The Cake

There were 2 main reasons why I did not want to buy a wedding cake from a cake shop: the difficulty I would have had in fitting in a consultation when I wasn't even in the country, let alone the area and my extreme reluctance to spend £300+ on a cake. I know, its an amazing, tiered and highly decorated cake but its still just a cake.

Of course I had another reason as well - the desire to decorate my own. Ever since I was a child and my mum discovered an amazing cake making and decorating shop in Reading cake decorating has been a hobby of mine. Every year I would decorate mine and my mum's birthday cakes and I did quite a few Christmas cakes and birthday cakes for my friends as well. However, decorating the cake was one thing, I didn't feel capable of making it as well which left me with a problem.

Marks and Spencer was my saviour. Whilst I briefly considered buying one of their pre-decorated cakes I still didn't want to spend £200 if I could help it.
So I bought several of their "Traditional Wedding Cakes" which can be bought tier by tier in different flavours. I bought a medium fruit cake and a large sponge cake to provide 2 tiers. Sadly they don't do a round chocolate cake so I bought 2 rectangular chocolate cutting cakes to be kept in the kitchen and served later.



The decoration was obvious to me as soon as I had my butterfly theme in mind. I wanted it to look as if several butterflies had landed on the cake.
I bought some butterfly cutters which also imprint veins onto the wings along with some flower paste (very fine icing paste). The paste sets hard so all I had to do was roll it out, cut out the butterfly and then prop the butterflies up so that they set with the wings at an angle.
Finally I used dusting powder to brush the wings and give them a bit of colour.

Since I only had 2 tiers for the cake stand I used the same decoration as for the tables on the bottom instead. I had also made lots of extra butterflies in case any got broken in transit and these were placed around the bottom for extra decoration.

The cakes themselves totalled £72 and I spent roughly £15 extra on the decorations, though I still have loads of paste and powder left if I ever want to make more decorations.

Flowers

I'm not sure how it started but somehow weddings just have to have flowers and from what I've heard from some sources, flowers usually makes up a large chunk of your overall budget. Don't get me wrong, I wanted my wedding to look pretty but there was no way I was spending £1000 or more on flowers.

Not only that but my colour scheme was blue and there aren't many  blue flowers to choose from. In fact, it turns out that in early May the only blue flowers (worth mentioning) in season are hydrangeas. I had issues with that because I wanted cornflowers. I also wanted (white) tulips but was told they weren't in season either. Maybe it was the especially long and cold winter we had but there were definitely tulips for sale the day before my wedding!

I got around the cornflower issue by buying some artificial cornflowers from Hobbycraft. I wasn't too keen on the idea of using artificial flowers for the whole wedding though so I started looking into florists. A quick google search brought me to the conclusion that wedding florists all charge pretty much the same. You can't do a true price comparison without having a consultation with each because the prices they quote on their websites are a guide only. The final cost depends on the types of flowers you want and the complexity and sizes of the arrangements.

As I had minimum time in the UK in which to have consultations I decided to just choose a florist recommended by the venue and go with it. So I went down to Bristol to meet this florist and have a chat about what I wanted. Since the only aspects I had in mind were the colours, this turned out to be a rather awkward conversation. I think I was expecting far more from her in the way of suggestions and ideas, rather than me reel off a list of what I wanted and for her to put together some numbers. We got along better once I had a look at her portfolio and suggested some styles I liked. I chose a small square vase arrangement for the windowsills which she announced at the end was quite expensive as it took a lot of flowers to fill. Why she couldn't have told me at the time so I could possibly have chosen an almost-exactly-the-same-but-cheaper (same size but round perhaps) style I don't know!

Anyway the result was a quotation for 4 bridesmaids bouquets, 1 brides' bouquet, 6 table decorations and a floor-standing pedestal arrangement for £600. It was a reasonable price and my mum thought I should go with it but my fiance thought it was too much to spend on flowers. I would have ignored him had it not been for the nagging control freak inside me suggesting that I could use artificial flowers for a lot cheaper and, most importantly, I could make the arrangements myself. Not only that but I have terrible hayfever and felt that artificial flowers were preferable to sneezing all day...

...So I provided Hobbycraft with a lot more business. Not just Hobbycraft either, I also bought flowers from Dunelm Mill, vases and glass nuggets from Tesco Extra and tin buckets from Homebase.

