Mark Tattersall Photography Archives - The Natural Wedding Company

Blog: Mark Tattersall Photography

Charlie

Colette and Simon’s vintage eco wedding with an original 1950s wedding dress, homegrown flowers and a vegan feast

Charlie

Vintage eco wedding

Such a pretty wedding today! Do I say that every time? But each and every wedding is beautiful, and yet so different and personal to the couple. Colette and Simon got married in August on the Cornish coast (you might recognise their wedding venue from last week’s wedding), with a real vintage-cum-eco feel.

Colette told me that for her and Simon, “it wasn’t too much about the look, rather more about the feel we wanted to create which was, beautiful, relaxed, sustainable, vegan and fun, fun, fun!”

I’ll let you see for yourselves – over to Colette and exquisite photography from Mark Tattersall (TNWC recommended wedding photographer and Colette’s brother-in-law!)…

“We wanted a kind of a mixture between an eco wedding, a vintage themed wedding – 50s style and a handmade really relaxed wedding. This kind of just reflects our favourite kinds of weddings and our personal likes and dislikes. We wanted everyone to be comfortable and to have lots of fun.”

Charlie

Our wedding is going to be featured in Country Living magazine next month!

Charlie

The thing about blogs is you can share all kinds of news in real time, whenever you life. This news, however, has been under wraps for the past 9 months, and Mr Rigg and I haven’t been able to share it with anyone until today. One month from today, our wedding is going to be featured in the July 2012 issue of Country Living magazine!

I’m not even sure where to begin in telling you how excited I am about the whole thing – where do I begin?! I have been an avid Country Living reader since we bought our own house and I always enjoy the beautiful ideas and inspiration that they share, as well as the pieces on small rural businesses. To think that our wedding will now be part of that tradition is so amazing!

Charlie

You’re invited to The Natural Wedding Company’s 5th Birthday Party!

Charlie

I am a bit nervous about sharing this news in case you don’t share my excitement – I really hope you do, so fingers-crossed. As you might know by now, I am celebrating 5 years of The Natural Wedding Company this March 2012 – there will be loads of offers and competitions everyday during March so make sure you keep checking back.

When thinking about how I would love to celebrate 5 years, I couldn’t think of a lovelier way to celebrate than with a small party with some of my readers, eating cake and doing something crafty. So…

I would like to invite you to The Natural Wedding Company’s 5th Birthday Party!

Now, there have been all kinds of glamorous parties and events in the wedding industry world, I was even lucky enough to go to the Love My Dress Summer Soiree last year. My party isn’t going to be anywhere near the scale of these other events, my party is going to be a small party – there are just 10 places available – and you won’t need to dress up in swanky frocks, although party dresses are welcome!

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – an outing with Carrots the pony

Charlie

Today’s photos are some of my favourite from our wedding and I’m really excited to be sharing them with you all. After the church ceremony and ice cream outside, Nick and I left across the field on a simple pony and carriage, which took us down the country lanes for a short while just the two of us.

My mom is solely responsible for organising this – as a teacher in the village primary school she knows a lot of local people, and John who took us out in his pony and carriage is one of them.

I’ve had a love of horses and riding since before I can remember, as a little girl growing up in London I used to dream of moving to the country and having riding lessons. That finally happened when I was six, and I think for my 7th birthday I got my first lessons.

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – ice cream in the church yard

Charlie

It is terrible to toot your own trumpet, but this is one of the ideas that we had for our wedding that I was so pleased with. Nick and I love our food and love supporting local producers, so we always knew this was going to be woven throughout our wedding. There were moments we worried we might be overfeeding people!

We have a wonderful local farm to where we live in Cheshire that makes its own ice cream – we practically live off the stuff. Somehow we wanted to incorporate this into our wedding day, and the only place we could think of when people might need something to eat and break up any standing around was after the ceremony.

So we set about creating our own ice cream stall that would greet our family and friends as they exited the church. We commandeered a nice old trestle table from my parents, which meant we didn’t need to cover it.

Nick built a wooden cone holder by drilling holes into a plank of wood and attaching legs to it. Then I painted it with leftover paints (tester pots are great for small projects).

Charlie

The order of service for our rustic country wedding

Charlie

When you’re heavily involved in planning, organising, and making your own wedding there are so many details to consider. I found it was quite easy to get wrapped up in whether or not I should wind ivy inside the tealight lanterns on the dinner tables (ran out of time/forgot in the end!) and other details, without putting as much thought into our ceremony.

