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Senin, 17 Desember 2012

Real Stylish London Wedding: Caroline & Matt - Part 2

London brides are going to love this inspirational wedding, with its fun pub venue, shabby-chic wedding decorations, and pink and gold colour palette. Caroline and Matt stamped their personality on their big day with unique DIY'd wedding details - Matt designed their wedding stationery, Caroline's mum made the wedding cake and Caroline created the tankard table plan. Stunning table flowers as well - I love David Austin roses! Huge thanks to Erica from Photo Madly for capturing the wedding so perfectly, and to Caroline, for filling the Before the Big Day Brides' Questionnaire. Don't miss her fab hints and tips, and take a look at Part 1 of this wedding here.


Matt and I met at work but we didn't get together until one Christmas party when Matt was dressed as a Lego man and I was dressed as Madonna in the Material girl video. 

We were together for 3 and a half years when Matt surprised me with a weekend away to Norfolk which is where we went for our first weekend away together. He'd booked us into a romantic yurt and took me out for an amazing eight course meal, when we got back we sat next to the camp fire with our glasses of champagne and Matt got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.


We got married on 21st September in London, our ceremony was in The Old Marylebone Town Hall and held our reception in The Londesborough pub in Stoke Newington.



We looked at lots of different types of buildings for our reception but decided a pub would work well for us as we really wanted the day to be really laid back and relaxed. I was also determined that our venue should have just one room to create a really intimate atmosphere. 

The Londesborough is one of my favourite London pubs and they really ticked all the boxes for us, we had the whole pub to ourselves and they have outside space and the food was amazing! We felt bunting would work best in the pub and other than flowers we didn't need to do much else as its such a lovely space already. We really couldn't have been happier with our venues.




I didn't want a particular wedding colour theme, but instead worked to a colour palette of soft pinks, greens, white, pale gold and navy.


My florist was Elinor Walsh from Marlow, Buckinghamshire. She did such a good job, the flowers were exactly what I wanted. I really wanted pink and white peonies but in September that's not really an option so we chose pink David Austin roses mixed in with white hydrangea. I chose to have them tied with twine.

I was very keen that the table decorations should be in low vases as I wanted people to be able to chat over them easily without wanting to move them out of the way. The flowers were one of my favourite things about the day as it was so exiting seeing them in the pub, I was so happy with how they turned out.

Matt is a graphic designer so he designed our wedding invitations. I came up with the idea of using beer mats, and he created the look. We used the same design for our wedding menus, which also doubled as the table place names.


My DIY projects included our table plan. I wrote the names of our guest on glass tankards, using chalk pen, then stacked them on a set of shelves. We also made the table names by buying clipboards and sticking struts on them. We then printed out each table name to look like a pub sign, and clipped them on.

We wanted wedding favours that were fun, and we spotted the chocolate lips and moustaches in a wedding magazine. We bought them from Creightons Chocolatiers in Leighton Buzzard, and were so pleased with them. They looked great and tasted amazing, and everyone commented in how fun they were!


I saw a cake online that I fell in love with, and my mum said she would try and replicate it. I bought the cake stand online and my mum did the rest. I don't like fruit cake so we had a lemon drizzle cake. It was delicious and looked amazing, I'm so pleased my mum made it, as it meant so much more.

I loved planning my big day! There are so many different ways you can do a wedding and they're all amazing, I could do it all over again - although only if it was with Matt obviously!!

Our photographer was Erika Szostak from Photo Madly. We picked her because we loved her work, and we felt really comfortable with her straight away. Your photographer is such a big part of your day it's so important you choose someone who you like having around! We're thrilled with how our photos turned out.

My advice for future brides is to remember that on the day you can't change anything so just enjoy it! Things will go wrong but it's not important, the main thing is that you enjoy the day you've spent so long planning. Also don't stress about your decisions once they're made, I can't tell you how much I stressed about things that looking back on it just weren't important!



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Real Stylish London Wedding: Caroline & Matt

There's a real soft spot in my heart for London weddings, particularly after we hosted our own 'official wedding' in the heart of Hackney. Caroline and Matt planned their own stylish big day at The Old Marylebone Town Hall, with their wedding reception at The Londesborough pub in Stoke Newington. I'm completely in love with Caroline's fairy-tale Tara Keely wedding dress, which was the complete opposite to what she had originally planned! Her dress matches the feminine mood of the wedding; reception decorations included shabby-chic bunting, stunning David Austin roses, with gold, pink and dark blue colour accents. There's tonnes more DIY wedding details in Part 2 of this lovely wedding, keep an eye out for the second post later this afternoon. Huge thanks to Erica from Photo Madly for capturing the wedding so perfectly, and to Caroline, for filling the Before the Big Day Brides' Questionnaire. Don't miss her fab hints and tips!

