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I absolutely adore today’s bride, Lynette, who sent in her Real Wedding along with photographer and Brides Up North Featured Supplier Andrew Scott Clarke. Her wedding is so full of colour and personality that I think I want to be her best friend.
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Not another girl crush, surely!?!
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Let’s hear from Lynette: Ben asked me to marry him in October 2010 in the Eiffel Tower restaurant at the top of the Paris hotel (Las Vegas) overlooking the Bellagio Fountains. It was very romantic (I don’t think my family thought so when I rang them to tell them forgetting that with the time difference in the UK I was calling them at 5am!).
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We set the date for 5 November 2011 (Bonfire Night and the day after the my birthday – Ben has been forewarned about trying to combine birthday and anniversary gifts into one in the coming years!).
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We chose The Place Hotel Manchester as our venue. The main thing we wanted from our wedding was to have as many people as possibly share the day and evening with us and have a huge party atmosphere, but without breaking the bank. Most of the venues we considered only offered ‘packages’ such as the typical “sparkling wine on arrival, 2 glasses of wine with the meal” etc which would have really restricted us in terms of numbers. Most of the venues were also quite traditional which whilst nice, didn’t really make us fall in love with them.
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We came across The Place by chance online, as it wasn’t hugely advertised as a wedding venue as such. As soon as we walked in, we knew we were going to get married there! It’s funky, modern, huge, with open brick walls and steel rafters – an old converted cotton mill (working well for a bride originally from Oldham!) The Atrium where we had our ceremony was really unusual and nothing like we’d seen before at the weddings we had been to. It had so much potential, and with a main room on 3 levels, we thought it was fantastic.
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And as if we hadn’t already fallen in love with the venue, the food / drink packages (or lack of them more importantly) was fantastic. We were able to basically split out budget in whatever way we felt was right for us. If we wanted to spend all our money on food – fine, give our guests a purely liquid lunch – again no problem!
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Which leads me to the main reason we ended up picking the venue. Sam the wedding coordinator at The Place. We discussed options with her before we booked the venue and basically nothing was too much trouble. She showed us mood boards for decorations, made drink suggestions, had ideas for entertainment, and instilled us with a huge amount of confidence that our day would be just as we wanted it! I can’t sing her praises highly enough!
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We didn’t have a theme as such, more a general mishmash of ideas mainly focused around late 80’s and early 90’s power rock songs! The only thing we knew for sure was that we wanted to get married to a beautiful instrumental version of Somebody to Love by Queen, and this kind of music ran through our entire wedding (check our the Vitamin String Quartet for fantastic and beautiful classical versions of great songs if you want something a bit different!)
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In the end, our colour scheme was bright but modern! Black and white mainly, but hot pink, yellow and orange were the accent colours of the day, from centre pieces, to the bouquet to the cake itself. Our evening reception had more of an ‘awards ceremony’ type feel – so we teamed black table cloths with the bright flowers – they looked great!
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So many people had told me you choose the dress you think you want. They were so right! I thought I was going to go for a more simple streamlined affair, but having tried on a range, I went for a strapless dress, with diamante trip on the empire line, and a fuller skirt.
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The dress came from Pronuptia Manchester I had a really fantastic experience with the shop, the price was really reasonable, and the fitting was a dream.
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I’d have to put a shout out to the local bridal alteration lady Pauline who was an absolute dream.
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I wasn’t a very ‘bridey bride’ at any point in the wedding so when it came to selecting flowers, I had no idea whatsoever, (who really knows the names of flowers anyway!) All I knew was I quite liked the idea of pink, orange, and yellow. Millers in Oldham handled everything! I had a beautiful, slight teardrop bouquet of gerberas, and roses in the bright colours I had suggested. The bridesmaids had the same flowers in more of a posy style.
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The button holes were all hot pink gerberas, and the shop even made me up a tiny baby sized pink carnation, as a button hole for a 6 month old nephew!
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My makeup was done by the amazing Zareena Mayet (zareena.mayet@yahoo.co.uk) a fabulously trained makeup artist who did a fantastic job of my request of “I don’t want any of that au naturel bridal makeup – give me dark smokey eyes and big eyelashes”. All of us felt like a million dollars/ supermodels when she’d done her magic!
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Our photographer (oh the photographer!) Andrew Scott Clarke was the best one I have ever come across in any wedding I’ve been to! Every single guest since the wedding has raved about the photos they’ve seen since (and one of my relatives even snapped him straight up for their wedding on NYE!).
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The best part about our photographer was his sheer daring! He managed to barge us into the venue kitchens to get a shot of us in the middle of dinner preparation madness, and also had us running out into the middle of a city centre road, dodging cars to get the best shot of us in a more urban setting. At one point we were even standing on a walkway under an old canal – bit smelly but made for some amazing photos!
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We designed our own invitations, menus and table plans. We also created our own cones of sweets wrapped with hot pink and yellow ribbon which looked fab and were loved by all (try making 120 though!)
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Now the thing for me about wedding cakes, is that I think no-one every really remembers them, despite a hell of a lot of expenditure going into selecting the best cake. I’d stumbled upon the idea of a ‘fake cake’ online – a cake actually made of foam but decorated to look real! Lets be honest, the cakes are there to look great on photos! So Fake Cake it was!
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Cherry Cloud Cakes managed to create me an amazing 3 tier cake in hot pink, orange and yellow (not a drop of white to be seen) with lots of mini gerbera and swirl designs. They also managed to create a cake topper of myself and the groom which looked exactly like us – even down to the tiny diamante details they had added to the dress and hair piece, and a mini cricket bat carried by the groom!
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Its so hard to choose my favourite part of the day! I think I would have to say our ‘non first, first dance’ We’d been to New York the year before and seen a Broadway show called Rock of Ages, and fell in love with Journey ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ as a first dance song. But then it got X-Factored and Glee’d so it became less cool and we picked something else!
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Towards the end of the wedding, the DJ played Journey, and with all of our friends and family in a circle around us, we managed to get the first dance we had wanted – and it didn’t feel cheesy!
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After the wedding we were off our our honeymoon! We started in New York for a few days, flew to San Francisco for another few days, then drove across to Yosemite for a night. From there to Vegas for 3 / 4 days then onto Mexico for 10 relaxing days – it was incredible. I think we were away for about 22 days in total!
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My top tip for other Brides Up North would be stay completely relaxed! If there is one thing I think most people would say about us in the build up to the wedding is that we were really laid back, which is weird as we’re not like that by nature! After we’d gotten engaged we made a list of things that we definitely wanted in a wedding and the things we didn’t, and it basically came down to a fun day with our loved ones. We kept this in mind throughout, and really didn’t worry about details such as whether seat covers would match the bride’s shoes (these things can drive you insane). As a result, we were really relaxed for the wedding itself, and it made the whole thing amazing!
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Congratulations Lynette & Ben! 
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Newlywed? Share your Real Wedding memories on the wedding blog. Contact me.
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Brides Up North UK Wedding Blog – Images © 2012 Andrew Scott Clarke
Andrew Scott Clarke is a Brides Up North Featured Supplier, but this is not a sponsored post
Contact Brides Up North to submit your business as a Featured Supplier
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