contact on and offered to review some of their products in my wedding series if they send them to me as compensation. Cheeky? Yes! But I have dreamt up my wedding and I don't have money to pay for all of it so if I can get anything in exchange for review, great! Besides, I think this might help some future brides to discover their website where they can get MANY wedding items for fraction of the price they are sold for in the UK or US. Yes, some can be 'you get what you pay for' but with many I've been very pleasantly surprised how nice they are.

So let's get back to the invitations. Once I've had an approval, I checked out ALL of the wedding invitation at Light In The Box website...and there's a lot of them, over 300! I absolutely love the laser cut out type which can be more expensive to buy here in the UK. Here are some invitations that I loved and from which I have chosen the final one:

They all look beautiful, don't they? And compared to the prices of the similar invitations in the UK they can be a bargain! It was really hard to choose which one of these top six will be our final wedding invitation design but in the end I followed my gut and chose the one that I fell in love at first sight. Which one is it? This one...

They offer to print out the insert card as part of the deal but because they don't offer Czech language, I've decided to get just blank invitations and print them myself. That was the first plan anyway. My printer wasn't doing a great job at test prints so I ended up going to my local printers and have the insert cards printed for under £9. Not too bad. Then I managed to print the names and addresses on the envelopes myself.

I was very surprised how nicely the invitations were done, just like in the promotional pictures. That made me really happy and took a lot of stress off of my chest. The invitations are made of pearlescent cream paper and the floral cut out parts open up to reveal the printed insert card inside. Love it! To me, this invitation is not just a piece of paper to chuck out after a while but it's a nice keep sake where you can just replace the insert card and you have whole new use for it. I was also surprised that the envelopes have nice pearlescent inside, it's a lovely touch. The ONLY thing that was not a nice surprise was the smell of the invitations. They smelled like a paint thinner BUT after leaving them out overnight to air out (individually, not in a pile) the smell disappeared. I was so glad!

Overall, I'm very happy with the invitations and big thank you to people from Light In The Box for sending them to me and helping me with my dream wedding! These particular wedding invitations are available here.

So? What do you think of my choice? I hope you like them as much as I do and stay tuned for the next instalment of My Wedding Diary!

If you've missed the part 1 of My Wedding Diary, read it HERE.

Have a lovely day. Lucie x

*Invitations were provided in exchange for review