My venue was a country watermill so I wanted the flowers to be simple and reminiscent of an English country garden

I used 2 shades of cornflowers along with a single white hydrangea flower in the tin buckets to put on each windowsill. I also added a single white butterfly, made from feathers, to each.

The cornflowers were 99p for a stem with 5 flower heads on (3 stems in each bucket) and the hydrangea was £3 per flower, both from Hobbycraft. Buckets were 99p each and the butterflies were around £4 for a pack of about 12.

I wanted the table centres to be a little more elegant but still very simple. I was also very careful about which artificial flowers to use as some look much more realistic than others.

The table centres consisted of fairly large goldfish bowl vases with a handful of colourless, shimmery glass nuggets and a single artificial dahlia head in the bottom. I also used 3 strands of artificial grass around the edges of the bowl.

The bowls were £8.50 and nuggets around £3 a pack, only half a pack is in each bowl. Dahlias were £1.50 each from Dunelm Mill.

I wanted the bridesmaids' bouquets to fit in with the simple, country theme and, although gerbera don't really, these spider gerbera had just enough of a tousled look to be similar to cornflowers. Anyway I fell in love with them as soon as I saw them in Dunelm Mill, its the black centres that does it for me!

Each bouquet is made with 5 gerbera held together with florist's tape and then wrapped with a piece of cream ribbon, held on with 3 pins.

I did quite a bit of research into buying premade, artificial bouquets and discovered that the cost is the same as for fresh flowers. I wouldn't have minded if those companies had access to amazing quality, real-looking flowers but it turned out the flowers were no better than the ones I bought from Hobbycraft and Dunelm Mill.

Each gerbera cost me just £2, making each bouquet just over £10, a saving of £30 on the cheapest price I saw for real or artificial bouquets.

I also used some of my cornflowers with a single artificial leaf to make buttonholes for the groom, best man, ushers and dads. I simply tied the 2 together using florist's tape. One cornflower also made it onto a hairclip for one bridesmaid's hair.

My bouquet contained the only real flowers on display at the wedding. I was conscious that it would be in a lot of photos and possibly very close-up photos so I felt I should use real flowers. I would have done the same for the bridesmaids had I not seen those gerberas and fallen in love with them!

The day before the wedding I set off to Anemone a large florist in Bath to buy the flowers for my bouquet. However, I had got up very early and knew it wouldn't be open yet so I stopped off in Homebase on the way to buy a bucket to fill with water to keep the flowers fresh. In homebase I passed some beautiful blue hydrangeas and, knowing how hard blue flowers were to find, I bought the (fully rooted and growing) potted plant. I then stopped in Sainsbury's and spotted some bunches of  white roses for £4 so I bought them and headed back without every making it to Anemone. (Though Anemone did later provide us with some lovely bouquets to give as thanks to people)

I had a minor crisis with my bouquet because the hydrangea head I cut off to make the bouquet the day before the wedding had died by the morning of the wedding. However I just chopped another one off the plant and remade the bouquet on the morning, with some extra roses for added support.

The great thing about using artificial flowers for all these (apart from the fact I had full control over what they looked like) (and the fact that we saved several hundred pounds) was that we were able to give them away to our guests at the end of the night as keepsakes.

Photography

Photography was one of the most difficult aspects of the wedding to organise. I felt that it was one of the most important parts; as the only lasting reminder of the day and the only way to share it with people who couldn't be there. At the same time I didn't want to spend a fortune on it.

I started by googling for photographers in the area and emailing a few who seemed decent and/or cheap. I managed to contact several morons! One site advertised a completely custom photography package with precisely the elements the customer wanted. The reply I got to my email, listing the elements I wanted, was something along the lines of "its this much money for these hours and this, this and this". Sadly "this, this and this" were not what I asked for...

I started again with the list of photographers recommended by my venue as being good quality and good value for money. What I found was that wedding photography usually starts at around £1000 and you could easily spend up to £2000 without getting anything out of the ordinary. At this point I put my fiance on the case who has an even higher aversion to spending money than I do and unfathomable skills with google. Even he could not find anyone with wedding photography experience for cheaper. The other issue we both had with the vast majority of wedding photographers was that they did not provide you with rights to or digital copies of your photos. This meant that, if we wanted any extra prints making for ourselves or friends and relatives, we would have to buy them each time from the photographer.

