Wedding Week - The Flowers

It has to be said, I kind of went mad with the wedding flowers. In my defence, we did save a lot of money by having the reception at home... oh wait, no we didn't - after we'd paid for the marquee, the tables, chairs, glass, crockery and cutlery hire, the fridge, the Italian deli buffet, the catering staff, the midnight bacon paninis, the coffee machine hire for proper lattes, cappuccinos and espressos, and a rather large amount of prosecco, wine and beer, we'd pretty much paid the same as we would have paid if we'd hired a venue. But heck, it wasn't about saving money, it was about having a freakin' awesome day, and we totally got that part right :-)

Choosing our florist was easy - I went to have a chat with Lynsey from Living Flowers, a rather lovely local florist, and she totally got me so I hired her there and then. I wanted a very organic, natural feel that co-ordinated with the existing plants in our garden, and with a mediterranean influence to reflect Andre's Portuguese background. After a visit to the local flower market (a huge perishing cold warehouse in north Manchester), we settled on roses, olive, eucalyptus, hypericum berries, gypsophila, chrysanthemums and agapanthus as the main flowers.

I'd always fancied getting married in an olive grove, and we did consider holding the wedding in Italy, but we didn't want our guests to have to spend any money at all to celebrate with us (is it just me who finds the concept of a pay bar at a wedding a bit odd?) and paying for flights and accommodation for 40 peeps was a bit out of our reach. So I asked the church vicar if we could decorate the church with olive trees - "yes, lovely", he said. (I also asked if we could serve prosecco in the church immediately after the ceremony - "yes, lovely", he said.)

As well as the olive trees, we had pots of herbs and other fragrant plants at the foot of the olive trees, and on the pew ends. We transferred everything back to the house after the ceremony and added them to the general proliferation of flora and fauna in the house and marquee:

Andre and I had matching white rose and olive leaves for my bouquet and Andre's buttonhole - look, you can see actual tiny green olives among the flowers:

My bridesmaid carried a bouquet of white roses, and our two little flower girls each carried a wand of roses and chrysanthemums wrapped in spare lace from my dress (the youngest, Isabella, was given her wand and promptly and thoughtfully pulled one of the rose heads off it):

The gentlemen had lovely buttonholes:

And the ladies had corsages:

We had white rose petals as confetti, packed into handmade paper cones:

We enjoyed the confetti shower so much, we did the same thing when we entered the marquee - yep, that's our forsythia under white canvas:

In the marquee, we had kissing balls suspended from the ceiling, plus vases on the all the tables:

The cake had roses, hypericum berries and chrysanthemums between the layers:

And the living room had a lovely twiggy garland, plus agapanthus flowers in vases on the coffee table:

What I've shared photos of here is just a fraction of what we actually had - in addition to the above, we had another garland on the front door, flowers in the bathroom, flowers in all the vases on the living room shelves, flowers on the cake table, flowers draped all over the kitchen cabinets and suspended in tiny test tubes from the cabinet handles, flowers all over the shed roof, more kissing balls hung from the parasol at the back of the garden, flowers decorating the buffet and glass tables, a huge bunch of gypsophila hanging from the back door, the drinks menus tucked into little pots of herbs... and that's just the extra flowers we brought in for the wedding. On top of that we had all the existing flowers and plants in the garden - sweet peas, cordylines, olive trees, lobelia, bamboos - it was fabulously jungly and gorgeous, and exactly how I had envisaged it.

Finally, tomorrow I'll be sharing photos of two very special members of the wedding party. Watch this space!

Wedding Week - How To Put A Marquee Over Your Entire Garden

Deciding where to hold our wedding reception was simple. It went something like this:

Me: "Where do you want to have the reception?". Andre (looking around garden): "Can we have it here?". Me: "Cool".

I should point out at this stage that Andre and I do not live in a country manor house with a large garden - we don't even live in a largeish house with a reasonably sized garden. Nope, we live in a two-bed semi with a garden that is large for the size of the house, but certainly not wedding-sized.

And not only is our garden a modest size, but it looks like this:

Yep, there's quite a few trees, and not a whole lot of lawn.

Not one to be daunted by an impossible task, I arranged for a bunch of marquee peeps to come over and take a look. Most literally laughed and made a hasty exit. However, one dude stood in the back garden looking thoughtful, stroking his metaphorical beard. "I think we can do something with this", he mused. I promptly signed him up before he changed his mind - which was probably a good thing, because when he came round again in full summer and the trees and plants had doubled in size, he went quite pale, poor chap.

