Natalie and Lewis not only planned their wedding very quickly, but they did so with a small budget and grand ideas! Not really liking traditional wedding colours or themes, they pulled together a Great Gatsby inspired day with a budget of £6000.
“I love the Great Gatsby and the 1920s so we based the wedding loosely on that”, said the bride. “Lots of lighting, peacock feathers and sparkly things. I don’t particularly like ‘wedding colours’ so I dressed my bridal party in metallics and kept our bouquets white with greenery and peacock feathers to break them up a bit. The chairs at the village hall were black and gold with a shell pattern which matched perfectly, which was lucky as I hate chair covers with a passion. We also had some Thai influences as my friend Joy is so talented at fruit carving and we love Thai food.”
“We planned the entire wedding very quickly but we were pretty laid back about the whole thing. The only time I was actually properly stressed was the day before, as I was on a course for work and my phone rang constantly for four hours! We were lucky in that we got all of the suppliers we wanted at short notice, I think having a January wedding helped! I think I booked the caterers two weeks beforehand.”
The bride’s incredible dress came from ASOS! “I got my dress from Forever Unique at ASOS in the sale! As we arranged everything so quickly I didn’t have much time for dress shopping, plus I couldn’t justify spending thousands on one dress, so I ordered every white dress they had and tried them all on. I loved the low back. My headpiece was my something blue and was from Rose Red Rose White on Etsy. I originally had the headpiece instead of a veil as I didn’t see any I liked, but when the Rock n Roll Bride for Crown & Glory veil collection launched I fell in love with the custom slogan veil. I had it personalised with my married name so I didn’t wear it till after the ceremony. It got the most compliments out of everything I wore!”
“We didn’t have a lot of decorations in the hall as once we had our draping and lighting we didn’t think we needed much (basically just a few paper wheels hung on the walls). Our favourite decorations were the beautiful Thai fruit carvings we had to decorate the cake table from my friend Joy. We had quite a few children coming and as our hall had a smaller adjoining room we set that up as a children’s area with some arts and crafty bits. It went down well although I ended up covered in glitter glue!”
“The whole wedding was pretty informal”, she continued. “My family took turns behind the bar in the day time and we hired staff for when it got busy in the evening who were brilliant. We didn’t have a table plan aside from the top table so everyone sat where they liked and the hog roast was buffet style. I completely made up timings as I had no idea what time things are supposed to happen, but somehow we seemed to stick to them anyway. It was really relaxed which was exactly what we wanted.”
