I have a funny feeling you’re going to completely fall in love with Helen and Ainge’s colourful wedding. Rainbow roses, bridesmaids ear headbands made of flowers and a bride carrying a hamburger purse! I mean what’s not to adore about it?!
“When we were planning the wedding we didn’t really have any strong ideas regarding what we did want but we knew exactly what we didn’t want”, began Helen. “We didn’t want a bare function room, we didn’t want it to be too traditional and we definitely didn’t want it to be too stuffy or formal. We viewed the Belle Epoque in February 2014 and booked it a few days later. It was exactly what we were looking for – quirky, cosy and with amazing food!”
“When it came to our theme, I’ve always loved colour and am known for my brightly coloured shoes!” she continued. “Our house is filled to the brim with colourful things and I just couldn’t imagine only choosing two or three colours for the wedding. So we went for all of them! We were so lucky that we found our florist Emma Fawcett-Eustace as she was fantastic from start to finish. I told her my (very rough) ideas for the flowers and she just went to town and created the most amazing bouquets, buttonholes and table centrepieces. She was so enthusiastic about our colourful wedding and was just a joy to deal with. The groom, the dads, the best man and each groomsman had a different coloured buttonhole each and myself and the bridesmaids had bouquets filled with gerberas, parrot tulips, craspedia and, of course, glorious rainbow roses.”
“As well as lots of colour we had some pixel elements. All our stationery was made by the groom in an 8-bit style as we’re both partial to old computer games and I used to love the Minipops illustrations. We didn’t want to use a photo of us on the save the dates or invites but we knew that we wanted them to be personal and very colourful. Other than that, our wedding was just a collection of lots of things we love like cheese, glitter, burgers and pigs!”
“I’ve always loved pigs and they had to feature in our day in some way so I spent the year before our wedding buying up as many suitably sized plastic pig figures on eBay as I could find”, she continued. “Ainge and my dad then sprayed them all white, glued little coloured pegs to them and they held the place names on the tables during the wedding breakfast. We also did gold glitter table numbers and ‘Mr & Mrs’ letters for the top table. My Mum made raspberry jam for the favours (we had little jam jars for the girls and chocolate moustaches for the boys) and Ainge designed the label to go on them.”
“The only thing I would have changed about our wedding would have been to have started the DIY earlier!”, she laughed. “Time ran away with us and, before we knew it, it was the weekend before the wedding and we hadn’t yet finished anything off! Cue a mad few days of rushing around and panic, frantically trying to get everything done. We managed it but I wish we’d planned better so we hadn’t been so stressed in the final few days before the wedding!”
“Everything takes longer than you think it will. From DIY projects, to getting invites printed, to choosing music for the afternoon playlist, everything took far longer than we’d anticipated. So my advice to other couples would be to start everything well in advance of when you think you actually need to!”
