Wedding Wednesday - part 3

More wedding details ... table settings! ... (parts 1 & 2, and other wedding related posts)

So this is what the table settings looked like. A centerpiece of a vintage jug filled with flowers; a milk bottle table number; and a jam jar filled with some battery operated fairy-lights. Also, at each place setting, a hand made place card.

The flowers: As we were having the wedding in a gorgeous country garden, we didn't want professional expensive flower arrangements - we wanted it to feel like you'd picked some flowers for your kitchen table (also, helped with cost!). Sourcing the flowers (as I was doing this myself rather than through a florist) became quite a chore ... won't go into the details but suffice to say, best man Dom was a life-saver ... I spent the Thursday night before the wedding, (after having had a large family dinner), in the best man's garden with one of those caving head lights strapped to my forehead; equipped with a pair of garden shears, and some buckets; cutting hydrangeas and crocosmias till almost midnight. Earlier that day I had bought out all of the Broadmead Marks and Spencer's stock of gerberas and larkspurs in the wedding colours.

We transported the lot to the venue on Friday in buckets and set my lovely mum on the job of flower arranging. Remember the vintage jugs I had been collecting over the last 6 months? Well my mum then sat down with all the flowers and jugs (and lovely helper Nic) and made up some smashing centerpieces ... Thank you Ammu! For some strange reason though, mum seems to have disappeared in the photo - that's my Aunt in the pink fleece ...

I also bought a stack of florists' cellophane flower bags and printed out some translucent sticky labels to stick on them. Towards the end of the wedding evening I sent my sister and some willing helpers off to take the centerpieces and pack them up in the the cello bags as wedding favours for whoever wanted them!

Table numbers: I had in my mind that I wanted to use some old milk bottles for something - but not sure what; or where I was going to find them. Then one day earlier in the year, I saw my neighbour disposing of a whole box of them. I ran over and asked if I could have them and he said "Sure!" ... wondering why on earth I was so excited about some dirty milk bottles ;)

I then found a font I liked (it's the same font as on the "Wedding" sign that I painted); opened it in Adobe Illustrator; got it to the right size; and vectorised it. Then sent that file off with Sunshine as they have a vinyl cutter at his work. I had both some red and some white sticky-backed vinyl cut as the combination worked much better than each colour individually. Then it was matter of cleaning and drying the bottles and carefully sticking down my vinyl so it was all aligned nicely. (Edit: someone asked me where I got my vinyl from - the answer? Scrapstore!)

I still had lots of wedding invites left so got my helpers to make up a few more Tweeters which then got stuck on some barbecue sticks and plopped into each bottle. Ah! A photo of my mum ... from the top left, anti-clockwise, my sis, my grandma, and mum! (there was a lot more birdie helpers - this is only the ones whose photos I have).

Place Cards: This again was an idea that evolved over time ... I had initially found the vintage Garden Plants book in a charity shop for 20p(!). With the wedding being in a flower garden, I knew I wanted to use it for the wedding - but not sure how ... Eventually they ended up as place cards! You can pretty much see how I sliced the pages and folded them up to make little stand up flowers (I didn't have enough to cover all the guests so had to make a few colour photocopies too).

I then used a craft punch to cut out the red circles on which I wrote the guest's name with a white pen. I also did a few cards with yellow butterflies (another craft punch) to make sure the caterers knew who had special gluten-free diets (and a purple butterfly for our one and only garlic-free guest).

Last but not least Fairy lights: We didn't manage to get any photos of me making them, but let me describe it (you can see them on the top photo). I sourced some battery operated LED fairy-lights that would fit inside jam jars that I had been collecting for years (I always have a stash for all sorts of use). Then cut out some fabric circles to fit over the lids and glued them down with some PVA to look like homemade jam jars. As it was getting dark, we went round the wedding marque to each table; popped the lids open; switched the fairy-lights on and popped the lids back on ... for some twinkles into the evening :)

There you go ... next week - cake!

Wedding Wednesday - part 2

The story continues ... (part 1 here)


I had been dreaming about a bright sunny wedding ever since we booked our gorgeous venue. But all of the Friday before as we were prepping; and all of the wedding moring; it rained ... But, about half an hour before the ceremony was due to start, it cleared, and an executive decision was made that we were going to have it outside :)

This meant that I got to walk down the "aisle" - through the flower garden - to one of Sunshine and my favourite songs, by our favourite Bristol artist - "On my knees" by Phil King. Happy me!

