Libby and Stephen were hitched in September at Tournerbury Woods Estate on the Hampshire/ West Sussex border. They didn’t set out to have a theme, but in throwing together all the things they liked it ended up being a super colourful, festival-esque day.
“Our wedding was an expression of our personalities and everything we love”, explained the bride. “We also had lots of colour! We wanted to create a day that was going to be fun for all our loved ones.”
“We were true to ourselves and didn’t have a theme and we created our own ceremony from scratch with our friend Harry. At the venue, they had this beautiful black metal pagoda which we decorated with ribbon and brightly coloured pots with beautiful plants and pink flamingos. Our guests were all sat on hay bales with crochet blankets sourced from various car boots and charity shops. As I walked down the aisle with my Dad and bridesmaids ahead of me to James Vincent McMorrow’s cover of Higher Love the sun came out and apparently dragonflies were flying around the guests! I was oblivious at this point as I must admit I was a little nervous.”
“The whole day was so special and we did not conform to the usual wedding traditions”, she continued. “We also had camping at the venue so on the Sunday we all got to hang out in the sunshine and have a cooked breakfast on the BBQ and giggle about the wedding and all the fun we had.”
“We did a lot of making and doing too. We made ribbon garlands for the marquee decorations, we made homemade signs for the venue. We also decided to give everyone a hand drawn picture as their favours which we tried to make as personal as possible, this went down really well and made a lot of people smile and laugh. Although it took us hours to draw over 90 pictures it was lovely to see everyone’s faces when they sat down to eat. My Dad also sprayed over 90 plastic dinosaurs gold for our name tags. We made a lot of things and that is why it really felt like ‘our’ wedding because we put so much love and thought into everything.”
“The best thing about planning the wedding was the excitement of it all coming together, seeing all our hard work and ideas taking form”, she concluded. “We also really enjoyed all the handmade projects. The hardest thing was the time it took out of our everyday life and the constant worry of ‘I really should be doing that thing for the wedding instead of watching TV’ but we did it, we made time and it was totally worth it.”
