Lindsay and Ian’s big day at the iconic Ripley Castle in Yorkshire was sleek, chic, fun and fabulous… with a really big party at the end of it. Sounds exactly like our kind of wedding.
With images by Brides Up North Sponsor, James Tracey Photography.
Lindsay says:
We got engaged at the top of a mountain during a snowboarding trip to Tignes, France on Ian’s 30th Birthday. Ian rode all morning with the ring in his pocket unaware his pocket zip had been open! Luckily it was still there when the time came to propose!We got married on 22nd February 2014 at Ripley Castle in Harrogate. We wanted a winter wedding to tie in with honeymoon plans to head straight to Thailand after the wedding.
We’d looked at a number of venues prior to seeing Ripley Castle and none of them felt right. As soon as we looked around the Castle it was exactly what we were looking for and booked straight away.
I wore a Mori Lee dress, and bought it from Platinum Bridal Boutique, Yeadon.
I never wear strapless dresses so I knew my dress would have sleeves of some description. Before I went dress shopping I saw my dress in a magazine and already knew it was the dress I wanted. I searched for shops who stocked Mori Lee and managed to find the dress I wanted and loved it as soon as I tried it on.
I’m not a massive flower fan so I wanted more greenery and a twig effect rather than roses. My bouquet was made by a florist called Elsie Russell in Shipley – they also made my mums bouquet when she got married.
My make up artist, Lauren Sally, was also amazing and we all loved our make up on the trial and on the day of the wedding.
I had two bridesmaids who had floor length evening dresses from House of Fraser by Ariella.
Ian had a custom made three piece tweed suit made on Saville Row by JLSA MONO Design.
We went for a bit of an indie style wedding as we both love music so this was heavily featured in our wedding plans. We also wanted to keep it a little vintage to keep in with the Castle theme. Our colour scheme was navy blue and green.
We handmade our seating plan which concentrated on our music theme of the wedding. Instead of table numbers we had our favourite bands as the table names and put the bands vinyl on each table.
Instead of a guest book we ordered a heart shaped jigsaw for guests to sign the pieces from www.notonthehighstreet.com
The centre pieces were floating candles and candelabras, and we had little navy blue and ivory chocolate love hearts as our favours. The bridal party all got tailored gift as an extra special thanks.
Neither of us are big sweet people so we went for the savoury option and had a five wheels of cheese cake. This was from Cheese and Chutney, Saltaire.
We used James Tracey Photography. I would definitely recommend James to others. He was exactly what we were looking for as we didn’t want structured pictures for hours but more of a documentary style photographer and James is great at this. We’ve had lots of compliments on how good our pictures look. In addition to this as soon as we met him we knew we wouldn’t be a bossy photographer and had a personality which would get along with us and our guests during the day.
We hired a band called ‘The Story’ who we booked through Warble Entertainment. They played a mixture of music but mainly indie. They had everyone up dancing all night, and their rendition of ‘Killing in the Name’ was a particular highlight!
The evening reception was probably the best part of the day. The band were amazing and it was great for the evening reception to turn into a massive party with everyone dancing all night.
We went on our honeymoon two days after the wedding. To start with we flew to Bangkok for three nights, from there we stayed on the island of Koh Pha Ngan for three nights where we stayed in an amazing hotel with our own pool overlooking the sea. From there we stayed in Koh Samui for four nights and then to finish off we went to Singapore for a couple of nights.
My top tip for other Brides Up North would be to have a spreadsheet! I had lots of spreadsheets and although everyone laughed at me and I had hours of jokes made about my organisation there wasn’t anything I didn’t know from looking at them!
I asked Ian to answer this question and his top tip to the groom was ‘just say yes’!
