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Every weekend Alana James loads her car with hundreds of chair covers, cartons of confetti and metres of snow-white organza and heads off to create someone's fairytale.

She ties bows around chairs, lugs candlesticks up stairs and hangs fairy lights from ceilings to beautify function centres all over the Hunter.

As one half of a dynamic duo running Events of Elegance, Ms James' professionalism and business success has already been recognised.

This month she was one of six finalists in the Alcatel Young Business Women's Award, a section in the Telstra NSW Business Women's Award.

More than 300 women aged under 30 entered her section of the awards.

Ms James didn't win but she wasn't disappointed; she was thrilled to be a finalist in a competition won overall by horse trainer Gai Waterhouse.

And when the energetic 25-year-old isn't decorating, she is X-raying broken bones.

Ms James has a Bachelor of Applied Science in radiography and was awarded the prestigious Ag Silver Award and the Australian Institute of Radiography Newcastle sub-branch prize when she graduated from Newcastle University in 1996.

She now works at Wallsend Casualty X-ray as practice manager.

Ms James said juggling two careers wasn't easy but she won't be giving up her day job just yet.

She said radiography was extremely rewarding but her heart was in being creative.

Ms James said Events of Elegance offered packages from the most low-key function to the more extravagant fairytale dream.

The business is also embarking on a new direction, theming corporate events.

Ms James and Ms Drinkwater have decorated for a Saturday Night Fever theme party, complete with a big 'John Travolta' surrounded by flashing fairy lights and hundred of fluorescent coloured disks suspended from the ceiling.

They also hosted a New Year's party at the Newcastle Workers Club featuring more than a thousand coloured masks.

The weekends are exhausting for Ms James, with weddings stretched across the Hunter from Pokolbin to Swansea.