How we met, all those years ago, is irrelevant, suffice to say we were both with other partners whom we married and became good friends. R’s ex was a bridesmaid when I married in 1991. I was a witness when they married in 1994. We are Godparents to each other’s children. We have been best friends for over 25 years, and honestly never looked upon each other as anything other than friends, until in 2011, when R broke up with his ex. I’d been on my own for several years and we often visited them. He was devastated and it became a daily ritual to give him a ring to see how he was doing. After a few weeks this became a more and more important part of my day until I realised that I felt more for him than before. Then one of his work colleagues started making a move and I had to say something. It was a very strange way to start a relationship, both of us knowing that we had a lot more to lose than a casual friendship if it went wrong.
Planning
Because of the depth of our relationship it was tacitly understood that once we begun it would have to be forever. We became officially engaged in February 2013 and started planning straight away. We knew that neither of us wanted a formal affair, and wanted something very personal to us. We entertain a lot and wanted to have a party to reflect all the things and people we love best. Our lives are very family and friends orientated so hosting everyone became the mantra.
Our wedding grew out of two things: we needed an approved venue as R is not at all religious and didn’t want to marry in a registry office, and also R’s first comment on wedding planning was that we should book the same circus skills workshop that I’d used for my 40th several years ago. So, we were looking for an informal approved venue which could accommodate a circus skills workshop. A hotel really wasn’t going to cut it so we started looking for more unusual venues. The googling commenced!
We considered marquees and katas, but for the sort of thing we wanted the logistics to cover all contingencies and to accommodate the older family as well as the younger generations were getting too complicated threatening to spoil the fun of it, plus we have lots of other things to spend our money on (for this read that I’m a bit of a scrooge) and as the guest list was looking manageable we decided on barn type venue rather than going the entirely DIY route.
There are several of these venues within a commutable distance from us. Some looked stunning but the photos on different photographers’ websites seemed to imply a quite generic service/feel to the day, and some of the reviews implied that the venues had been very insistent on what ‘would work’ and we both knew that what we wanted was complete flexibility. We kept coming back to one venue: The Hunsbury Hill Centre, at Northampton, which is run by Northamptonshire ACRE, the rural affairs charity, and is based in a Grade 2 listed ironstone octagonal farm. As I am pathologically incapable of choosing only one thing we booked to view Hunsbury and two other venues on the same day. We visited on a dull rainy day in March while they had building work going on, booked on the spot and cancelled the other viewings. Basically we could do what we wanted, in whatever order we wanted, using whichever suppliers we wanted, and they had our date available. Serendipity!
We booked the registrar and started to think about the other big things: catering and photography.
Big stuff booked, we moved on to the minutiae. I was losing weight really quickly over this period but there was no way I could justify spending loads on a dress for one day and it was so relatively unimportant to me. I came up with the plan to make my own dress. True to my ‘if we can do it well enough ourselves there’s no need to spend’ ethos we decided to grow our own flowers too. 2013 was the experiment year so we bought some seeds and sowed them in April. We chose gyp, daisies and polkadot cornflowers, and planted a couple of ivy plants in a pot. The colours of the flowers set the colours for the girl’s dresses. We had decided to have my 2 daughters to give me away, and R’s girls as bridesmaids: with girls between 9 and 16 with very different styles, sizes and bodyshapes as well as stages of development, we knew that no one dress was going to work. I started buying up second hand dresses on ebay in chiffon in all the colours of the cornflowers and all sizes and styles. This spring we had a fun fashion show and they each picked their favourite. They were dressed in a mix of Dessy, monsoon and unbranded dresses, but most importantly each one was happy, comfortable and looked stunning (my biased opinion as a Mum but….).
R’s an artisan and very handy, so we decided to have some wood in the scheme. They were cutting down trees near my work and I brought home some tree slices. In spite of R’s best efforts they all split: the wood needed to season before cutting the slices. We were lucky enough to visit one of the local country parks when they were cutting back some willow trees. They let us have some lengths of trunk for a donation, so they lived in the garage for a year to dry out slowly. This year we cut them with a chainsaw and R planed and polished them. We used the big ones for cake stands and the smaller ones for table centre/stands to play jenga on. We decided on table games, cards, dominoes and jengas instead of table centrepieces.
Because we didn’t want a formal sit-down meal, but for families to be able to move freely about the venue, we invested in some lawn games: in fact these were our first purchase after booking the venue! We decided on bunting to decorate the indoor and outside space, but rather than make this, and as we needed so much, we stepped away from the beautiful print wedding bunting and went for standard multi-coloured bunting: we used over 300m in total. To support the bunting outside I bought extending poles like those used to mark one’s tent at a festival: it was an obvious decision to get windsocks for the tops of these, and just like that the wedding started to look more like a mini fete!