My dress by Tara Keely by Lazaro from Morgan Davies in London. It was not an easy decision! I must have gone to about 20 bridal shops and kept waiting to find 'the one'. When I started shopping I said "I don't want a big dress and I don't want it to be strapless", so obviously that's exactly what I ended up with! I had a couple of dresses that I was choosing between, but I kept comparing everything to that one,so in the end I just accepted that it had to be the one!

My sister and I bought some fabric from a shop in Tooting, and I handmade my sash. I was then thrilled to find my Carvela shoes in the sale, and the colour matched the sash almost perfectly.

My florist was Elinor Walsh from Marlow, Buckinghamshire. She did such a good job, the flowers were exactly what I wanted. My ideal wedding flowers were pink and white peonies, but in September that's not really an option, so we chose pink David Austin roses mixed in with white hydrangea. I chose to have them tied with twine.

My wedding jewellery was bought online from Glitzy Secrets and my veil was from Blissful Gifts. I really wanted a bubble veil, and was so happy when I found Blissful Gifts online as it was so hard to find one anywhere!



I didn't really mind what colour or style my bridesmaids wore as long as they all felt nice in the dress. The dresses they ended up in were actually the second set of dresses we bought, because the first dresses just weren't quite right, and I could tell they weren't happy in them but didn't want to say anything!


It was more important that my best friends and sisters were happy and felt nice on my big day than they were wearing a specific style. In the end we bought their dresses from French Connection and added some gold ribbon from John Lewis to link in with the colour of Matt's tie.

We got married on 21st September in London, our ceremony was in The Old Marylebone Town Hall and we held our reception in The Londesborough pub in Stoke Newington. I got ready at The Black and White House in Belsize Park.


We both knew we wanted a civil ceremony, and living in London means there are lots of Town Halls in the city that were big enough for our 80 guests. We only gave ourselves 7 months to plan the wedding, so it really came down to where was available, but Marylebone was my first choice as I love the drama of the building, so we were really happy to get it.




Matt's suit was tailor-made from King and Allen. He really wanted a nice suit he could wear again. He also wore the pocket watch, which I bought him as a surprise, to open on our wedding morning.


Our photographer was Erika Szostak from Photo Madly. We picked her because we loved her work, and we felt really comfortable with her straight away. Your photographer is such a big part of your day it's so important you choose someone who you like having around! We're thrilled with how our photos turned out.


Matt and I met at work but we didn't get together until one Christmas party when Matt was dressed as a Lego man and I was dressed as Madonna in the Material girl video. We were together for 3 and a half years when Matt surprised me with a weekend away to Norfolk which is where we went for our first weekend away together. He'd booked us into a romantic yurt and took me out for an amazing eight course meal, when we got back we sat next to the camp fire with our glasses of champagne and Matt got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.



♥ Click for more London wedding ideas! ♥ And tonnes of shabby chic weddings! ♥
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Senin, 03 Desember 2012

Real Vintage Music-Themed Wedding: Katherine & Yianni - Part 2

With a fabulous rock music wedding theme, a gorgeous burgundy colour theme, and a self-confessed perfectionist bride, Katherine and Yianni's wedding was always going to be a pretty impressive affair. It's packed full of stealworthy ideas, and if you're looking to be a DIY bride, you'll find tonnes of wedding inspiration. My favourite wedding details include the album themed table plan and decorations, the beautifully packaged CD wedding favours, and the stunning burgundy colour palette. Gorgeous pictures published with thanks to Dominic Whiten Photography - don't miss Katherine's helpful answers to the Before the Big Day Bride's Questionnaire, and Part 1 of this fabulous wedding.


We got married on Saturday October 13th 2012 in a small village in Kent where my parents live. We had a church ceremony at St Johns Church followed by a reception at Mountains Country House in Hildenborough.

