Charlie
Charlie
Did you see yesterday’s beautiful wedding? If not, you can view it here – it’s a down-to-earth and relaxed celebration with an outdoor ceremony at an eco park in Cornwall.
Today we have the film from Emma and Chris’ wedding, created by videographer Pete Cox. It’s one of those films that will bring a smile to your face and there’s no better way to start the day.
Charlie
Charlie
Well what an utterly wonderful way this is to start the week – a stunning, sunny, Cornish wedding. The wedding of one of my lovely TNWC Real Brides from last year, Emma (you can read all about her wedding planning and handmade details here). I do hope you’ll check back tomorrow as well as I have their wedding film to share and it is a feel-good way to begin your day.
Emma and Chris got married in July on a stonking hot sunny day in Cornwall. They planned a day that was relaxed and informal, full of colour and with a festival type vibe. I’ll let you decide but I think they achieved all those things they dreamed their day would be.
Over to Emma…
“The Natural Wedding Company and Pinterest played a bit part in the planning process. I used the internet to search for all sorts of things! I also bought a sketchbook and started scrap booking images and very quickly formed a strong theme for the day. Most the ideas came from the festival theme – we booked the venue and the flags in the same day – the rest sort of followed naturally.”
“I just want to say that despite the hiccups nothing could have ruined our day – it was just perfect in its imperfection – all the bits that didn’t go according to plan just make for good memories. Something will always go awry but it is those differences that make your special day yours and your only – and the things you will chuckle about when old and grey!”
Charlie
Charlie
Charlie here writing from my maternity leave, I couldn’t not be here today to share with you this exciting blog post – it’s the first blog post from a now married TNWC Real Bride! Eeek!
So far, three of our TNWC Real Brides have got married – Caroline, Nik and Emma – and all have been busy ladies since their weddings over the summer, both honeymooning with their new husbands (!) and running their businesses. I’m utterly delighted to have Emma with us today sharing how her wedding went, and we’ve even got some of the beautiful official photographs from Rebecca Roundhill Photography of the day.
In the coming week’s we are going to be lucky enough to share with you all of the stunning photos from Emma and Chris’ Cornish outdoor festival wedding along with many more details. So do stay tuned for those!
For today though, over to Emma…
Our wedding day was just perfect; it really was all we had hoped for and I can tell you it is better on the ‘other side.’
My bridesmaid and I left Plymouth on the Thursday prior to the big day with a car full of wedding regalia and hand made prettiness. We stopped off on the way to see Susanne at The Blue Carrot to collect our flowers for the table decorations. It was so lovely to see her again and she kindly showed us around her magical garden. She had chosen a wonderful array of wild and beautiful flowers for us to use to fill the collection of glass bottles.
I had chosen The Copper House in Portreath as a base for the preparations, which was a wonderful choice. On arrival we were greeted with a cream tea! I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting a complete getaway with serene and peaceful surroundings.
Charlie
Charlie
Can you believe it, two of my lovely TNWC Real Brides are getting married this week! Nik and Chris are getting hitched today (!!!) in Wales (read all about their wedding plans here) and the lovely Emma and Chris will be tying the knot in Cornwall on Saturday. Even though these lovely ladies are around my own age, I still feel a bit like a mother hen with them getting married.
I hope you’ve all enjoyed their journeys and creative plans, and I’m sure we are all looking forward to hearing how it went and seeing the pictures. If you have recently got engaged or are just starting to plan your 2014 wedding, maybe you’d like to be one of my next TNWC Real Brides – full details here.
Today though, it’s over to Emma who has done one final blog post as a ‘Miss’…
I thought I would just pop by to say hello before the big day at the end of this week! We have made a few last minute decisions, one of which is probably the best last minute decision any bride could make – we booked a videographer. I had been toying with the idea for months but decided to take the plunge.
Our photographer Becca posted a link to Pete’s work on her Facebook page. We didn’t have the budget for a video but I thought it would be worth a shot to ask, firstly if he was free (only weeks before the wedding) and to see if he could do reduced coverage with a reduced price. We came up trumps as not only is he mega talented; he was free on our wedding day and did us a brilliant deal.
