Moustaches, cakes and a whole lotta fun

Happy Friday! This week has flown by; all my weeks are merging into one at the moment. Who would have though that this time of year would be so busy in the wonderful world of weddings. I must keep this in mind for next year so at least I am prepared

I have some gorgeous real weddings coming up on the blog over the next few weeks people so do keep checking back for some real loveliness. First up, is the gorgeous, fun wedding of Joanna and Duncan by Sam Clayton Photography. Joanna and Duncan got married in Cley Next The Sea, Norfolk on 15^th May 2010. As always, more photos can be found in the real wedding gallery after the photos.

All photos courtesy of Sam Clayton Photography

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE FULL WEDDING IN THE REAL WEDDING GALLERY

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From Joanna and Duncan
The priority for our wedding day was for all our closest friends and family to have fun, relax and enjoy themselves. We had a great lead up to the big day… with people turning up a few days before to help out, celebrate and generally be merry. It made the whole experience fantastic. We’re both pretty silly and creative people. I thought of the moustache theme due to my love of Poirot. We came up with the idea to ask people to make cakes for a summer fete style cake stall as we love food and couldn’t decide what to have as dessert… people wanted to be involved and making a cake for the day was a great way to do that. Our friends and us have always Dj’d at parties since uni days and have a great selection good times records. Asking our friends and family to help and perform at the wedding allowed us to create the personal and intimate event that we wanted.

From Sam Clayton Photography
Although both living in London, Joanna & Duncan had chosen to get married in the Norfolk village of Cley. It was a very relaxed and fun day with plenty of lovely little details.

Joanna’s grandmother used to live in Well Cottage next to the church; the cottage still remains in the family as well as a piece of marshland opposite the cottage, over the village green. It was here that the reception was held in a pretty marquee with wonderful views.
Joanna had chosen a beautiful Sassi Holford dress, her shoes were fabulous, Kurt Geiger, a dark rose in colour with a beetle adornment! She placed a brooch belong to her Grandmother on her bouquet.

Joanna didn’t want the typical bridesmaid dress for her bridesmaids and had given them pretty much free reign to choose their own outfits. When they found these lovely skirts in Reiss paired with some French Connection tops they knew they had found an outfit which suited their style and the feel of the wedding.

Duncan had chosen a suit by Nicole Fahri – I loved it! He had a complimenting blue linen waistcoat and white tie. The couple had decided to keep both their choice of wedding attire a secret to each other. So Joanna had no idea what Duncan was going to wear.

Joanna, Duncan & I went over to Well Cottage for photos in the garden after the ceremony, whilst their guests enjoyed drinks and canapés in the orchard, along with special ale brewed by their close friends as a gift.

The guests enjoyed a barbeque and evening guests were invited to join the party in time for cakes & speeches. Guests had been invited to bake cakes for dessert and there was a huge array of fabulous cakes.

Joanna and Duncan wanted a post wedding shoot the next day on the beach at Cley. The weather was a totally different story to the previous day – overcast, blustery and threatening rain – but Joanna & Duncan were quite up for it.

With thanks to Joanna and Duncan and Sam Clayton Photography for sharing this gorgeous real wedding with the Bow Occasions Wedding Blog.

Louise ♥ xx

Bow Occasions is always on the lookout for gorgeous real weddings to feature. If you are interested in submitting a real wedding to the Bow Occasions Blog, please visit the submissions page for more information.

A Laid Back Country Wedding by Rebecca Honeywell Photography

It has been a few weeks since I have posted a real wedding on the blog but I have a lovely one for you today. Mel and Joseph got married at Hipping Hall in Cumbria. A beautiful, rambling country house hotel. I love every wedding I post on the blog but I really do love so much about todays wedding. From the gorgeous florals, to the dress (those ruffles!!!), to the AMAZING invitations to the fact that this lovely couple walked down the aisle together – a perfect example of doing it your way. I have posted a selection of photos below as well as a lovely piece written by Mel and Joesph’s wedding photographer, Rebecca Honeywell. More can be found in the real wedding gallery.

