TNWC Real Bride number three is Miriam, a lovely bride-to-be who I have ‘known’ for a while via my social media networks. I was pretty excited when she applied to be one of this year’s TNWC Real Brides and I love the sound of her wedding plans and am sure you will too.

Over to Miriam for all the details so far…

Hello! My name is Miriam and I am very excited to marry my wonderful fiance John on the 26th of July 2014. We first met two years ago in Edinburgh, when I was working as a vet in nearby Falkirk and he was teaching at a primary school in the city. Since then there have been several big life changes for both of us.

I now live in Bodmin in Cornwall, where we will eventually settle into married life together, and John is spending two years teaching overseas in Qatar. He returns for good just a month before the Big Day. To make things even more complicated we have settled on the gorgeous venue choice of Dryburgh Abbey near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, 350 miles from me and 3500 miles away from John.

It might not be easy organising a long-distance wedding, but we enjoy a challenge! With our families being an eclectic mix of Italian, Scottish and Irish we have lots of traditional family influences, and will certainly have a ceilidh and a piper (with a family connection as John’s dad runs a piping school in Edinburgh).

John proposed in the most modern way possible – via Skype! I was obviously over the moon, even more so when he returned at the Easter holidays with surprise Eurostar tickets to Paris as an (unnecessarily) compensatory big romantic gesture. We adore the sophisticated, romantic, carefree air of Paris and hope to have brought a piece of this back for our wedding, to fuse with our love of Scotland (especially Edinburgh) and the beautiful British countryside.

Both of us identify strongly with the 1920s, and there will certainly be subtle touches of this throughout our planning and the day its self. We are both keen to avoid a “themed” wedding, so we will be working out how to create the atmosphere of a certain era with a few home-made creations, without turning into a scene from The Great Gatsby.

John is a keen gardener and we have chosen July to get married so that we have the best British bee-friendly fragrant flowers, herbs and fruits at our disposal. The Cornish countryside is such fragrant, vivid inspiration, we hope that elements of this will worm their way into every part of our wedding.

We are experimenting with jam jars for tea-lights, and tying bunches of lavender around them with velvet ribbon to give the tables a beautiful Summery scent. My father and sister are on a mission to find the perfect wedding cake recipes and have kindly offered to bake the cakes, and decorate them with edible flowers. In my spare time I am an amateur artist, and look forward to the challenge of creating a beautiful multi-sensory event for ourselves and our guests to enjoy.

I adore everything about weddings because they are the perfect time to unashamedly declare your love for one another, and to invite the most important people in the world to celebrate with you. You have complete artistic freedom to express yourselves as a couple, and through planning can find out all sorts of interesting new things about one another.

No two weddings are the same, and with so many brilliant ideas shared by creative people on places like The Natural Wedding Company it is possible to create the most wonderful day on any budget. I love this website and especially the blog section, which has already given me some wonderful ideas. I can think of no better use of my time than exploring and sharing ideas in this way, and hope you enjoy reading our ideas!

Images: (1) Photos by Zoe; (2) Brides own picture; (3) Photos by Zoe; (4 + 5) Brides own pictures