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!