Sarah and Arran were married in August, after two years long distance between Manchester and Brighton. They wanted their wedding to just reflect them, have a venue with a brown sign, and be beautiful. For entertainment they had snail racing (!) and even made a DIY snail arena for the day!
Sarah told us all about their wedding. “At the start of our ceremony, I walked down the aisle Baba Maa, followed by lovely readings by Arran’s dad, and our brilliant friend Marie Harris who reworked Baz Luhrman’s Wear Sunscreen to describe how we met, as well as dishing out some great advice to guests and couple alike. At the end of the ceremony we danced back down the aisle to some banging Psy Trance!”
“Wee did loads of DIY projects so the one thing we wish we’d know about planning a wedding before we began is the amount of time it takes!” she laughed. “We designed and hand-printed all our invites, table plans and save the dates, we made our own wildflower seed favours, did the floral arrangements, made the bike wheel chandeliers (out of old bike wheels, florists foam and fresh cut flowers), and painted the snail arena the weekend before the wedding. It wasn’t just a quick Saturday morning job!”
“Our favourite part of the wedding was the ceremony itself and seeing our guests have so much fun. But the lemon posset for dessert was a close second!”
The couple’s biggest expense was their venue, “When we saw Michelham Priory we fell in love, and their catering was also great. We had seen a lot of venues but nowhere else had anything close to the atmosphere and ‘us-ness’ that Michelham did. However we saved money by doing so many DIY projects, and also by having great friends who can bake meant we didn’t need to splash out on wedding cakes.”
“The best thing about planning our wedding was doing it together. We had so much fun and not an argument in sight! The worst thing was the time it took, it felt like we did nothing else for a few months, but in retrospect, we wouldn’t have done a thing differently.”
“Our advice for future brides and grooms is to do it together. It’s a brilliant bonding experience and starts you off on the right footing for the marriage to come.”