Charlie
Charlie
It’s so nice to be back today with another TNWC Real Bride instalment from the lovely Emma. She has less than three weeks to go until her wedding! I’m so excited for her. If you’re new to the feature, you can read all of Emma’s blog posts here and this fab guest post she wrote all about bridal beauty.
Over to Emma…
With less than three weeks to go I am getting butterflies and bubbles of excitement. We have nearly completed the ;to do’ list and the DIY attempts have been continuing late into the evenings.
In the last few days I have been making pretty labels for our favours, which are wildflower seeds for butterflies and bees. I bought some little brown recycled envelopes last year, which have been nestled in the loft waiting to be decorated. For ages I wanted to make a lino cut to hand print each envelope, but time got away and I found a great alternative that is way less messy; some cute little oval labels from Avery, which are made from 100% recycled paper too.
There is free template software included online, which was very easy to use – I made my design in Photoshop then just copied and pasted into the template ready to print.
Chris is filling these little envelopes each with a tablespoon of wild flower seeds as I write this!
Charlie
Charlie
So we had a little break last week from our TNWC Real Brides series – the first of our real brides, Caroline, got married on May 18th in a beautiful farm wedding (you can see a gorgeous picture of Caroline and Gareth on their wedding day here on Facebook) and I can’t wait to hear all about it.
Today we have Emma back with us, and she only has 8 weeks to go until her big day in Cornwall. These weddings are all coming so quickly! She has a couple of gorgeous craft projects to share with you all today – a pretty decorated bottles for table flowers, a homemade blackboard seating plan, and the sweetest aisle liners I’ve seen.
Over to Emma to tell you what they’ve been up to…
Up until a week ago I was feeling calm, organised and under control with the planning going swimmingly. Then suddenly with less than 8 weeks to go (EXCITED!) I started to get a bit worrisome. All the big things have been well and truly ticked off the list but the little things seem like they have started breed!
I suspect this happens to every bride and the point at which where ‘bridezilla’ may start to rear her ugly head, I can feel it bubbling beneath the surface now… I think the main problem is worrying that we will forget something! Like having enough tables for the caterer to put food on, sorting out music for the ceremony and how we are going to play it outside in the amphitheatre.
I have been worrying about things that we had slightly overlooked; like what we can feed our vegan guests when we are having a hog roast and cream tea (slight fail). The only oven on site is an outdoor pizza oven…hmmm, still to be solved.
Charlie
Charlie
Well firstly I want to announce that this is my 1,000th blog post! Whoop whoop! I can barely believe it, but it seems like a pretty neat achievement. What could be nicer than my 1,000th blog post being written by one of my lovely TNWC Real Brides? Today we have Emma back with us and she’s sharing her super sweet engagement photoshoot, along with her feelings on being photographed on her ‘big day’.
I think it’s fair to say there’s a great number of us brides-to-be who aren’t thrilled about being photographed all day long, I was pretty apprehensive about the whole thing, but my experience was that we picked the right photographer for us (the lovely Mark Tattersall) and we both felt so at ease (plus we were pretty loved up all day!).
For any of you worried about having your photo taken on your wedding day, I hope reading about Emma’s worries and her experience of having an engagement photoshoot helps you feel that it will all turn out fine…
Last month I had a wobble; the only real wobble I’ve had in this whole wedding planning process. I started to freak out about having my photograph taken on the big day. This is probably because I have always been the one behind the camera and despite having taken photographs at lots of weddings, I had never really thought about what I would feel like; really feel like, on my actual wedding day.
