For those of you planning a vintage wedding, this morning’s bride Amy has lots of lovely inspiration to share.
Having set her heart on a
vintage style
dress and venue, Amy found exactly what she was looking for in Jenny Packham’s Damask gown and beautiful The Bowdon Rooms located in Altrincham, Cheshire.From there an elegant colour scheme of blue followed (we just adore Amy’s blue shoes and nails) and she also incorporated a subtle music theme as a nod to one of her and Rob’s favourite pastimes.
For those that like the look and sound of The Bowdon Rooms, why not come along and see the stunning venue for yourself on Sunday 17th April during our Luxury Wedding Exhibition, which will feature the area’s top suppliers too!
With images by Let Love Flourish.
amy says:
Our engagement story isn’t the most romantic. Rob had been thinking about proposing for a while but instead of picking the right moment and setting, he got down on one knee whilst we stumbled home drunkenly from a party in the early hours. He did propose again in the morning though, just to make sure I remembered!We set the date for 28th August 2015. We chose to have the wedding on a Friday at the start of the Bank Holiday so we could carry on the celebrations into the long weekend.
We had our ceremony at Manchester Town Hall, which we always knew we wanted as we both love the architecture. We then chose The Bowdon Rooms for the reception as we wanted somewhere that would complement the town hall with a vintage feel.
Our theme for the wedding was vintage and music. Our relationship blossomed from our love of the same kind of bands and going to gigs so we thought this would be fitting. The colour scheme was pastel blue, mainly because it’s my favourite colour, but also as it works with the ‘something blue’ tradition in weddings.
My dress was Jenny Packham’s Damask design, which I bought from a sample sale at The White Closet, in Didsbury. It was a flowing, heavily embellished 1920s style dress. I knew I wanted a vintage style dress and after trying on a couple of the embellished Jenny Packham dresses nothing else compared.
Rob wore a navy blue three-piece suit and pale blue polka dot tie from Red Herring at Debenhams.
The beautiful bridesmaids’ dresses were made by Rob’s talented mum using pale blue silk fabric that I found at Borovick Fabrics in London.
On the day of the wedding my friend Donna was our chauffeur in her convertible Audi. She went to town decorating it and one of my favourite parts of the day was being driven to the Bowdon Rooms with the top down drinking champagne as passersby congratulated us. The guests were driven to the Bowdon Rooms in a personalised double decker bus from Travel Master.
Our photographs were the wonderful Amy-Leigh and Daryl from Let Love Flourish. I loved the natural style of their photography. They completely put us at ease and we enjoyed having them around on the day. I loved how the photos turned out and they made sure they captured every happy moment. I would 100% recommend them – it was one of the best decisions we made!
We also had our wedding filmed by videographers Quaint Weddings. They were so unobtrusive that we didn’t even notice them on the day and they did a beautiful job of putting the video of our day together.
For my flowers I carried a pale blue and white bouquet made up of gypsophila, thistles, eucalyptus, white lisianthus, white veronica and agapanthus blue to complement my colour scheme. They were from Venus Flowers on Oxford Road, in Manchester.
The table decorations carried on the music theme: every table was name after our favourite bands and table number were stuck on record singles we collected from Camden Market. My mum had collected old alcohol spirit bottles and a mixture of jars for vases which we added blue and white silk flowers to from Oswaldtwistle Mills. These were placed on top of sheet music of love songs by The Beatles. In keeping with the theme we also had an old guitar case on display for cards and presents to be placed in.
As favours we gave our guests personalised wedding shot glasses with miniature Jägermeister’s as we wanted our wedding to have a party feel!
Our friend Kasia stayed up until 3am the night before the wedding making our cake. She made it to tie in with our theme in pale blue with sugar flowers and a silver ‘All You Need Is Love’ cake topper, from Not on the High Street. She made each layer a different flavour so we had carrot cake, Victoria sponge and gluten free chocolate.
The catering at The Bowdon Rooms was great quality. Our wedding breakfast included choices of supreme of chicken, roasted rib of beef and homemade cannelloni.
In terms of entertainment, the band we hired, JJ Rosa, was one of the first things we decided on for the wedding as they were the band we were watching when we first met. They are a soul funk band, not your typical wedding band, but agreed to perform on our day delivering the perfect selection of cover songs including Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson as well as some of their original songs. We also had a photo booth provided by Infinity Booths, which was great fun to look back on.
One of our best friends Darrell Smith, performed our first dance song, which was You do Something to Me by Paul Weller. A group of our friends had also written a fun song about our relationship which they performed to a video of Rob’s stag do – it was a total surprise!
The staff at The Bowdon Rooms, especially Suzanne, did an incredible job of helping our wedding vision come to life and were supportive and helpful every step of the way. We would certainly recommend the venue to other brides and grooms.
I’d say my favourite part of the day was greeting our friends and family outside the town hall after the ceremony to a sea of bubbles. There were lots of happy vibes and it was funny watching tourists take our photo.
For our honeymoon we toured around Cuba for a week before staying in an all-inclusive hotel there for a further week. It was an unforgettable experience taking in the Cuban history and culture with plenty of sunshine and mojitos.
My top tip to other Brides Up North is to ask for help from friends and family and utilise friends’ talents to save money!