I had a minor brainwave and advertised on Deviantart for a photographer. My thinking was that this is a website devoted to showcasing people's artwork (including photography, both professional and amateur) and that maybe I could find someone who does wedding photography as a hobby on the side or someone just starting out in the business. The idea was a mutually beneficial agreement where I would get good quality, cheap photos and the rights to copy them and they would get experience and a start on their portfolio. Sadly I didn't manage to find anyone suitable.

In the end I went back to the list of recommended photographers and chose the cheapest one - Graham Morgan - who also provided full resolution, digital copies of all the pictures. I managed to negotiate a further discount for not getting a wedding album as I preferred to make my own.

Check out my future blog post "Reviews" to see what I thought of Graham Morgan and all the other services/suppliers we used for our wedding.

Pictures!!

Now the wedding is over (in the end it went perfectly and everything came together) I decided to quickly put a couple of pictures up so you can some of the things I mentioned in a previous post.

My dress which is made by Romantica of Devon and bought from Altered Image in Shrewsbury. (This isn't me)

The Groom and ushers' outfits; suits, shirts and cream waistcoats hired from Moss Bros. blue waistcoat (groom) and cravats (ushers) hired from Young's Hire

(Rest assured I will continue to update this blog until I've covered everything before I let it rest, even though the wedding has now been)

Of themes and stationery

Colour schemes were easy, I had decided at least a year ago that I wanted a purple and cream colour scheme for a simple but dramatic effect. That was derailed rather quickly when someone suggested it was rather winterey but it didn't take much to switch to blue, a nice bright blue, a colour that James (with his blue eyes) looks particularly good in.

Themes took a little longer, mainly because I was adamant that I did not want a theme because I decided themes were just too cheesy. On the other hand a theme makes it so much easier to build up a big picture in your mind. It was when I was designing the invitations (I wanted to make them by hand) that a theme finally emerged. I started by going to Hobbycraft and buying up a selection of items that I thought might come in useful to make the invitations out of:

A couple of heart-shaped punches in different sizes. I wasn't sure if I would use them to punch hearts out of the invite card itself or to make hearts in different colours/patterns to stick onto the invitation.

Some sheets of coloured paper and card, some patterned and some plain, as well as some wedding-ey premade card toppers.

Plain, blank cream cards with envelopes, as well as some extras to practise on.

Rubber stamps with wedding messages on and ink stamp pads in an assortment of colours.




After several ideas and attempts I had made several sample invites that I liked but nothing that was really special. I started googling for images of invitations for inspirations but there was one design that stuck in my head that I had rejected for being far too cheesy. Needless to say that is the design I ended up with and that was the start of my overall theme!

I have rather an obsession with things that are simple yet striking and I think this fits that category.

I started with a stamp saying "Wedding Invitation" using silver ink at the top. Then I used a butterfly stamp which I inked with silver in the centre, blue for the middle of the wings and purple on the edge.

Once stamped I used a craft knife to cut out the butterfly wing shape, following the contours of the stamp outline.


Finally I printed the insert with all the details on onto blue paper so it would show through where the wings had been cut out. I added a few printed butterflies to the insert as well and handwrote the guests' names inside with silver pen.

In the end I followed this theme right the way through, using the same butterflies, from the insert, on the wedding website I made and the same butterfly outline, as on the front of the invites, for the place settings.

I wanted a darker shade for the tables to make them more striking so I chose this indigo shade and tied it in with some purple hints on other decorations. I used the same colour card to write the place settings, also with silver pen and tied very-nearly-the-same-shade ribbon around cream favour boxes. The favour boxes came from Tesco Extra and cost 3.99 for a pack of ten - the cheapest I managed to find once you took into account delivery.

The seating plan was a little more tricky for several reasons. I wanted to be able to print it out which meant I couldn't use silver writing which in turn meant I couldn't use dark paper. In the end I found the perfect solution - a large piece of flower-patterned tracing paper in exactly the right colours which I glued to some cream mountboard. I then printed the numbers in the same shade of blue on a circle and the names onto a ring which I cut out and stuck around the number.


I also used butterflies to decorate the cake, the flowers and for my earrings. I even managed to find some beautiful butterfly thank you cards for my bridesmaids. Check out future blog posts to see more!