All photos courtesy of Rebecca Honeywell Photography.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE FULL WEDDING IN THE REAL WEDDING GALLERY

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Mel and Joseph had a really relaxed and personal wedding at Hipping Hall – they got ready together and Joseph even helped paint Mel’s nails! As Mel and Joseph got ready upstairs, the guests arrived and were treated to afternoon tea – with lots of strawberries. Between them Melanie and Joseph have 5 boys, and the school they went to serves strawberry tea including strawberry sandwiches in the summer, so this was used at the wedding as well. Mel’s gorgeous dress was Peony from www.juliatasker.co.uk, she had two pairs of shoes – a pair of heels for the day and flat for later on. The make up was by www.beautysimply.co.uk.

Mel and Joseph then walked down the aisle together and married at 4pm in front of 40 or so friends and family, before enjoying Pimms in the garden. A brilliant caricaturist captured all the guests (and even a dog who was invited!) throughout the day. Rather than showing up the bad points as many caricaturists do he looked for the good and so the portraits were flattering!

Mel and Josephs invitations were stunning – designed by Amy Tan (www.treespacestudio.com) in the US. The RSVP’s were jigsaw pieces which once put together revealed a scene of Mel and Joseph’s wedding.

With thanks to Mel and Joesph and Rebecca Honeywell for sharing this gorgeous real wedding with the Bow Occasions Wedding Blog.

Louise ♥ xx

Bow Occasions is always on the lookout for gorgeous real weddings to feature. If you are interested in submitting a real wedding to the Bow Occasions Blog, please visit the submissions page for more information.

Wedding :: Rachel and Darren – Loughborough {Part Two}

It’s time for part two of Rachel and Darren’s gorgeous, quirky wedding.

All photos courtesy of Mark Wallis.

We based our ideas and theme loosely around Alice in Wonderland, wanting to host our guests an afternoon tea party and garden games of croquet and cards. We also love festivals and wanted a laid back feel to our day, so chose a barbeque, old fashioned ice-cream man, bunting and floral patterns throughout. For our colour scheme we chose to use pastel shades of pink and yellow and turquoise. These colours gave a very fresh and summery feel to the day.

We wanted to be a bit different with our place names so decided to print out a face of each guest that was coming and stick it to a body that we cut out of various bits of magazines and print outs. It was so fun to see everyone interacting with their characters over dinner and the speeches, another small touch to make our friends feel special.

Our lovely friends Vicky and Alison made the cake for us and it looked amazing! The 3 tiers of sponge and fruit cake were covered in icing and wrapped in small bunting and sweets. Dennis the Menace and Tinkerbell figures stood proud on top of the cake. We first started liking each other at a fancy dress party dressed as these characters.

A friend beautifully arranged our table flowers for us. She placed a range of wild flowers in assorted jars with ribbons around them. They looked fantastic, creating a great central point to each table.

The entertainment was led by Best Man Tom and his band. We danced the night away to lots of old and modern classics. The dance floor was full all night.

Words of Wisdom

Make sure that you really do make your day as enjoyable as you can! Remember to be yourselves and think about creative ways of showing off your personality! I found it helpful to research a lot, gaining inspiration from multiple sources and weddings.

I love how many friends got involved with this wedding, it makes it all the more fun and so much more personal. With thanks to Rachel and Darren and Mark Wallis for sharing the wedding day with the Bow Occasions wedding blog.

Louise ♥

Bow Occasions is looking for real weddings to feature. If you are interested in submitting a real wedding to the Bow Occasions Blog, please visit the submissions page for more information.

Wedding :: Rachel and Darren – Loughborough {Part One}

Good morning everyone. I have a gorgeous wedding to share with you all which I know will brighten your Monday morning. It certainly made me smile on more than a few occasions when putting this post together.

