Our fourth TNWC Real Bride is Kerry, who is marrying her Mr of fifteen years this summer at the beautiful Cowparsley Weddings in Somerset – one of our fab recommended wedding venues and a pretty special place that I visited last summer.

Over to Kerry to tell you all about it…

Hmmmm, how should I start?….Ummm, well – I’m Kerry (Hi!) my friends call me Potts (my surname’s Potter….not for much longer). I’m 36 and I’m marrying my long term boyfriend, Nick this August (eek). We’ve been together 15 years this year, and already have our little family made with our kids; Amber (9) and Finn (7).

Nick and I met on a Monopoly pub crawl in London back in September ’99. We hit it off straight away, and saw each other every weekend from then on, until I went to Thailand for the millennium with my best friend. Whilst I was away we realised we had something kinda cool going on, so when I got back we moved in together.

After 4 years, 5 house moves, a fair few festivals and a few more crazy nights out, we discovered we were pregnant with our first child; Amber. We suddenly had to grow up, so we bought a flat in Hackney and settled down. Sixteen months later, we were pregnant again, this time with Finn. By now we felt it was time to leave the city and decided to head for the country, so in 2008 we up sticks and move to Taunton in Somerset.

Jump forward 6 years, and here we are; two children at school, working full time and realise; “hold on a minute, we’ve missed something out” somewhere along the way past the clubbing, the breeding and the moving, we forgot about us, we’re approaching 15 years and we’re STILL NOT MARRIED!

So, in February 2013, we decided to go for it.  We didn’t have a ring or anything at the time, but decided to have one made.  My Dad passed away 12 years ago, but he’d given me a diamond ring on my 18th birthday, I’d always wanted to use his stone, so we put this together with other diamonds from rings which we’d been lucky enough to inherit from our Grandmothers.

We designed it ourselves, and found an amazing ringmaker in Poole who did a great job…we now need to get a custom made wedding band to fit it!

The venue we’ve decided on is 2 miles down the road, at the beautiful Roughmoor Farm (Cow Parsley Weddings). It was the first venue we saw, but we knew straight away this was the place for us.

Being festival-goers, we’ve decided to give our wedding a festival feel and name it ‘Kipstival’ – a play on Bestival (one of our favourite festivals) and Kipper (Nick’s nickname) we’ve included wristbands with the invites, we’ve booked two live bands, and we’ll have loads of festoon lighting, a bonfire, and dancing under the stars.

I’m quite a creative person, so I intend on making a lot of the decorations myself. I’ve already made a start, with music paper flowers, burlap laced jars and have decorated wooden initials with fabric swatches and have spent many hours on Pinterest and Etsy getting lots more inspiration…maybe too much!

As a small local business (I decorate cakes; whilst not at work and being a Mum), it’s important to us to use local small businesses to source our wedding. So, for our bar we are hiring Cedric, an old Citroen van from A Couple of Mugs, our flowers are being farmed by Lucy from Sweet Cicely just up the road in Lydeard St Lawrence, and our late night snacks will be provided by Red Tricycle Catering, I will of course be making my own cake…..once I can finally decide on a design!

If I were to describe our wedding in five words I would say; It is time to party!

Images: (1 – 5) Brides own pictures