Our wedding photography was Dominic from Dominic Whiten Photography. I found him via our wedding venue - we met up at my parents house I really liked his easygoing manner. I researched quite a few other photographers and I was tempted by some of the more artistic styles. However after looking through Dominic's online portfolio again, we really loved his portraits and the way he captured real moments from the day in an artistic but honest way.


Yianni’s Dad is Greek Cypriot, and as everyone knows the Greeks don’t do small weddings so finding the perfect venue that would also accommodate 200 guests proved quite difficult. We thought a lot about how to combine both of our family traditions, and whether to have the wedding in Kent or London. 

In the end we decided that because I wanted to stay true to English tradition and get married at my parents' church, so it made sense to choose a venue that was close by. However we still wanted to have a proper Greek party for the reception, and Mountains Country House turned out to be the perfect choice. With its beautiful stately home and huge marquee we knew we'd have room to make it a party to remember!

The wedding theme was obvious – the reason we got together – our love of rock music. Our starting point was when one of our favourite bands Deftones released a limited edition CD with a beautiful image of roses on the cover. We used this imagery as inspiration for the invitations – which, in keeping with the music theme, we had printed as a CD album case.

I chose a burgundy rose from the centre of the design as the colour for my bridesmaids' dresses and as our a wedding colour theme, for Yianni's ushers' ties, the cake ribbon, and all the other wedding details.

My florist was Suzanne at the Flowersmiths. I visited a few other florists to get ideas but Suzanne gave us the best price for what I wanted for my wedding flowers. I knew I wanted roses in the colours from our wedding invitations, and I knew I wanted neat rounded bouquets and elegant candelabras in the venue. I really trusted Suzanne would do a good job and her dedication and planning to achieve my vision could not have been bettered.

We chose to name each table at our wedding reception after some of our favourite albums. We bought some old records and then printed labels with the album art to stick in the centre, which at 50p a record was much cheaper than buying the actual vinyl.


We designed our own invitations, table names and table plan. I am a print textile designer and Yianni works on websites, so we are both quite used to using Photoshop on a daily basis, and didn’t think it was necessary to outsource the design. We did loads of research online, and pulled all our ideas together, and then spent a lot of time perfecting the final results.

As we had nearly 150 people to the sit down meal, it was difficult to come up with something thoughtful but relatively inexpensive for our wedding favours. Originally I thought I would go with traditional sugared almonds - cheap but unoriginal. But after sending out what was essentially an empty CD case as the invitation, a lot of guests asked me for a music CD! So we decided to make our own compilation as a favour for each guest - with his or her name tacked on the cover using old school dymo labeller.

My mum helped me find our wedding cake on Classic Cakes. I had just chosen my dress, and knew the pearl decorations would work well with it. I knew I wanted a proper traditional tiered cake that you cut, instead of the current trendy cupcake towers, and I didn’t want anything too fussy visually and this cake ticked all the boxes. Plus they sent us some delicious samples including a gluten and dairy free option for pernickety eaters like me.

Yianni and I set aside 1 evening a week to do wedding stuff. When it got nearer to the day quite a few weekends got booked up with meetings too, but my advice is not to let your wedding take over your life. Also don’t stress about the little details – I asked for my mum and sister to help with decorating jam jars lanterns. I had planned a fun craft morning, but almost had a meltdown because they weren't all perfect - then on the day I didn't even see them lit up, as I was too busy enjoying myself in the marquee! So in hindsight - take the time to savour your months of labours as it is a cliché but so true - the day really does fly by!


I did enjoy planning my wedding, but at times it was really stressful and so time consuming. There is a reason why you're meant to get married before the kids arrive! I think it doesn't help that I am a perfectionist and frequently got bogged down in details. I have to say there is such an immense choice out there for everything, that it really does help if you have a good sense of your own style and a theme to stick to.



{Wedding Credits}
Venue: Mountains Country House  
Wedding dress: Pronovias 
Bride's Shoes: First For Brides 
Bride's Earrings: Chez Bec 
Bridal Bag: Jane's Vintage
Bridesmaids' Dresses & Groom's & Ushers' ties: Dessy 
Groom & Ushers' Suits, Shirts & Shoes: Reiss
Flowergirl's Dress: Monsoon 
Wedding Car: Gold Drive 
Flowers: The Flowersmiths 
Make-up: Makeup By Ashley 
Cake: Classic Cakes 
Laser-cut Bunting: Come Uppance 

♥ Want more music wedding ideas? ♥ Or how about marquee weddings? ♥
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