I really enjoyed making YouTube videos. It helped build my confidence with creating and editing video content and I loved reading comments from people that I didn’t know when they’d occasionally come through.

I eventually lost inspiration to keep creating when I started working full time in 2017. I do now wish that I had kept going.

However, while this was all happening, I was also very active on Instagram, where I shared incredibly curated and aesthetic content of my life. I’ve always put a lot of time and effort into my instagram because it’s always been my favourite platform.

Through the years I’ve tried many photography styles and aesthetics in the content I produced and shared. I was used to remembering to capture photos and videos of what I was doing, even if it didn’t have a specific purpose. Because of this, I’ve always been able to tell a story through this ‘visual diary’ on my Instagram.

When Instagram reels launched I heard that video content was better to grow with, so I started posting little videos alongside my photo content. It didn’t really kick off and I’d get a couple of hundred views per video and hardly gained any new followers. Still, I persisted this time and kept posting what now is the cringiest of content, but back then it was important to learn about the algorithm and hopping onto trends.

I have also always loved throwing big parties for my birthday and found so much joy in bringing a creative vision to life with costume parties.

So when Josh and I got engaged in April 2022, I obviously fell in love with wedding planning. At the time, I was incredibly onto it and organised. I did most of it myself with helpful nods from Josh along the way. I documented small snippets of the process once I borrowed a friends Cricut machine to complete some wedding DIYS like fabric signage and cards. I posted one or two things on Instagram and didn’t think much about it.

Fast forward to after the wedding and I start making a few little videos about the day. Because I had borrowed a DIY’d few things for the day, and I personally watched a lot of DIY content in the lead up to mine, I decided to make a “Things I DIY’d for my Wedding” video. I posted it and didn’t think much about it and we went camping over New Years so I wasn’t checking my phone often. Every day the video was getting another 10,000 views until eventually it reached close to 300,000. So, seeing that I had done something for the algorithm to pick me up I started to share more content of the same style. To my surprise, a few more of my videos started to gain me some new followers and a lot of reach. By March I had gained over 10,000 followers and I was still growing everyday.

The problem was, people were following me for my wedding DIY content, and I had just gotten married. How was I supposed to keep the machine happy? Have another wedding?

For my birthday, I hosted a sit down dinner where I DIY’d elements of the event to show my followers how they could do the same for a sit down dinner (aka wedding reception).

The video of building the flower welcome sign went viral on both Instagram and Tiktok, pushing me deeper into the Wedding DIY niche. Luckily, it just so happened to be wedding season within my friendship group, so I jumped on every creative project I could so I could keep making wedding content.

And here we are today!

I got my first DSLR camera at 16 after moving to Australia from New Zealand. All of my friends back home were starting to get into photography and I had just stumbled upon the British Vlogging YouTubers who inspired me to jump into trying it all out myself.

From 2014 – 2017 I actively uploaded YouTube videos; mainly pieces to camera, music and comedy content. A couple of my videos where I recreated my icon at the time, ‘Colleen Ballinger’, silly dance videos got a couple of thousand views and comments, the biggest getting over 150,000. At its peak I had just over 1,000 subscribers.