When you first get engaged, every married person you know is an expert on weddings, amIright? So much advice, so so overwhelming!
Some advice we received was helpful, some…not so much. One thing that really surprised me was the number of people who told us not to bother with any personal touches.
They said it wasn’t worth it, that no-one noticed them, they took up too much time etc etc. I felt a bit lost, as I have never been a fan of spending hours on things that don’t matter, but in life generally I am ALL about the personal touches.
So this just didn’t sit well with me. I was determined to find ways in which we could make our wedding different, show a little bit of me and Mr DTE, without spending weeks (or thousands of pounds) doing so. I turned to Pinterest for inspiration. After an hour I felt even more overwhelmed.
It is possible! I’m pleased to say, bridelings, it is possible. And you don’t have to spend a ton of moola to do so. Here’s how we did ours…(feel free to steal, it’s not like we can copyright all our genius ideas). Here are just a few of them, with tips on how to recreate:
Order of Service Guest Intros:
- Though we know all our guests, they didn’t know each other from Adam. There were 150 of them, come on now.
- As it was such a BIG group, but we wanted it to feel as intimate and personal as possible. Tricky…
- We wanted our guests to feel like they knew each other, so we provided some intros to our nearest and dearest VIPs on our orders of service.
- A little snippet about each of our squad members, showing why they are our VIPs.
- It didn’t even take very long to do this and didn’t cost any extra, except that we had some additional pages in our orders of service.
Here’s a sneaky excerpt of some messages:
Joe (Jo’s Bridesman): Jo’s best pal from high school, and amazing travelling buddy. After surviving years of school life in Essex and travelling to random corners of the world together, Jo and Joe are more like family.
Rory (Pedro’s Usher): Pedro’s first love in London, Pedro and Rory lived together for four years and worked together for one. We are pretty sure Pedro and Rory were separated at birth.
Supplier:
Printers: For more information on our printer suppliers see the recommendations for stationery page here
Mixtape CD Wedding Playlist:
As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of wedding favours. In my book you don’t need to give your guests a present (don’t get me started…). However, we wanted to give our guests a little keepsake.
Our keepsake was probably quite indulgent as it was all about us – a little reminder of our top toons from different playlists they heard throughout the day, all of which meant a great deal to us. Here is our top playlist – your sensual trip through our wedding:
Supplier:
Promo Discs
Wish You Were Here:
Just like everyone, Mr DTE and I had some very important loved ones who sadly couldn’t share our day with us for various reasons. We didn’t want them to be forgotten and also wanted to show some happy memories with them all, so we created a photoboard and put up this sign to show them all off. Pretty simple but we loved this.
Suppliers:
Blackboard: Amazon
Chalk: Amazon
Frames: Charity shop (more info below)
Photos of our Guests:
The relationships Mr DTE and I have with our beloved guests all represent different parts of our lives – some of which blossomed before Mr DTE and I had even met. So we really wanted to show photos which gave an insight into our friendships. It was also a nice way for guests to feel included, and again get to know each other.
How much does it cost? We found the frames in local charity shops and got them all for about £30, then bought some little pegs from Amazon and some wire, then pinned the wire up and attached the pics to the wire. Boom. You can just rest these frames up against objects at your venue like this:
Suppliers:
Frames: Charity shops for the frames
Pegs and wire: Amazon for the pegs and wire
Flip Flops:
I first saw this idea of dancing shoes (flip flops) on Pinterest too and thought it was kind of over the top. Then our venue said our guests were not allowed to have bare-feet on the dance floor, so they suggested we did this. I’m so glad we did as so many people used them and danced the night away. We just bought the flip flops on the cheap – £15 for about 20 of them. BARGAIN!
Cake:
I love cake. Mr DTE loves cake. We all love cake. We didn’t love the bill for a £2,000 cake. I’m sure it would have been delicious, but I just thought it was crazy and we don’t even like a lot of the fruit cakes out there. So we opted for two different ones – a red velvet number with a cake topper, and then a delicious macaron tower. Grab a bit of extra flower bundle from your florist, and job done.
The macarons were really different, but also really easy to dish out, winner. Bit hard to have an epic ‘cutting of the cake moment’ with them though as they are teeny. Thankfully the red velvet cake solved that problem. Crisis averted, ha!
Suppliers:
Red velvet cake: Hummingbird Bakery
Macaron tower: Anges du Sucre
TOP TIP: Pinterest can be your friend – pick the things that feel ‘you’, put your own twist on them and forget the things that will take you 5 years and a PhD in Blue Peter DIY to recreate. No-one has time for that.
I’m so pleased we stuck to our guns and made some little personal touches that everyone loved. So many of our guests mentioned how they loved these parts of our wedding. Those people are now on our favourite list forever.
Happy Friday, bridelings! Rock that Friday, take no crap, do that wedmin, drink that gin.
Peace out
Jojo x
