We cannot wait to show you the photographs we received back last week from our very own wedding!
It's actually a rather odd feeling to be blogging about our own lives, when we usually focus on everybody else!
William and I were married on August 27th in our local Registry Office. We wanted a small gathering, and so only invited our close families, plus William's two best friends he regards as family.
My biggest worry for the day was the weather as we had no back up plan if it rained! Luckily though, someone was looking down kindly on us and we had blue skies and beautiful sunshine all day.
My sister is an amazing florist, so we obviously wanted her to create all of our floral pieces. She won the Kent Wedding Awards Florst of the Year 2012, so we knew we were in safe hands! Sarah did an utterly amazing job, and although I don't like to think of myself as difficult, I knew that I didn't really want 'traditional' flowers. I'm not a pink person at all, and pretty, flowery flowers just aren't my taste. Given our small wedding, the whole theme and feel of what we wanted was set by the flowers. We wanted a rustic, country feel without going full-on barn dance!
In my bouquet, I had gorgeous dahlias, craspedia, tanacetum, lavender, gyp and alchemilla. These were tied with a jute string.
The guest's buttonholes had craspedia, lavender and rosemary stems, again, tied with a jute string. William's buttonhole had the addition of gyp to make it just a little bit more special.
Sarah also created our table decorations. I gathered together all of my families vintage looking vases - I wanted cut glass and pretty vintage style vases, and nothing modern with clean lines. Sarah filled them with all sorts of English country garden blooms, using the same flowers as in my bouquet with the addition of sunflowers, nigella and hydrangeas. Sarah really understood what we wanted and we cannot thank her enough for making the flowers so perfect.
We decided to make the place names double as favours. We chose small kalanchoe plants in a variety of colours, cut squares of hessian and tied them with pretty ribbons. The place names were designed with matching elements from our wedding invitation. I printed them out onto brown kraft card, secured them with cute washi tape and added a little note with a mini peg to let our guests know they could take them away with them.
I made our rustic table runner which you can see peeking out in the photo above. It took 7 meters of hessian, 14 meters of beautiful lace and a whole day to secure the two together!
Now, the part that should have been the easiest for us, but turned out to be the hardest! Our stationery! I think we both had so many ideas that settling on one design for our invitations was really tough! After about 10 different designs making the shortlist, we decided upon this one.
At the time, we hadn't even though about our flowers, but it just so happened that the yellow in the ribbon design, and the yellow belly band we secured our stationery together with perfectly matched the dahlias and craspedia in our flowers.
I think that people who design and make things always find it the most difficult when creating something for themselves. I am a perfectionist with other people's stationery, so you can just imagine what I was like with my own!
I so wanted to make our wedding cake, but realised that the time needed to make it, stress levels in hoping the final one would turn out just right, and an unwanted expanding waistline in testing cakes in the weeks before the wedding, were all elements that just made me realise buying one would be a lot easier. However, I couldn't not make our cake toppers, and I am so chuffed with how they turned out!
I bought the wooden people-shaped toppers from eBay, drew the shapes lightly in pencil and got busy with some paints. I had to paint 3 or 4 layers to build up a decent coverage as the wood just soaked up the paint! Using the end of a pin, I then added the eyes (holding my breath the whole time!) and drew the mouths with a pen. The white line on the suit was actually done with a fine nail art pen! Then I glued on our flowers and the details to my dress. The trickiest part was attaching William's glasses - but with a steady hand and a bit more patience, I got there!
We had our photographs taken by Kirsty Grant Photography. Both an old work colleague and good friend, we felt relaxed and confident in the knowledge that she would do a fine job for us. And she did! We would recommend her in a heartbeat - she understood what we wanted, got all the 'formal' shots that we asked for, and helped make our day completely perfect.
After a 'mini-moon' in Cambridge, we are now back and loving married life together. Our day was perfect for us, having people who we love with us, the sun shining and everyone smiling. We couldn't be happier.
Credits:
Flowers: Sarah at Broadview Florist
Photography: Kirsty at Kirsty Grant Photography
Find her on Facebook here and Twitter here.
And don't forget to check our wedding stationery designs at
(shameless plug!)
