eco wedding Archives - Page 9 of 12 - The Natural Wedding Company

Blog: eco wedding

Charlie

Featured in Simply Beautiful Magazine with a step-by-step guide to making my ‘save the date’ cards

Charlie

I am so excited to share with you that I’m in a real life magazine. Never did I imagine 7 years ago when I started dreaming up what became The Natural Wedding Company that I would be featured in a glossy magazine.

You can find me in the September issue of Simply Beautiful Magazine sharing details about our wedding stationery and a step-by-step guide with never-seen-before photos of how to make my ‘save the date’ cards. I created this especially for the magazine so very excited to share it.

There’s also some of my top tips for having a greener wedding and saving money while you’re at it – so if you’re interested in having a read, get down to your local WHSmith and get a copy. Would love to know what you think if you’ve had a read.

Charlie

Sneak peek of the new wedding stationery designs from Emily&Jo

Charlie

Emily&Jo design beautiful wedding stationery combining stunning patterns and classic typography. They are about to launch their new website and have been kind enough to share with me and you some of their gorgeous new designs.

They are keen to keep their business green and use FSC accredited or recycled papers for all their stationery and employ no bleaching, all things that are better for the environment and as they tell me “make trees smile.”

Charlie

Plantable seeded paper for eco-friendly wedding stationery

Charlie

I can remember the first time I came across flower seeded paper, it was way back when I was first starting out with The Natural Wedding Company. It only ever seemed to be available in America, and even now it never seems to appear that often in the UK, so it is truly lovely to see these fab products from one of our businesses, Favour Haven.

The idea that you can create something beautiful from the paper and then plant it and have pretty flowers grow from it, is in my opinion, wonderful. Favour Haven sells these lovely favour tags, which come in four designs, are available in different colours and can be personalised for your wedding with your names and date.

Charlie

Competition to win a bunch of seasonal flowers or a beautiful Camelia corsage made from fairtrade cotton

Charlie

Please note: my Reader Survey 2011 is now closed.

I’m doing a bit of a reader survey, to help shape what I do with the website and blog in the future. So if:

you’ve used The Natural Wedding Company website and directory
would be happy to spend about 10 minutes filling in a survey to share your thoughts and ideas
and would like to win one of the two lovely prizes mentioned in the heading

Here’s what to do…

Send me an email to charlie@thenaturalweddingcompany.co.uk with the subject line ‘Survey’ and I will reply with a link. I’ve thought about adding the link to the website and blog, but I’m really keen to get feedback from people who’ve used the directory, not just the blog.

The prizes

As a bit of an incentive and a ‘thank you’ I’ve decided to buy two gifts as prizes from businesses listed in the directory. I’ve picked these particular businesses to celebrate those businesses who were part of my wedding.

Someone will win a bunch of seasonal flowers from The Real Cut Flower Garden, grown by Charlie Ryrie in her flowerfield in Hereford – the same place where my wedding flowers came from.

This is an example of the sort of bunch of flowers you could win

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – the veil, the hair and make-up, and pretty accessories

Charlie

Today it’s all about my wedding accessories – from my vintage inspired shoes to the heirloom lace veil, natural make-up to a gorgeous garters. It’s all here including the details of how I came to choose them for our wedding.

The Shoes

Mark Tattersall Photography

I spent ages looking for the ‘right’ shoes. So many wedding shoes are elegant but modern, and my dress was so delicate and had a country feel to it, that I wanted something with an old-fashioned feel. I also didn’t want really high heels as most of our wedding was spent walking on grass.

Mark Tattersall Photography

In the end I came across the gorgeous designs by Diane Hassall and fell in love with a pair called ‘Liliana’ – I managed to track them down to a bridal shop in nearby Knutsford and despite being loads more than I’d ever imagined spending, they came home with me. They came with a choice of floaty organza or velvet ties – I went for the velvet ones.

Mark Tattersall Photography

I particuarly love this picture above of my shoes on the windowsill in my parent’s bedroom, with all those personal bits you find in people’s houses in the background.

The Veils

I hadn’t planned on wearing any veil…and I ended up having two! My mum spent ages trying to track down the family veil, which she had worn when she married my dad, and my granny before her, and so on back through the generations.

I love this photo of my little sister Izzy holding my parents wedding album open at a photo of my mum wearing the veil, with it hanging behind Izzy from the cupboard…

Mark Tattersall Photography

Charlie

Beautiful and unique wedding flowers made from pretty recycled papers

Charlie

Having a short break from our wedding details I wanted to share some of the latest creations from one of the businesses from the directory. I am always so amazed by the creativity and imagination of people, especially those businesses I work with on my website – there can be so much of the same ‘stuff’ in the wedding world, it’s refreshing to see something different.

Kat from The Paper Florist is one of those people. She creates stunning flowers from recycled papers, they can be used for table decorations or even the brides bouquet. Here is some of her recent work at a beautiful May Day wedding.

Charlie

Our “Rustic, Outdoor, Eco-Chic, Country Garden Wedding” is featured on Love My Dress

Charlie

Such exciting news to tell you all – our wedding is featured on Love My Dress today! You can (finally!) see the photos from our wedding – the lovely Annabel who runs Love My Dress has called it a Rustic, Outdoor, Eco-Chic, Country Garden Wedding.

I would love to know what you all think. There are so many more lovely photos from our wedding and other details that I will be sharing here on my blog, so please check back or stay in touch by adding your email address to the mailing list (you can find it on the righthand side of this page).

Charlie

A sneak peek of the first of our wedding photos

Charlie

Yes, this really is a photo from our wedding! Bet some of you can’t believe it (some of my friends are ready to start a mutiny if I don’t share the photos soon!).

Really soon there will be loads of photos from our wedding here, and on Love My Dress (so excited we’re going to be featured on Annabel’s lovely blog!). She’s posted a few sneak peek photos so do have a look.

Charlie

Do it yourself: rustic handmade wedding stationery ~ part 1

Charlie

I’ve decided to split the ‘do it yourself’ for our wedding stationery into four parts as there seemed too much to share in just one post, and I didn’t want you all nodding off. So without further ado, here’s Part 1.

First off, you should know I did all of this in Microsoft Word. Perhaps insane, as Word is not meant for graphic design, but it’s what I have. I don’t have any fancy software packages, so I had to do the best that I could with what I had. Yes, it undoubtedly caused headaches and extra time faffing about, but I got where I wanted in the end and I’m proud of my effort.

The Invitation

Inspiration

For me, our invitation needed to reflect what our wedding was going to be about. I wanted people to get excited (hopefully!) and have a sense of what kind of wedding they were going to.

I went through various different ideas, including sewing mini bunting onto each card, which I decided might kill me off and wasn’t a true reflection of our wedding day. Here are the some of the ideas I was inspired by…

From left to right starting at the top: found Once Wed; Perch Papiers; Junkaholique; Ruffled; unknown; found Snippet & Ink; unknown; Heather Ross; Ruffled; found Twig & Thistle

Charlie

Our wedding: handmade rustic wedding stationery with red and white string and luggage tags

Charlie

Like our ‘save the date’ cards, we also made all our wedding stationery. There was an invitation, a booklet of wedding details, a RSVP postcard, and a gift envelope. Everything was tied up together with red and white string with a tiny brown luggage tag onto which I hand-stamped our RSVP date.

I’m one of those people (I hope there are others out there!) who knows in my mind what I want something to look like, but don’t always know how to translate that into reality. So although here you can see lovely photos of the finished invitation set, it took a lot of attempts to get them ‘right’.