Although we and the "Best Posse" managed to keep dry in the beautiful wooden gazebo that the ceremony was held in, by the time we got to our vows, the guests had to get umbrellas out! I found this HUGELY distracting and worrying ("Argh! Our guests are getting wet!!!"); but they themselves seemed to be enjoying it just fine ;)

Speaking of vows, as you can see on the photo; rather than have a ring pillow to hold our rings, I tied them onto a lovely mossy branch I had collected on one of our many walks in the woods. The lady in the floral dress is Anna, who helped us make our rings - so we asked her to be ring-bearer.

As it was raining, I know that quite a few of the guests couldn't quite make out what our vows were. So here, for prosperity they are (we both started with "I made this ring for you", because we did!):

Sunshine's vows to Me

"I made this ring for you, and with this ring, I give you my promise,
that from this day forward, we shall be as one.
I promise to be there for you, when you need me.
To listen to you, to respect you and be faithful to you.
To laugh with you, to cry with you and to confide in you.
To trust you, to comfort you and to support you.
All that I have, I share with you.
May we dance together, through all of life.
May you always feel loved, for indeed you are.

With this ring, I am honoured to call you my best friend and my wife."

My vows to Sunshine

"I made this ring for you, and with this ring, I give you my promise,
that I will stand by your side forevermore
I promise to love you; to honour, and support you,
To trust you and to confide in you.
I promise to listen to all your thoughts, your hopes and fears,
And to dream with you, of all our beautiful dreams, together.
You are more than I could have ever asked for in my life
and for that I promise to always be thankful.
Let us dance together through all of life.

With this ring, I am privileged to call you my husband, my Sunshine."

Aawwwww... aren't we soppy ;)

Now, since weren't actually going anywhere after the ceremony (ie 'leaving the church'), we hadn't initially planned on having any confetti. But somehow by the wedding day, bio-degradable dried flower petal confetti had been ordered. It was so last minute that we hadn't even got a container for it (ended up using a waste paper basket from the venue!), and I still don't really have any idea how it got distributed - but some confetti fairies went to work and we ended up quite drenched!

AND, if we weren't going to have confetti, as per the original plan, we surely had to have something else that would allow our guests to be 'celebratisious' with us, no? Oh yes, in honour of our leaving-ceremony song "WooWoo" by Joe Marsala and the Chicagoans (very old swing track), I handmade 150 little flags! They went down really well and you can see them floating about in most of the wedding photos.

They are really easy to make - I made a template that I then printed out on thin card. I then cut the flag shapes, and sat down with some cheap bamboo barbeque skewers and a glue gun, and a few hours later - ta da! Flags! If you want to make some flags for yourself, download my template here.

Next week - table settings!

Knees on bees ...

Update on these.
Edit: The Knees have a new website! Well done girls!!!

Wedding Wednesday - part 1

Phew ... what a manic few weeks its been! We're just back from visiting my family in Malaysia - and I can safely say that we're going to be mostly here for the foreseeable future ...

Now that I've actually had a bit of time to go through all the photos we've had back from our "official" photographer (friend Burning Dan); and lots of other people - they're still slowly arriving in the post; I thought I might start trying to dig through and find photos to show you all the crafting and other details of the wedding that I got up to. So, for the next few however-many-Wednesdays it takes, I'm going to do just that, right here ...

Today I start with the pompom project.

Initially I had planned to make lots of bunting to criss-cross the wedding marquee; but I found it difficult to source fabric that I liked, and at an affordable price. As a test I tried making one of the Martha Stewart pompoms that seemed to be all over the blogs last year. It turned out to be extremely easy to do and so I set about sourcing enough tissue paper in colours that I wanted to make at least 50 of them! 1 is easy; 50 is a bit more demanding ... It took me a whole day and a half of solid work to fold and tie them up; and I took them to the venue in that state. Then, the day before the wedding friends and family chipped in the "Pompom Fluffing and Hanging Game". It was a lot of work ... thank you so very much to all my diligent little elves ;)

And this is what it looked like all hung up:

Two other little details I thought I'd share are the hand painted "Wedding" signs I made from junk wood planks and acrylic paint; to be hung on the way to the venue (at the top of this post); and the paper doily place cards I made for all the family reserved seats. I colour printed out individual names on transparent inkjet sticky labels, and stuck them to small paper heart doilies. These were then taped to the chairs. Unfortunately it rained - and the doilies didn't hold up too well; and alas, these are the only photos I have of them ...

So there you have it - the first few details you would have seen if you had been at the wedding. Tune in next Wednesday for part 2!