Rachel and Darren tied the knot on 24th July 2010 at Our Lady’s Convent School, Loughborough.

All images courtesy of Mark Wallis.

The Proposal
We were travelling around New Zealand for 3 weeks in a baby blue VW Kombi around Christmas time (2009) when he proposed. We were in a place called Paihia on the North Island in a beautiful bay for Christmas Day. Darren woke me up nice and early all dressed up in smart shirt and tie. In the night he had got up and covered the outside of the Kombi in a hundred pink hearts, each one with a significant moment written on. After a special breakfast (and when the tide had come in) he took me in a small boat to the other side of the bay and played me a few songs on his guitar, including one he had written especially for me. Then the moment! He got down on one knee and proposed.

I wanted to keep my hair and makeup really simple. My bridesmaids and I did our make up together in the morning, which was good fun! I went to the hairdressers to get my hair done before they arrived. I decided to have my hair down, curly, with a large ivory flower in it. I really liked it, feeling the style went well with the dress. They used something called the ‘magic wand’ to curl my hair, which is intended to give larger curls at the top and smaller ones at the bottom.

My dress was a strapless, ivory, detailed dress from Berketex Brides. I loved the floral sequined detail on the front and side of the dress. I was after a fitted dress, and when I saw this in the shop I knew it was the one I had been looking for! I loved wearing it on the day and didn’t want to take it off!

I was given a pair of pearl earrings to wear. I did not have any other jewellery or accessories on as my dress was so beautiful and details, I felt that I didn’t need it!

For the bridesmaid’s bouquets, we wanted to keep them simple, as the dresses were bright and floral. The bouquets were made up of white roses. For my bouquet, I wanted to pick out the yellow in Darren’s bowtie and in the girl’s dresses. My bouquet consisted of daisies and yellow roses. All of the bouquets were tied with turquoise ribbons to tie in with the pastel colour scheme.

Rachel walked down the aisle to Reign Of Love by Coldplay and we walked out to Strawberry Swing, also by Coldplay. Our first dance was to Ordinary Angel by Athlete.

We had 6 bridesmaids; they wore beautiful floral dresses from Coast. We loved the bursts of colour in these dresses and found that the shape and style suited them all. We had 4 Best Men and 5 Ushers in the end because we have too many great friends! Everyone had the beautiful light blue shirts on with light grey suits and pink bowties for the Best Men and navy blue ties for the Ushers. They looked stunning!

For the transport it could only be a VW Kombi! One of Darren’s friends owns this Kombi so we had to get him booked in!

Come back tomorrow for Part Two of this gorgeous real wedding.

Louise ♥

Bow Occasions is looking for real weddings to feature. If you are interested in submitting a real wedding to the Bow Occasions Blog, please visit the submissions page for more information.

A Fun, Relaxed, Outdoors Wedding… Part Two

Welcome back for part deux of this lovely wedding. Georgia has provided some fantastic advice for you brides to be which I have slotted between a whole bunch of lovely photos.

All of the beautiful images are courtesy of Neil Palmer Photography.

The best advice we could give would be… Work as a team. So often the bride-to-be always feels the pressure that they need to make all the decisions and organise everything. You don’t! Write lists (excel spreadsheets.. and lots of them! Ha ha!) and daily, both look at these lists and split the jobs up evenly. Both me and Steffan are Graphic Designers so we loved figuring out all the small details and what things would look like. Luckily we love the same things, so take jobs that you are interested in, or work out who would be better at that job than the other!

Ask for help… You will be surprised how much your friends are willing to help. I couldn’t have had better people around me. And as soon as I said… I can’t do this, please can someone help me out. I would have more than enough hands. I did find this one hard as all I thought was people aren’t going to want to take time out of their busy lives to help with a wedding, and having to ask can always feel strange. But they do and really enjoy it. Anything that you can sit with your girlfriends over nibbles and wine and make, can’t be bad. I made 100 meters of bunting with my close friends and it was the funniest day!

