Blog: real bride Ellie
Charlie Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie and Jon’s DIY guide to making your own giant light-up letters

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie and Jon's DIY guide to making your own giant light-up letters

DIY guide to making your own giant light up letters

It is so lovely to be back with TNWC Real Bride Ellie today after a bit of a gap in posts. I have just this week been contacting a handful of (hopefully!) new TNWC Real Brides to introduce you to. Today we have a Real Brides first – a groom-to-be has written this fab post (thanks Jon!), which details how him and Ellie created a set of giant light-up letters for their up-coming wedding.

Over to Jon to tell you how to create them…

DIY guide to making your own giant light-up letters // The Natural Wedding Company

A how to guide for making giant light up letters

We were looking for giant light-up letters that we want to hang at the end of the field when we get married in May – a huge ‘J & E’ to welcome everyone to the party. However, each letter cost nearly £200 each to buy – and not much less to rent. This was way out of our budget. However, I was a bloke looking for a blokey wedding job – and confidently proclaimed that they’d be easy enough to make. It turns out (fortunately) that it was actually quite simple!

I’ve included a step-by-step on how to do it below. It is significantly cheaper to build them yourself – all three letters’ raw materials came to about £150 (mostly electrics), and they take a bit of time to put together, but if you’re like me and enjoy pottering around outside with a cup of tea and some power tools, then read on!

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie and Jon's DIY guide to making your own giant light-up letters

Read more

Charlie Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie’s trip to her florists garden to pick out her seasonal blooms for her late spring wedding

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie's trip to her florists garden to pick out her seasonal blooms for her late spring wedding

How many other brides-to-be have visited their florists garden to pick out the flowers for their wedding? Well in today’s post from TNWC Real Bride Ellie she shares how she did exactly that over the summer, and she took along some of her family and bridesmaids. 

Ellie is a girl after my own heart with her love of countryside and seasonal flowers and foliage. Over to Ellie to tell you all about it…

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie's trip to her florists garden to pick out her seasonal blooms for her late spring wedding

For some brides, the most exciting part of wedding planning is finding the perfect dress. For some, it’s food and drink and, for others, it’s music or decoration. For me, however, the most exciting part of planning my big day has always and unequivocally been…flowers!

Since I was a little girl, I have walked along country lanes with my Mum and Granny and been filled up with the names of the flowers growing madly all along the verges.

TNWC Real Brides: Ellie's trip to her florists garden to pick out her seasonal blooms for her late spring wedding

I’ve also been lectured somewhat extensively on the folklore of flowers; from blackthorns being the preserve of evil faeries, to a horror of white lilies displayed on their own (exceptionally funereal), flowers have always been a part of my life – and, perhaps oddly, a huge part of how I’ve related to members of my family, and an important impetus for spending time together.

Read more

Charlie Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: introducing Ellie and Jon’s relaxed and rustic wedding in the Hampshire countryside

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: introducing Ellie and Jon’s relaxed and rustic wedding in the Hampshire countryside

This week I have a few more posts from TNWC Real Brides and a great piece all about a new wedding festival package from one of our TNWC businesses – so stayed tuned!

But first up this week I get to welcome you to our fifth and final TNWC Real Bride for 2014 – her name is Ellie and she’ll be marrying her Mr-to-be Jon in a rustic wedding in Hampshire next May. I hope you enjoy hearing all about her ideas and following her plans with me.

Over to Ellie…

Jon and I met seven and a half years ago, on our first day at Uni. In fact, it would more accurate to say that we met in our first minute of Uni because, as the fates would have it (or maybe it was all thanks to traffic on the M3) he and I pulled up outside our halls of residence within about 10 seconds of each other, got chatting – and, well, the rest is history!

TNWC Real Brides: introducing Ellie and Jon’s relaxed and rustic wedding in the Hampshire countryside

Much of what we have always had in common revolves around the countryside. Both of us are grandchildren of farmers (his grandparents were beef farmers in South Devon, mine sheep farmers on Anglesey) and, for that reason, we’ve spent much of our time together walking, camping, sailing, cutting logs, building chicken houses and generally looking for any excuse to be outside, ideally in foul weather (you can take the girl out of Wales, but you can’t take Wales out of the girl)!

A Proposal in a Thunderstorm

It’s then unsurprising that Jon, in a story that splits audiences down the middle along the lines of a) how mad they are and b) how well they know us, chose to propose after a 12 mile hike, on the top of a hill in the Peak District and in the middle of a thunder storm (the picture below was taken a few hours later)! It was magical and, although few believe me, I will swear until my dying day that the storm cleared and a rainbow came out within minutes of me saying ‘yes’!

TNWC Real Brides: introducing Ellie and Jon’s relaxed and rustic wedding in the Hampshire countryside

Read more

Seasonal wedding ideas:

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

DIY + Inspiration

Real Weddings

Suppliers + Products

Planning

Advertise

Get your eco wedding business listed on our directory