2013

The Natural Wedding Company is lucky enough to be blessed with some fantastic small and independent businesses, who aren’t only making and selling beautiful things, but they’re also showing you how to do it too.

I’m delighted to welcome back to the blog Sharon Langsdale from TNWC business Razzle Dazzle Rose – she’s going to be showing you how to make recycled seeded paper flowers that are ideal for decorating wedding favours or invitations, and even transforming into alternative buttonholes.

Razzle Dazzle Rose sells a number of fantastic eco-friendly craft materials, specifically in my favourite brown craft card.  A new addition to her shop are these paper flower kits – you can choose from recycled brown kraft paper flowers, cream vintage fleck flowers, or seeded paper flowers.

Once you have your kit, here’s how to make the flowers – over to Sharon who is using the cream vintage fleck flower kit…

Handmade Recycled Seeded Paper Flowers

Step 1 - Unpack your paper flower kit and you’ll see you have a number of die cut pieces of paper, just like these…

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2013

It’s that lovely time of the week when we get to hear from one of the TNWC Real Brides.  Today, Myfanwy is sharing details of the homemade elderflower champagne that her and her Mr-to-be Tom have been brewing up for their wedding.  She’s also done a great ‘how to’ guide for these pretty origami flowers she’s been making from old book pages.

If you’re new to the TNWC Real Brides feature, you can read Myfanwy’s first guest post here on her plans for a creative vintage-inspired wedding.  I hope you enjoy Myfanwy’s latest update…

It’s been a busy few weeks finalising the bid decisions for the wedding, the catering, the dress, the DJ!  These are things we wanted to get done over the winter before our shop re-opens at Easter.

So now the major details are pretty much done this leaves plenty of time for us to make and prepare the little handmade details that we feel are important to us.  We’ve made a list (got to love a list!) of tasks to do each month.

Making elderflower champagne

February’s list included starting off the elderflower champagne and making origami paper flowers.  We have decided to have a drinks reception when we arrive the tipi’s for people to help themselves.  We thought of having some bottles of local beer, the inevitable Pimms and really wanted something else a little bit different.  Our friends had made some elderflower champagne a couple of years ago and we’d rally enjoyed it.  It’s lucky we looked into making it so early on, we hadn’t realised that once bottled it needs to stand for 3-4 months!

Equipment was really easy to get hold of in fact Dorset Homebrew sell and elderflower champagne making kit with a recipe and all the equipment you need to get started on you first brew.  Or of course the River Cottage recipe is really easy to get hold of online - we plan on trying this one when elderflower is in bloom.

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2013

I am so excited about my new TNWC Real Brides feature and I hope you are too!  It’s been lovely finding out so much about other people’s weddings and being able to share all those details with you here.  You can catch up on all the blog posts by clicking this link to the full TNWC Real Bride feature.

Today has her second blog post, and is going to tell us all about the start of their DIY elements to their wedding – starting with their invitations.  She’s even done a how to guide on how she made some very cute cake flags!  If you haven’t read Emma’s first blog post, you can find it here.  Over to Emma…

This week we have reached the first of our planning milestones – we posted our invites!  We both wanted personalised invitations and I love to draw so I thought I’d have a go myself.  I drew the designs on watercolour paper, painted in a bit of colour and went over it in fine liner.

I photographed the paintings then added the text using Photoshop.  We had them printed on recycled card at Monkey Puzzle Repro Art who are based at Mount Pleasant Eco Park. I couldn’t be more happy with the service, John was lovely and got our invites printed within 24 hours of me emailing him the artwork!  The front of the invite features us in what I think I can pass off as ‘naïve cartoon style’, standing in front of the archway area we plan to have our ceremony in.

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2013

One of the nicest parts of running my own business is that I get the loveliest emails from brides-to-be and couples planning their wedding.  Sometimes you even send me pictures of the sweet items you’ve been making, often inspired by things I made for my own wedding.  Today one such bride-to-be has been kind enough to share her handmade wedding invitations – and the all important details on how she made them – that were inspired by my own handmade wedding stationery.

Becky was kind enough to detail down how she made each part of her wedding stationery and included some of the websites where she bought supplies from.  Over to Becky to tell you about how she made her handmade wedding stationery…

The Invitations

Our wedding reception is taking place in a tipi in a field on our friends’ farm which is overlooked by the forest where Tom proposed, so we wanted the stationery to reflect this natural and beautiful setting that is so special to us.

I found a previous post on The Natural Wedding Company blog where someone had used card made out of elephant poo for their invites, which I loved the idea of, so I ordered some of the paper from The Green Stationery Company with matching envelopes.

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2012

It’s been a while since I shared some of your lovely wedding stationery designs, and I get some utterly lovely emails from you all with snaps of your designs attached.  So I decided I’m going to get better at sharing them with you, and to start with I’ve got these lovely vintage inspired postcard save the dates from Matt and his fiancée Candice.

Matt and Candice are getting married in January 2014 in the Lake District, because Candice is Australian they’ve had to be super organised ahead of time to give her family plenty of time to plan for their wedding.

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2012

Some of my favourite emails are from you lovely readers, sending me pictures of your wedding stationery that has been inspired by my own wedding invitations or save the dates.  Today I get to share with you Hollie’s wedding stationery, which was also inspired by ours, with a few tweaks and her own stamp on it.

She combined our two ideas, turning her wedding invitations into a larger version of our sealed save the dates.  I love this idea, I can imagine it would be lovely to receive one of these in the post and to unfold it.

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2012

Regular readers will know that on Sunday it was the TNWC 5th birthday party, which was held at my house with 11 lovely guests – all readers of the website and blog.  I made a number of items for the party, which I hope to share with you, but to start with I wanted to share this natural hedgerow wreath I created.  All the photos are taken on my phone so nothing fancy!

My hedgerow wreath was created using hawthorn cuttings, mostly green ones, but I managed to find a few with the pretty white blossom already out.  Before I go any further I must say I wouldn’t recommend you to use hawthorn, even though it is so beautiful and so seasonal at the moment.  Why?  Because it droops incredibly quickly – more on that below.

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