However, with the aid of a team of Polish marquee builders, and a large saw for removing a few tree branches here and there, they managed to put a 6m x 9m marquee over pretty much the entire garden, shed and all:

Pretty sweet, eh?

Liking the fact that the garden shed became a prominent design feature. I actually woke up at 5am on the morning of the wedding having remembered that I hadn't covered the window and everyone would therefore have a lovely view of our lawn mower, and sent my Mum round first thing to tape over it with some spare patterned paper left over making the wedding invitations. Fortunately we had already painted the shed in Cappuccino Candy so it co-ordinated nicely.

I hung dozens of huge Ikea lanterns from the ceiling, and strung fairy lights and handmade silk bunting everywhere:

Plus great big pouffy balls of gypsophila and green chrysanthemums provided by Lynsey from Living Flowers, our wonderful florist:

We decorated the two long tables with simple bunches of chrysanthemums tied with brown string and popped into square glass vases:

And bars of organic chocolate wrapped in ribbon:

And set out a table with glasses along one of the walls. Yep, that's our garden fence (with sweet peas growing up it) - by sheer co-incidence the marquee was ever-so-slightly wider than the garden, so we were able to put the sides just over the fence in my patient neighbour's flowerbeds:

And of course the bonus of throwing a wedding reception in your back garden rather than hiring some random castle somewhere is that you have absolute justification to be ruthless with the guest list and only invite the 40 people that you really, really like. Sneaky, eh.

Coming up tomorrow - les fleurs!

Wedding Week - Stationery

Hurrah for more wedding loveliness! Today I'm going to share all the stationery that I made (yes, MADE I tell you) with my own two hands - invitations, menus, escort cards, seating plans, and so on. Let's just say a lot of Pritt-Stick was involved, plus a plethora of paper cuts, and some fairly frequent cursing. It all turned out splendidly though, so totally worth the effort. My big tip for anyone who is bonkers enough to consider making their own wedding stationery is that everything takes about five times as long as you think it's going to, so get everything done well in advance in order to avoid ending up gluing confetti cones at 2am. Ahem.

My first task was to find the perfect paper. It had to be the right shade of ivory, the right weight, and the right texture. "Um, those samples all look the same," said my future husband. Poor man - the sample on the right was at least 20 gsm heavier than the one on the left. Men, eh. After much reasearch I ordered the ivory card and envelopes from a company called Daintree Paper (who I have just discovered are no longer trading), and bought the brown papers (plain and patterned) from Paperchase.

I went for a square centre-fold option, with two layered bands, plus ivory ribbon:

I also decided to draw a wedding map showing all the key locations (the church, our house, various Didsbury landmarks), which we enclosed with the invitations:

I created this map by driving to all the places, taking photos of them, doing a normal size drawing of them with black ink, scanning the picture in, shrinking it, and then using Photoshop to place each separate house onto a road map that I had also drawn separately and scanned in. This meant that I could have a lot of detail for each house, down to individual roof tiles, without trying to achieve this in a tiny drawing:

I then printed the maps onto the same paper as the invitations - and because I'd scanned the drawings at a high resolution, it preserved the actual pen marks (where I had coloured in the windows, for example) so each map came out looking as if it had been hand-drawn individually rather than printed.

I also made drink menus (which I fastened to wooden skewers and stuck into individual pots of herbs):

Name tags (fastened with ribbon onto bars of organic chocolate - and yes, Batman came to our wedding):

A table plan - an aerial drawing of our garden (we held the reception at home) which I placed in a wooden frame and hung from the door of the garden shed (yep, we were probably the only wedding in history for feature a garden shed as a prominent design element - more to come tomorrow!):

A menu - written in gold pen on an ivory-framed mirror:

And escort cards:

The idea behind these cards is that all our guests located their card by name - and on the back of the card found a picture of one of four flowers (agapanthus, olive, chrysanthemum and eucalyptus - all part of our wedding flowers) which corresponded to the order in which we wanted people to go up the Italian deli buffet table and pile their plates high. So the people with agapanthus cards were called first, followed by eucalyptus, and so on:

And then we went on our honeymoon and I slept for about 48 hours straight in sheer exhaustion from all that cutting and gluing.

Coming up tomorrow - decorating the marquee (and finding a team of Polish marquee providers who were prepared to put a marquee over our entire garden - suckers!)...