Relax and don’t get too stressed, I know that this may seem simple and silly to say. But once you are stressed, nothing will get done how you want it to. The thing that helped me was not to get stressed about the small things, I would just think about what is upsetting me and how important it actually is. The day is about getting married, not about the colours of the flowers or why my nails don’t look perfect! No matter what advice about this I could give, there will always be moments of silly stressing, but as my first bit of advice says, if you work as a team, then these moments will be few and far between.

The BEST advice that has been past on to me: I was given this by a friend, she said it would help us remember the whole day (And it worked!), assign a close friend to come up to you and tell you the time, every hour or so. It’s just so simple! I had forgotten about this advice and forgot to assign someone. But one of my wonderful bridesmaids had remembered and got a friend of mine to do this. It was amazing as it made you take in every moment, sometimes I even thought ‘oh it’s only been an hour.. Great!’

First dance song?
Nina Simone ‘Here comes the sun’. Fun, upbeat, perfect for our summer day and most of all 3 mins 34 sec long!! Nice and short!! Hee hee!

Where did you go on your honeymoon?
We island hopped through Croatia. We could only take 10 days as we had another wedding to come back too!! It was an amazing country… We started in Split, hopped over to Brac, then Hvar… Kayaked around the islands of Hvar.. Then on to Dubrovnik. We could have stayed there for months. Unluckily we couldn’t. But coming back to a wedding stopped those honeymoon blues!

“I hope people enjoy all our photographs. I would recommend Neil Palmer. He was honestly amazing. So friendly and unobtrusive. Everyone said how funny it was to not notice him around. Which was perfect for the style of photography we wanted for our big day.”

I would have loved to have been a guest at this wedding!

Many congratulations to Georgia & Steffan – thank you so much for sharing your day with Bow Occasions and a big thank you to Neil Palmer Photography for the fantastic photography.

With love,

Louise xx

A Fun, Relaxed, Outdoors Wedding… Part One

Today on the Bow Occasions Blog, I have a fun, relaxed outdoors wedding to share with you. Neil Palmer sent me so many gorgeous images, I struggled choosing a selection for the blog, therefore this wedding will be another two-part blog post.

Georgia & Steffan tied the knot at St Mary’s in Hampton followed by a marquee reception just up the river in Thames Ditton.

All of the beautiful images are courtesy of Neil Palmer Photography.

Where and how did you propose?

Steffan: ‘I proposed to Georgia in Thailand. We were going on holiday there and I knew it was her favourite place in the world. I had asked her parents and had the view of getting/designing a ring together when we got back (the safer option!). So when arriving in Thailand I knew I had to get something as a token to give when I proposed. A little Buddha maybe? No not good enough. A piece of jewellery.. A bracelet a necklace.. No not good enough. We were meeting friends who had been travelling for a year and my mate had talked about coconut jewellery making they had done in Fiji. A spark went off and I carved a ring out of a coconut shell, luckily Georgia likes laying on the beach and I like having some shade, so at the front of our beach hut I carved away. It was perfect! Then the setting arrived… It couldn’t have been better, night time on Bottle Beach, Koh Pha ngan, just after full moon so night time became a brilliant blue glow. Luckily she accepted my proposal and we celebrated into the evening with a bottle of Thai whiskey. I don’t think either of us would have changed the occasion. It was an amazing evening. She loved the coconut ring and wore it for 3 months as she couldn’t make a decision on the ‘right’ ring, she also wore it on a peach bit of lace around her wrist on our big day.. I was chuffed when I saw it!’

Most memorable moment of the day?

