Parasols and fans - in case it's hot hot hot.....

Wedding's are a great excuse to bring out all the things that you would usually overlook as not really necessary in normal everyday life.. We visited our wedding ceremony site, the rose garden, a couple of weeks before our wedding date in 2011 to see what the weather would be like and it was hot, hot, hot!

Credit to Bliss Weddings Market.com

So I went on the search for parasols and fans to keep the sun off those guests with fair skin and those that require a breeze to cool down even if its man made.. E bay was my main source of inspiration. I scoured many a shop looking for cheap but really nice parasols and fans.

My searching for parasols led me to three web sites:

• Pink frosting
• Parasoul
• Chinese Flourish Crafts

My original plan was to have paper parasols in black, white and red. So I checked out

Credit to Pink Frosting

the Pink frosting site and purchased a red one and a white parasol for $20 each. The red parasol looked good but the red wasn't the right colour for our theme as it was too bright. The red we were looking for was more of a dark red burgundy. The white one had what looked like yellow glue stripes along the paper part of it so I wasn't very happy with the quality of it. The details in the inside of the structure part of the umbrella were rather pretty though.

Photos of the Parasoul Umbrella and Packaging

My next company to investigate was Parasoul, a New Zealand based company who were just starting to branch out to Australia. Binky, the manager was very helpful with choices and packaging. I received my umbrella and remember picking it up at the post office and opening it in the car, and being a little bit disappointed as I had high hopes of this company being the one as I spent AUD $65 on it. It was beautiful quality don't get me wrong, but still not what I was looking for. I should of probably also said earlier that this one was sun and rain proof which made it fantastically multi-purpose for those who needed whichever. It was made of heavy duty linen like fabric which was coated with a white water proofing substance and then had black lines painted down it. Beautiful but still not what I wanted.

Photos of the Chinese Flourish Craft Umbrellas

So by now I'd tried paper and heavy duty linen parasols and they still didn't float my boat. So I tried a company on eBay called Chinese Flourish Crafts who had all sorts of different types of parasols and they even had black ones. Do you know how impossible it is to find nice black parasols in Australia, very hard I can tell you! So I ordered one of their black ones and a white one as well. I dealt with Lawrence through this process and received the parcel just over a week of him posting it and that was from china, so I was rather impressed with the service. And the parasols were great. The fabric and structure was good. The painting on the handle and colouring of the stem of the parasol not so great, but I could overlook that as the final finish was perfect. I had an 'oh they are so cute moment', when I was taking photos of them for this blog. So glad that I purchased them. They come with little tassles on the ends of them. The first lot I received had red tassles which I promptly pulled off but this instalment had white tassles which didn't look too bad on them. So I think I'll attach my favour tags to them with white ribbon on the black ones and black ribbon on the white ones. FH and I decided that we'd just stick with black and white parasols as the red ones on his web site were the wrong red for us as well. So happy campers in that area.

My fans with Favour Tags

I checked out Lawrence's other items and he also had an amazing range of reasonably priced fans. I found a brand called Lady Novel Fans that he sold and purchased some white ones to see what quality they were and was not disappointed at all. Nice and simple but perfect! I then went on to purchase some black and red ones as well and they were just as great. So every fortnight or so I receive a package from Lawrence with that amount of fans or parasols that I ordered till I get the amount I require. Such a great service!