John and Louise wanted a rustic, barn wedding and Sledmere Barn in Yorkshire was perfect for them. The venue was a real ‘blank canvas’, meaning they can completely free reign on how they decorated it.
Sledmere barn was the first place we visited and we didn’t need to see any other locations – we loved it!” said the bride. “The barn has some gorgeous details, brick archways, wooden beams, old hooks and nails dotted everywhere. It is open on one side but to protect us from the elements the manager said he would build us a hay bale wall!”
“Our wedding theme was simply about us, our friends and family, our loves, our lives and our memories”, she continued. “We made everything we could ourselves, and used an eclectic and rustic country theme to pull everything together. We called in a lot of favours from people, not necessarily to save money but to just make everything as personal as we possibly could.”
“For our table plan we used a selection of mirrors which were either bought from car boot sales or donated to us by our friends and family. Our tables were named after pubs from places that are special to us. We made pub signs that were used as part of our centrepieces.”
“Our day was full of love and humour”, she continued. “We did literally everything ourselves too. The pub signs, jars covered in ribbon, cake toppers, wooden signs, individually stamped place names with individual home grown garden flowers, hand punched confetti, all the stationery, mirrors for the table plan and literally hundreds of tissue paper pompoms both large and small! My Mum’s Friday morning coffee ladies even did the flowers for the church which were sourced from their gardens. The whole wedding took a year to make from Mum planting seeds, growing flowers and plants to buying and making all the decorations and all the details. The best bit of the day was seeing all the hard work come together.”
“Although everyone told us in the run up not to stress about the little details, I’m glad we did! We spent ages concentrating on all the little touches. Our experience was that people did notice everything and we loved making it all! My advice to other couples having a DIY wedding would be to start early and whenever you see anything for a good price that you think fits wedding, JUST BUY IT! That way you naturally spread the cost, and it reduces the risk of last minute panic buys. Also look for things around your house that you already have. We used loads of things that we already owned like metal signs, fairy lights wicker baskets and tablecloths.”
