Nowadays brides and grooms go beyond a colour scheme to theme their wedding day to reflect them as an individual couple – their personalities, passions and hobbies.
Today’s real wedding couple Nicola and Andrew did just that by arranging their ‘festival wedding’ around their love of music with vinyl decorations, gig ticket style invitations and live entertainment, in which the wedding couple themselves took part.
So
grab your wellies
and watch out for the mud as we share Nicola and Andrew’s soulful big day.With images by Ricky Carrington Photography.
nicola says:
We got engaged on 23rd Feb 2013 while we were away in Paris for the weekend. I’d always wanted to go, and it was a surprise weekend away which Andrew organised.We set the date for 17th May 2014. It was in the rugby off-season and was an available date at the venue we wanted – Willington Hall Hotel in Tarporley, Cheshire. We both really liked the venue as it was easy on the eye and the team there were very relaxed in catering to our needs.
We decided on a festival/music theme for our big day – I play the electric guitar and Andrew plays the drums. We both played with the wedding band at our reception as a surprise to our guests. We played Spitting Games by Snow Patrol. Music is an important part of our lives and we wanted our wedding to reflect that.
To fit in with our theme the place names were old vinyls with guests’ names on them, the table names were groups/albums close to our hearts, our invitations were like gig tickets and we had lots of photographs with our guests in wellies.
To go along with our festival theme we had a yellow and blue colour scheme. I liked sunflowers and the idea stemmed from there really!
Before trying on any wedding dresses, I didn’t have any idea of what I wanted so I went into a shop and told the assistant this. She then helped me try on a wide range of different types of dresses. I fell in love with a Jenny Packham dress – it was the third dress I tried on! I then went to a further two shops and ended up going back to the original shop to get the Jenny Packham dress. I can’t really tell you why I picked I just loved wearing it. The shop I got my dress from is called The Wedding Club in Birmingham. The bridesmaids got their dresses from there too.
Makeup and hair on the day was organised by the spa attached to Willington Hall and was absolutely fabulous. The hairdresser was called Sian Dutton who was recommended to us by the spa.
All the male wedding party wore the same suit. It was from a local suit vendor called L & J Formal Hire. All the males wore converse rather than shoes which all matched, in keeping with our festival/music theme. I wore flat shoes for the wedding ceremony and converse which my friend had decorated especially for the day in the evening.
Ricky Carrington Photography did our wedding photos. Ricky was brilliant and made everyone feel at ease which is a big help on the day. Any request we made wasn’t a problem and the photographs were amazing.
The flowers were based around sunflowers with a few extra bits. Arrangements were done by Black Cat Floral Design who I would highly recommend. I’m not actually a big fan of flowers and Mel really helped bring out my one idea of sunflowers and made the flowers/venue look amazing. They arranged everything and everyone on the day, which is a lovely personal touch.
We didn’t have any favours as such on the tables, instead we had a retro sweet table which the florist also decorated and set up for us. We had cupcakes rather than one big wedding cake, which was made by my close friend Natasha and reflected our musical theme.
To provide entertainment we had live band for the evening called The Smooth Criminals. This was a true highlight of the day, especially when we played a song with them. Again, as music is a big part of our lives, it seems a good match to have a live band for the evening. To keep children (and some of the adults) entertained at the wedding we also had giant games such as snakes and ladders and Jenga.
We would definitely recommend our wedding venue to others. The venue is gorgeous to look at and you can get married outside, which we did. We had the entire venue to ourselves, including accommodation for all of the wedding party. The staff were amazing and no request was too much trouble for them. They made me feel in control of the decisions made for the wedding which they were supportive in, it didn’t feel like a ‘package’ wedding – everything felt individual. Sue was our wedding co-ordinator who I would recommend also!
I couldn’t pick a favourite part of the day – we loved all of it!
For our honeymoon we had a bit of adventure! As well as music, we also love to travel so we took full advantage of our three weeks off work and went to Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo and Dubai. We spent every day exploring – it was amazing, especially Tokyo.
My top tip to other Brides Up North is chill out – everything works out fine in the end!
