For any of our regular readers you’ll probably have realised that our lovely TNWC Real Bride Lisa is now married, however she got so busy in the lead up to her wedding day that it’s only now post-wedding and post-honeymoon that she’s been able to fill us in on the final aspects of her wedding planning.

Over to Lisa to tell us more…

Vintage crockery, stamping, bunting, lots of napkins and trying to get ahead…

In the run up to our big day, we realised that a lot of the things we wanted to do could only be done at the very last minute, such as our favours which were Welsh cakes, the flowers (which Tom’s mum was growing) the drinks for the drinks dispensers etc. We also found that we were still coming up with ideas even up until the eleventh hour! Below are some of things we did manage to do in advance (thankfully!!).

The hunt for vintage crockery

For our reception we had beautiful Kata tents, if you are not familiar with them they are a type of interlocking tipi and are absolutely beautiful inside. You could pretty much leave them as they are without doing very much decoration, I can imagine them to look stunning with very simple table settings and lighting. However I have always had my heart set on a very colourful, mismatch of styles filling the tables and all around.

There are many companies where you can hire vintage crockery but we (being me, my mother and my now mother-in-law) set out on a wide search for vintage crockery and scoured the net, antique stores, vintage hideaways, charity shops and boy did we have fun.

From sugar bowls to dinner plates we managed to collect an absolute treasure trove of vintage nick-nacks with loads of different styles and what’s great about all of this is that we get to keep everything at the end. Tom’s mother also did a fantastic job of buying beautiful tablecloths and hundreds of brightly coloured doilies to add even more decoration and mad colour to the tables.

Handmade napkins and bunting

After putting so much effort into collecting all these beautiful items I felt that it was only right that we needed beautiful napkins to match. So I bought several meters of different patterned fabrics to make into simple napkins.

Now I completely confess to being not very nifty around a sewing machine but these napkins were the easiest of things to make. For each meter of fabric I bought I got 4 decent sized napkins, I then folded in the sides roughly to 1.5cm and ironed them flat, I snipped the corners so they were tidy and straight stitched them all the way round.

I couldn’t believe that even I could manage this! You could, I was told after, double fold the edge so that they wouldn’t fray but with over 80 to do and with limited amount of spare time the single fold did the job. This then went really well with my mismatch bunting of which I’d made over 30 meters of.

Signs and place names

Mr C. also got stuck in to the creative aspect of the day and started painting signs to go up and around the site and on the field.

We also worked hard on getting all the name places done which were made from luggage tags where I stamped the names out and decorated with bird stamps. I liked this idea as I had used the same stamps for the bridesmaids cards in my original post which gave the whole thing a sense of a connection from beginning to the end.

These again were very simple to do and I thought pretty effective although quite time consuming.

Table plan and a place for cards

Although our wedding was very much a festival style wedding we did also have slight travel feel to it, hence the luggage tags for the place names. I saw this idea in several disguises on Pinterest so I’m sure many of you will have seen this before, but we simply bought two old suitcases from some charity shop and lined them with wrapping paper that had the world map on.

I then put string across from one side to the other and hung the table plans and the card sign to them. You can see the table names were of rugby teams, not fitting our theme at all but it’s what we love and really that’s what the day was all about!

We did manage to get quite a lot done in advance and although it meant some late nights after work and on weekends, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend my time.

Images: (1 – 8) Brides own pictures