And however beautiful, pretty, rustic, handmade we want to create our weddings, however great that need for attention to small details, there wouldn’t be all that if we weren’t getting married. I think partly I put off getting to grips with the content of our wedding ceremony because it seemed an insurmountable task to craft something that was so heavy and laden with meaning.

I find myself getting so lost in trying to create meaning with words when it comes to the different ways you can say ‘I love you’, that I end up just throwing up my hands and admitting defeat – sometimes ‘I love you’ says it all. At any rate, Nick and I know how much we love and care for each other, so why fret over putting that all into words?

Well I think that it is important to give it your best shot. I’m sure that with thought and care whatever you decide on for your ceremony, whether it be traditional hymns, modern love songs, readings for children’s books or excerpt from the world’s greatest poets – it will be lovely and meaningful.

So with that preface, these are what Nick and I chose for our wedding ceremony back in May. On the first page we had a short thank you to our family and friends for coming to share the day with us, including a list of everyone’s names. We also made special mention to Nick’s granny who died a month before our wedding – she was a very special lady in our lives and we wanted to recognise that.

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – the ceremony

Charlie

I’m excited to be back on track with sharing the full details of our wedding day – it is so lovely to hear that people are enjoying hearing the trials and tribulations of how it all came to be.

So with church decked out with frothy cow parsley, slender young hornbeams, country roses and lit only by candlelight, the only thing missing was me. The bride. It’s been mentioned before, but I was 20 minutes late to my wedding.

Image: Mark Tattersall

By now, Nick was getting pretty antsy, Alex the best man was playing his role and winding Nick up (do you remember the photo at the bottom of this post?), and every time the church door opened everyone would look up in anticipation. This I’ve all heard. First my mom and little brother Freddie entered.

Then the music started. We (meaning me) had fallen in love with a piece of harp music from Rebecca Joy Sharp called ‘Scattered Lad’. The first time I heard I knew that this was what I wanted to walk into the church to. It encompassed the feeling of how I wanted my wedding to be – it felt celebratory, it was twinged with an old fashioned country tune, and just utterly beautiful.

Image: Mark Tattersall

Of course, we’d rehearsed a couple of times at what point I wanted to start walking in, but standing outside the church with my dad as Izzy and the flowergirls filed in, I completely forgot it all. Emily and Isla the two flowergirls were so sweet, I was just sad not to see them myself, as they walked in scattering dried petals.

Image: Mark Tattersall

Izzy my gorgeous sister disappeared in – I swear I got tunnel vision, I don’t remember seeing anything inside that church.

Image: Mark Tattersall

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – a church full of cow parsley

Charlie

As voted for by you, I am moving onto the flowers in the church before continuing with our wedding ceremony. I’m excited to share this, because I just loved how the church looked, it was more than I could have dreamed of and we did it ourselves.

If this is your first visit to the blog you can catch up on all the details so far from our wedding here.

Mark Tattersall Photography

I’ve decided to show you photos of how the church looked and then go back to how we did after. That way I get to show off all the pretty pictures first. At the entrance to the church we filled two old metal milk churns with cow parsley and grasses – quite a wind picked up and I love how it looked blowing in the breeze.

Mark Tattersall Photography

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – across a field of buttercups and down the church path

Charlie

It feels like a while since I posted the last installment of our wedding, and I feel rather ashamed that I’m taking so long and dragging it out – you all must be bored of hearing about it by now. If readers, you’d like it shorter and snappier, please tell me.

One of the loveliest parts of our wedding, is that my parents house (where we had afternoon tea and the reception would be held) is at the end of the church path. This meant, everyone could walk, myself included – no fancy vintage cars frothy with ribbons or stretch limos for me.

Thankfully the weather had been dry the week before our wedding, so my dad had mown a path from the back of their garden across the corner of the field and to the church path.

Charlie

Our rustic country wedding – afternoon tea in the garden before the ceremony ~ part 2

Charlie

If you missed it, yesterday there was part 1 of our pre-wedding afternoon tea in my parents garden – do check it out before reading on or it all might be a bit confusing!

So we’d set up our afternoon tea tent, the scrummy scones and strawberries were out, and pots of stripey paper straws alongside old-fashioned lemonade were ready.

When our family and friends began to arrive, me and Izzy happened to be getting ready in a room above my parents drive, so we could see people arriving. This is one of my favourite photos from the wedding – check out Alex’s stunning dress (she’s getting married next April in Cornwall – I can’t wait for their wedding!)…

Here is some of the lovely photos Mark shot of people enjoy afternoon tea in the garden – 18 months of hard work starts to come to fruition…

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