Steffan: ‘My most memorable moment has to be when I saw Georgia for the first time looking like a Cheshire Cat, her smile was so large she looked gorgeous. This was also the first time I got to see ‘the dress’. It is probably most vivid as it was what I had been thinking about the most in the run up to the wedding.’
Georgia: ‘Oh there are just so many. And how some brides say that they don’t remember the whole day… I do. A few that stand out the most for me though… Standing behind the glass doors in the entrance to the church, arm in arm with my dad and standing tall thinking ‘now breath’. I could see Steffan at the front of the church and was hoping he’d turn round (he was told by his dad that it was bad luck to do so, so he didn’t! I was unaware of this superstition!), then I was beside him. Huge smiles from the both of us. Best moment! Another moment that stands out is when we got off the boat that had taken us from the church, down the Thames, to the field. At the bottom of the field was a pub. The boat had to moor up here for us to get off. It was an extremely warm day so there were loads of people sitting outside having a drink… We arrived, got off the boat and everyone cheered and clapped! I was pretty embarrassed as I don’t like being centre of attention, especially in front of lots of strangers!! But it gave me a lovely feeling that people I didn’t even know were so happy for the both of us. My third moment had to be arriving at the field. The entrance was at the bottom of the field and the marquee was at the other end. It was wonderful seeing everyone having a drink and laughing, we were bombarded by all the kids that ran to greet us. It was a lovely moment’.

Come back later today for the marquee reception, a ton of fun and some lovely couple shots.

With love,

Louise xx

Real Wedding :: Jo & Cole @ Elvey Farm

I love featuring local photographers & suppliers and this wedding is no exception. I’d like to thank Nick Griffiths, a hugely talented photographer based in London for sharing these photos with Bow Occasions.

Congratulations to Jo & Cole and thank you for letting me blog your gorgeous wedding.

Where and How Did He Propose?
Cole ended up proposing twice! We were on holiday in Kefalonia and it was a beautifully clear evening with the full moon reflecting on the sea. Cole suggested we take a walk along the beach and after a while he kneeled down. I thought he was just collecting pebbles so when he said ‘will you marry me’ I was really surprised. We walked into the village where I chose a silver and turquoise ring and Cole said he’d surprise me a diamond later on. About 6 months later we were eating out at a restaurant called Tatlers in Norwich, when Cole went down on one knee again and presented me with the most beautiful diamond ring.

Most Memorable Moment of the Day?
When the ceremony was over and we walked back down the path to our song – Take That’s Greatest Day – although this is closely followed by Boots (our American Cocker Spaniel) running up the path with our rings when Cole whistled!

What Advice Would You Give to Brides Who are Currently Planning Their Wedding?
1. It’s your special day so make sure you and your future husband plan it together.

2. Planning a wedding takes a lot of time so spend your time, effort and money on those elements that really matter to both of you. We wanted our day to reflect our love and personalities, so here’s our list of priorities – a magical countryside location, our vows, readings, the best photographer, ceremony music, our first dance song, our outfits, the theme/colours, invitations, entertainment, food & seating plan.

3. It was really important to us to have a small wedding with only our closest family and friends. Think carefully about what you both want and if well meaning people try to interfere, politely but firmly advise them it is your day.

First Dance Song?
Take That – Greatest Day

Where Did You Go On Your Honeymoon?
We spent 10 days at The Laguna Resort in Nusa Dua, Bali – then 5 days in Singapore – ending up on the Maldivian Island of Baros for 2 weeks.

Gorgeous couple, gorgeous dog, gorgeous venue, gorgeous wedding… I think you’ll all agree!

SUPPLIERS:
WEDDING VENUE :: Elvey Farm
DRESS :: Camilla Brides, 53 North Walsham Road, Norwich, NR6 7QA – Tel: 01603 482641
FLOWERS :: Lesley Masters, Phoenix Barn, High Halden, Kent, TN26 3BP – Tel: 01233 850551

PHOTOGRAPHER’S CONTACT DETAILS:
Website: www.nickgriffiths.com
Blog: blog.nickgriffiths.com
Twitter: @NGPhotos