I am really good at reassuring the brides I have photographed myself but was worried I wouldn’t be able to reassure myself, so started to worry I would have a mini meltdown about being in front of the lens. So I picked up the phone to our photographer and booked an engagement shoot…
Charlie
Charlie
We’re kicking off the week with a lovely guest post from TNWC Real Bride Emma, who has been busy sowing wildflower seeds at her outdoor ceremony venue in Cornwall – what a beautiful idea! She’s also been trying to decide on her wedding transport, so do read on and I hope you enjoy hearing about her wedding plans…
With less than four months to go we have been rapidly ticking off things on the seemingly never-ending wedding to do list, which has been brilliant fun! We kicked this off with a visit to our venue to meet the event organiser at Mount Pleasant Eco Park, Lee, who was absolutely brilliant! He made us tea (won me over straight away) and was happy to chat about our wedding for nearly two hours! We also got to see the new bar that Tim, the custodian of the Eco Park, had built from reclaimed wood found in Plymouth.
Whilst there we were able to scatter our collection of wildflower seeds on the site, which we hope will grow in time for our wedding. Chris did the scattering and I took some photos. It was a brilliantly sunny but very cold and windy day, so most of the seeds probably blew away! We can but try.
This is Chris tucking the seeds, ninja style, into the area around where we hope to have the ceremony, the idea being that the flowers will grow up and around the bottom of the decked area.
Charlie
Charlie
I am so excited about my new TNWC Real Brides feature and I hope you are too! It’s been lovely finding out so much about other people’s weddings and being able to share all those details with you here. You can catch up on all the blog posts by clicking this link to the full TNWC Real Bride feature.
Today has her second blog post, and is going to tell us all about the start of their DIY elements to their wedding – starting with their invitations. She’s even done a how to guide on how she made some very cute cake flags! If you haven’t read Emma’s first blog post, you can find it here. Over to Emma…
This week we have reached the first of our planning milestones – we posted our invites! We both wanted personalised invitations and I love to draw so I thought I’d have a go myself. I drew the designs on watercolour paper, painted in a bit of colour and went over it in fine liner.
I photographed the paintings then added the text using Photoshop. We had them printed on recycled card at Monkey Puzzle Repro Art who are based at Mount Pleasant Eco Park. I couldn’t be more happy with the service, John was lovely and got our invites printed within 24 hours of me emailing him the artwork! The front of the invite features us in what I think I can pass off as ‘naïve cartoon style’, standing in front of the archway area we plan to have our ceremony in.
Charlie
Charlie
Today is a very exciting day – I get to introduce you to a fantastic new feature to my blog called TNWC Real Brides. It has been so long since my own wedding that I decided I needed some new brides-to-be to share their wedding details, so before Christmas I invited applications.
Starting today, I have the first of my TNWC Real Brides who are going to be sharing their wedding planning experiences here on my blog – I am so thrilled to be opening up the blog to brides-to-be and I can’t wait to follow their wedding journeys with you.
I’m also super excited because for each couple I have had a fab illustrated picture of them created by my sister Izzy Burton – these illustrations of each couple will be used at the top of each real brides blog post so hopefully you’ll get to know them all by these cute images!
Our first TNWC Real Bride that you get to meet is Emma – I’ll hand you over to her so she can tell you all about her and her fiancée and the wedding they are planning…
Hello, I’m Emma (currently aged 29 and ¾) and I am going to be marrying the best Chris ever (also on the brink of ‘thirtydom’) on the 13th July 2013. Thirteen is my lucky number. We are planning an eco-friendly, DIY, windswept and romantic wedding at Mount Pleasant Eco Park in Porthtowan, Cornwall.
Chris and I met nearly 5 years ago through mutual friends on many occasions, most of which involved beer and back garden barbecues. Over time I had developed a bit of an embarrassing crush on him and therefore avoided talking to him for around six months, as whenever I got near him I would blush profusely. He happened to be just as shy and it took us well over five ‘dates’ before I made the move with a now or never awkward kiss. The kissing got a little less awkward after that first one.
Chris proposed on New Year’s Day, at the top of a snowy mountain in Bulgaria. He had chosen the most beautiful emerald and diamond ring, I couldn’t stop giggling and slightly hyperventilating as he knelt in the snow with clear blues skies all around us. It was massively unexpected as Chris is THE worst at keeping a secret – and he had been planning it for three months!