We chose our wedding date because every August bank holiday weekend we go to Towersey festival as a family. It made sense to make this our honeymoon too. In 2013, as always, we saw some new acts which blew us away. I was thinking of a wedding present for R and looked on one of these act’s website for local gig tickets. The gig list mentioned that he was playing a private function. In a light bulb moment, without mentioning it to R or discussing it (a wedding no no really) I contacted him and asked if he was free on our date: what better gift for your groom than a surprise set from a musician he really admires? Holding out no hope and frankly shocked at my own cheekiness, I was stunned when he replied some days later saying that in principle yes, he would love to do it, but that he had recently joined a new group (the folk scene is quite incestuous) and wasn’t sure about the plans for the festival season yet, but would let us know asap. At this point the surprise element went out of it as R was sitting beside me when I opened the email and squealed. We were thrilled that he would even consider such a request and waited as he went off on a tour of Europe, then Canada and India. Realistically getting a top act in mid-festival season was unlikely and I began to lose faith; but he had been very kind and so obliging. One night, after a glass of wine, I facebooked another of our favourite folk acts ( a singer) who was listed to play at a festival about an hour from us on our wedding day, asking that, if her gig was in the evening, would she consider coming to us in the afternoon? Her reply? ‘I love mad things! Let me rejig my schedule and I’ll get back to you!’ Within 48 hours the first musician came back and said definitely yes, and suddenly we had two of our favourite musicians to play at our wedding. You’ll see that I don’t name them: they don’t usually do weddings so it seems a bit off to advertise this: just know that we were chuffed to bits! We’d already booked a ceilidh band that we’d seen at Towersey a couple of years ago, so just like that our informal turned into a bit of a fete wedding turned into a mini festival.
I will plug the Ceilidh band: they are called Asha and were absolutely fantastic: loads of people dancing and they carried on playing in the breaks for the love of it. They are based out of Milton Keynes but will travel and I am happy to pass on details if anyone is interested. I will say this: it’s always worth asking. I know you non-folkies will be thinking that folk musicians have less to do/be more amenable, but all real musicians are looking for gigs! We had a singer at our wedding who was shortlisted (final 4) for the Radio 2 folk singer of the year award this year, which was televised. Seriously, just go for it!
So, between music and circus skills we were covered for spoon fed entertainment. We had lawn games for good weather. At this point I started paying far too much attention to hitched and other wedding blogs and the DIY element spiralled. Both R and I had been married in the days when you received an album from your photographer several weeks/months later which had a blank page at the beginning for names to be added which never got filled in. We were planning an event for our guests and we wanted their thoughts, so the combined photo album/guest book was born
We had a wish tree, a bunting line with tiny pegs so people could make comments inside, and a colouring poster with speech bubbles for wishes. The wedding web site implored everyone to engage with this and the plan is to scan everything including guest photos and make some books up to cover the whole day so we can’t possibly forget. Worried that children (and hence parents) may be bored in bad weather I made up some activity books, and had a dry weather and wet weather plan for the day to use more of the indoor space if required. We bought some cardboard frames which hung from string with tiny pegs and filled each one with a quote on love or marriage: we had over 120 by the day itself, and they were strung around the barn, bar and marquee.
At some point I decided to learn to crochet to make shrugs for the girls for the evening. This never happened as although I am crafty I didn’t get started soon enough and bought very thin thread which made everything harder. We compromised and as I had loads of thread my Best Woman stepped in and took this off me to make shoe clips to match the dresses so the girls could all wear the shoes they felt most comfortable in. The DIY elements which did come off included the wish trees made from wire, tape and skeleton leaves, a curtain of 1000 paper cranes, the invitations (we downloaded from wedding chicks and used the logo for everything, printing via vistaprint where necessary and ourselves for some elements), blackboard signs, wedding dress, flowers, a ‘selfie corner’ where rather than a photo booth we provided some baskets of masks/hats/moustaches/glasses on sticks and asked everyone for forward their selfies to us (v successful). The cake was a huge success, and exactly as I’d planned. My hen do was an afternoon making sugar flowers: this went slightly wrong as my ‘tea and cake and flowers’ afternoon turned into ‘wine and flowers which became increasingly mis-shapen’ afternoon and we never got out all the coloured paste. We ended up with hundreds of white flowers, so I, my girls, and latterly R spent hours painting them all. My BW made the main cakes, a friend made the cupcakes as a gift and the decoration was a joint effort by all of us. I had bought myself some Irregular choice Daisy Dayz shoes, but after wearing them for one 10 minute dress fitting I decided they weren’t comfortable for me and started looking elsewhere. I ended up going shopping on the Saturday before the wedding (my idea of hell) and bought a pair of really comfortable blue suede shoes with a slightly higher heel which I then overlaid with ivory Jaipur lace.
Our girls did all the chalkboard signs and we pulled lots of bits together as a family. Even my headdress was made by my youngest daughter out of loom bands!
