As I am so often admitting, I have been fairly ‘behind’ (a polite way of putting it!) with keeping up with last years lovely TNWC Real Brides. Recently we featured Fern’s beautiful wedding, and now I am thrilled to be bringing you a couple of catch-up posts from Vicky.

She did an incredible job of collecting a selection of vintage glass bowls, vases and doilies to add a relaxed vintage vibe to her wedding tea party. Her thriftiness paid off with a fantastic sounding haul – can’t wait to see how it looked all put together on her wedding day!

Over to Vicky…

We always wanted our wedding to have quite a relaxed vintage feel to it but didn’t want to spend too much money in achieving this, preferring to be able to invite more people if money allowed. I’ve always loved the mismatched vintage china that lots of people use but the cost of hiring the vintage crockery was too much to comfortably justify and after a quick scout around charity shops I wasn’t confident that we’d ever collect enough or it would work out any cheaper!

To try and achieve the gorgeous colourful effect of a vintage tea party without the vintage tea sets became the challenge. We decided to hire in basic white crockery and then try to create the effect of colour and age with all the bits around it.

I began the hunt for cut glass bowls – the idea is that the jams, cream, sugar and butter will all be presented in beautiful bowls adding a little bit of eclectic style to the tables. Luckily I had an amazing charity shop in my local town that seemed to have a never ending supply of them.

At the time of writing, I’d collected 62 bowls for the grand total of £32 and they are beautiful. I love the variety of styles I got and the prettiness of them.

With these were displayed a selection of lace doilies which I luckily managed to gather from family friends. My mum’s WI ladies were amazing at this, rummaging through cupboards and even digging out some beautiful hand embroidered linen table cloths which went on various tables.

We decided to put all the flowers in a selection of jam jars which we collected for months. However, on one trip to the charity chop I found a pile of old pottery jars and vintage bottles which nicely broke up the over abundance of jam jars and again made it feel a little more vintage.

To add a little bit of wedding sparkle I covered some of the jars in gold glitter to contrast with the hessian table cloths. All of this collecting was great fun and by starting early it meant there was plenty of time to find more unusual things and for our ideas to adapt to what was available.

To add a bit of colour I made small napkins for everyone from a mixture of floral fabrics. I managed to buy a lot of fat quarters from Hobbycraft which were in the sale when I got them – making them just £6.50 for a pack.

I split each fat quarter into 4 (for small napkins) so from 5 packs I had 120 napkins. Then it was just a case of committing a whole day to cutting and sewing them up.  I had ideas of using them again so wanted them properly hemmed. I have to admit it was a long process making them but I absolutely loved them.

Images: All brides own pictures