So now for the proposal, Andrew had a few weeks to think of a few ideas and his choice was the message in a bottle found on the beach as we enjoy going to the beach and collecting shells. He gave it a lot of thought and had to make it look like the real thing, you can’t have a new bottle lying in the sand it had to look weathered and old. So the search was on for the right bottle. He went past the Eastern Beach for three days as there is normally a guy selling old bottles there but no luck, the third day he was getting desperate so he decided to go to Kim’s Antiques. He walked in it was raining that day and ask the gentleman if he had any old bottles and one with a cork, he went outside and they had stacks of bottles and the perfect shaped one with a cork that was weathered it looked fantastic R 10 bucks later he had my bottle and off he went.

The bottle preparation was done at his office. He collected some sand in a bank bag from Eastern Beach. Mothballs, a candle and bees wax from home and twine at his office.

He typed out a few will you marry me notes on A4 and cut them out some in red ink and some in black ink. The paper was to white so he stained it in tea and coffee, this took 3 days to stain the right colour, the red ink disappeared so that was no good, so black it was, took it out the stain and left to dry overnight.

The next morning it was perfect except it smelt like coffee so into a bank bag with a mothball for the day, so now he started working on the bottle.  He decided to use twine around the neck of the bottle and attach it to the cork the cork had a metal pin through it that was rusted a bit so it looked old this is what he attached the note to.

The twine was new and did not fit the bottle appearance so into the tea and coffee it went, the next day it came out a dodgy yellow colour like someone had peed on it. It was now Thursday and he needed to get this thing together for Saturday or Sunday so the pressure was on. You got to understand this was all being done when he had gaps between working so it was very stop start.
He had to do a belt using the hot air blower and decided to see what happened if he burnt the twine with it, well it really looked good so he burnt the meter length, and now using a mix of candle wax and bees wax for the brown effect attached the twine to the neck of the bottle.

Suddenly it’s the later part of Thursday afternoon and he knows he will finish this today, the paper had taken on the mothball smell, so he rolled it up, tied it to the pin coming out of the cork with cotton and put a blob of wax on it. Put some sand in the bottle with a tiny piece of mothball, corked it and proceeded to finish tying the twine on. Waxed the twine and dipped it in the sea sand which stuck to the hot wax. It was all done and looked fantastic like the real thing was floating in the sea for years.

So now its Friday afternoon he left work early 15:00 get home and sort out a few things for the big day planned for the Weekend. Well to his horror he takes out my ring and it has tarnished so now it’s almost 4pm who is going to clean them for me now, he can’t give me a tarnished ring. He drove down to the jeweler on his bike and fortunately they could do it so he waited for 20min and was on his way with the “Sparkler”.

Well Saturday came with its own hiccups so he planned a beach walk for the Sunday morning at Ceffani, we had been out looking for shells a few times so nothing was strange.

So Sunday morning he got up, put on his baggy board shorts with lots of pockets, the bottle in one and the ring in another.

We got to the beach and started walking, after a few km’s he was waiting for me to say lets go back this was the queue for the bottle to be dropped.

The magic words were spoken and he dropped the bottle making sure there was no one around that could pick it up, walked a few meters on then we turned around.

As we got closer he sort of guided me in its path then slack off the pace so I would find it. Well I did and said “Hey check this bottle” and then shouted at him for not seeing it. Andrew says there is a note inside the bottle to which I said nonsense, so when he had a look I said I’m going to be in the newspaper for finding a bottle washed up on the beach.  He gave it back to me and I wanted to put in in the bucket so he said open it. I struggled a bit so he takes it from me but he knows how as he put it together and in no time he pulled out the cork and let me open it.
While I was unraveling it he went for the ring in his pocket and when I started reading it he went down on his knee and ask me “Will You Marry Me”, I was in such shock and excitement I didn’t quite know what to say so he said an answer would be nice, to which I replied “Yes” still stunned, he put the ring on my finger and we never picked up anymore shells on the way back and down came the rain!

Here is a picture of my “Message in a Bottle”, handmade!

This article was posted by Celebration.co.za - South Africa Wedding Guide.