Wedding - A few personal touches

October 22, 2014


From the start, one of my favourite parts of wedding planning was thinking of ways to personalise our day and have a couple of display tables in the entrance hall of our venue, Notley Abbey that reflected some of our favourite things and great loves. I'm a real faffer when it comes to displaying bits and bobs as you may have noticed by now, so I got great pleasure in planning all the pretty bits, where frames would sit amongst jam jars filled with flowers and a slightly vintage take on a guest book and card box.
To start with, you may also have noticed that I'm slightly mad about photos and thought having a few of my favourites on display of Ben and I through the years would make for a good talking point at the wedding and something easy to pretty up a room. I started thinking about creative ways to display the photos and in the end found an old wooden pallet and borrowed a vintage towel rail from Ben's Grandma.


A few weeks before the wedding I uploaded and ordered lots of photos from Costco online and had them printed out, laying them on the pallet before pinning them on. 


For the towel rail, I tied brown string around it pulled taught and pegged up photos using heart pegs to match in with our love heart theme. 



At the venue we stood the towel rail on a table as part of the display and stood the pallet up on the floor. We had a mixture of our engagement shoot photos and from various holidays and events over the last six or so years. Crazy how time flies, I liked looking back and thinking about our relationship in the time just before we tied the knot. 

In addition to photos of ourselves, I had seen the idea of family wedding photos on Pinterest a couple of years back and the idea had stuck in my head ever since. I've got a montage in my hallway with old family wedding photos, blog post on that to follow, but Ben and I had great fun a while ago getting our grandparent's wedding albums out and they took great pleasure in showing them to us and their own parents and grandparents. It's lovely to have photos of those special to us and a bit of family history on such a poignant event - a new family wedding to add to the collection. For those who couldn't be there it was nice to acknowledge them as part of the day. I used various frames, just from Dunelm and Wilkinsons in a vintage kind of style, all a bit mismatched but that would tie in for a display together. I propped some up on an old milk crate, purchased at a car boot sale, and asked our florist to put together a couple of extra jam jars of flowers to dot into the display.


I didn't like the idea of a traditional guest book what would we do with a notebook full of messages? We would have messages from friends and family in wedding cards and enjoy looking back at the photos and video with them in so I didn't see the point. However, messages typed on a typewriter would be a fun diversion for guests on the day and we'd have cool hand typed inky messages on brown paper to display. {Which I did as part of our wedding crate wall in glass frames}. The typewriter also looked great as part of the display and we've now got some funny messages, with quirky punctuation and spacing as people got the hang of writing on a typewriter. I was impressed at the length of some of the messages, it's not that easy to use! Ben's friend Vicky {at All The Little Touches} hired this typewriter out to us with a new set of ribbons {that hold the ink on} and made us the little sign telling people what to do. We left out pieces of brown a4 kraft paper and let people type us some messages.



I filled a couple of old French 'le parfait' jars, collected from Kempton Antiques market {I know I keep saying it but I promise there will be a post very soon about my beloved Kempton} with love heart sweets, added a little label with our B&R heart stamp on and tied lace ribbon around it. 



In addition to the vintage typewriter, I think I've mentioned that I've got a bit of a 'thing' for old luggage. So a suitcase seemed to be the answer instead of a generic card box for guests to leave gifts. I prettied it up a little with a lace doily and bunting saying Cards with little red hearts purchased from Etsy. 



I was so pleased with the flowers, from a very clever lady called Charlie who runs the Flower Fairies. She produced such floral magic that day, they were better than I'd ever imagined {and I'm the type of person who spends a lot of time thinking about flowers..} More on all the blooms from our day at some stage in a future post. 

If you've seen the post about our lounge, you may have noticed that we've got a bit of a thing for collecting old penguin books. Vicky, who we hired the typewriter from had these three old penguin books with names all relating to Love so we borrowed these too and set them out on a wooden crate as part of the display.


On the day I didn't have time to do the set-up as we could only get into the venue from 11am and our ceremony was at 2pm. Us girls would be getting ready upstairs so I gave Ben and his ushers strict instructions on how I wanted it all set out. Call me OCD but I did a mock set up at home using the same size tables and then photographed it as I wanted it to be set up. It worked and the boys did a great job, I didn't have to tweak a thing! Doing things like this well in advance definitely took the stress out of our wedding and stopped a lot of worries. In fact everyone was surprised at how calm I was on the day, I think preparation and organisation is key. 

Photos by the talented Binky Nixon Photography, our wedding photographer. 

R <3 xx

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2 comments

  1. Love how you took photos in advance of exactly how you wanted things set out!! You sound like my long lost twin! I love all your blog posts, so many great ideas :)

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  2. It was such an intimate moment and you could really feel the love and energy in the place. At Banquet Halls they had out sparkling water, wines, champagnes, etc. for all of us upon arrival, and provided dishes and serving utensils for the bagels and other snacks we brought.

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