Blog: real bride Vicky
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Vicky and Steve’s DIY Village Fete Wedding with garden games, cream tea and a beaded wedding dress

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Vicky and Steve’s DIY Village Fete Wedding // Lucy Jane Photography // The Natural Wedding Company

Today’s beautiful DIY village fete wedding is that of  a couple you may recognise from these very pages – Vicky and Steve, one of our TNWC Real Bride couples from last year. We followed them through their epic DIY-ing journey and now we get to share in their gorgeous day and enjoy all their efforts.

After being together over six years Steve proposed to Vicky on holiday in the beautiful Skopelos. Since then with friends and family on board, and with Steve’s handy occupation as a builder, they have gone about creating the most wonderful projects to fill their day with personal touches, all of which you can find out about here.

Naked wedding cake with flowers // Lucy Jane Photography // The Natural Wedding Company

Eliza Jane Howell beaded wedding dress for Vicky and Steve’s DIY Village Fete Wedding // Lucy Jane Photography // The Natural Wedding Company

Coconut shy for Vicky and Steve’s DIY Village Fete Wedding // Lucy Jane Photography // The Natural Wedding Company

Rustic wooden direction sign for Vicky and Steve’s DIY Village Fete Wedding // Lucy Jane Photography // The Natural Wedding Company

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TNWC Real Bride: Vicky shares all the details from the crazy week leading up to their wedding

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This is the final instalment of Vicky’s pre-wedding posts, next up we hope to share you details and photos from her actual wedding – so excited to see how all her plans turned out. Vicky and Steve have definitely been one of our most crafty couples in our TNWC Real Brides series, turning their hand to creating so many items for their wedding. If this sounds like you, then make sure you check out all her posts for some great ideas and how to’s.

But for now, over to Vicky…

The week before the wedding

The week before our wedding was one of the most enjoyable weeks I’ve ever had and definitely the most tiring. I’m sure all the other TNWC Brides would agree the downside of a truly personal wedding is all the work you have to do in that final week. You 100% need a band of willing helpers ready to muck in, as at some point you do have to go off and just be the bride, like finding time to collect your dress – amazingly I nearly forgot that one in all my list making.

Steve had taken the week off work before the wedding to help get things done and my family and aunt were also down in Devon for the week, while the best man stopped work and joined in the chaos on the Thursday.

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TNWC Real Brides: Vicky’s gold glitter and sequin wedding cake and bar signs

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TNWC Real Brides: Vicky's gold glitter and sequin wedding cake and bar signs // The Natural Wedding Company

If you are reading this on Thursday, I will be playing with spring blossom at a flower crown workshop by Catkin – you can join in by following me on Snapchat (anaturalwedding) where I plan to share some pictures and maybe even a video or two of what I am up to. More pictures will follow on Instagram and Facebook.

But in the meantime, I have some gold glittery love for you all (even us natural brides often can’t say no to a splash of gold glitter can we?) with some handmade picks from TNWC Real Bride Vicky. She got married last summer but we are only just catching up with the final few bits of her homemade wedding.

You can find all her previous posts here, which include some fab DIY projects and ideas. Over to Vicky…

While I loved planning the wedding I have to admit that by being maybe a bit too organised I found the last couple of months leading up to it, dare I say it, dull! I just wanted the day to arrive.

Initially there was lots to plan and make and decide and then I hit this lull. I really wanted to get on and do things but realistically I couldn’t because everything that was left was last minute things.

Everything was piled up waiting in the spare bedroom – or ‘Wedding HQ’ as it became for the year. Even the confetti bags had been made and boxed up. Like most churches we could only use natural confetti which suited us fine so we had bought a lot of natural flower petals and popped them into bags ready for our page boy to hand out.

Flower petal confetti and gold glitter tape // The Natural Wedding Company

It was during this lull that I decided it was best to stay off websites and Pinterest, as the temptation to do and make more and more things was too great.

I did cave in and make a glitter cake sign…

DIY gold glitter wedding cake sign // The Natural Wedding Company

A sequin bar sign…

DIY gold sequin bar sign // The Natural Wedding Company

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TNWC Real Brides: Vicky’s hunt for vintage glass bowls and doilies to add dash of vintage charm to her wedding tea party

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TNWC Real Brides: Vicky's hunt for vintage glass bowls and doilies to add dash of vintage to her wedding tea party

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!

Vintage glass bowls // The Natural Wedding Company

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TNWC Real Brides: Vicky tells us about her locally sourced wedding meal and ‘help yourself’ popcorn dessert table

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Vicky tells us about her locally sourced wedding meal and 'help yourself' popcorn dessert table

Locally sourced wedding meal details from real bride Vicky

A weddig topic close to my heart – food! In the past I think wedding food has often been an after-thought, but more and more it’s becoming something that couples really put a lot of thought into. Here are Vicky and Steve’s plans for their wedding feast!

>> View Vicky and Steve’s DIY village fete wedding here <<

Over to Vicky…

A hog roast with handmade cutlery packages for guests

The food and drink we’ll be serving at the wedding is at the forefront of my mind at the moment as we firm up numbers and start to make the final purchases.

We decided from the very start that we wanted to keep it quite simple to help save the budget for other areas and keep the day relaxed. In the end we settled on a cream tea reception followed by a hog roast is the evening.

The hog roast was easy to organise as our best man’s father-in-law does these as a sideline to his farming. A quick chat on the beach, followed by an impromptu dance lesson (only in Devon!) and we had booked a hog and ram roast with a few roast potatoes thrown in the bottom for good measure. Excellent!

We’ve put together a little bag for each guest to pick up before they eat which have a napkin, wooden cutlery and a hand wipe in. They have been decorated with a personalised stamp which we found on Etsy.

Paper bag eco-friendly wedding picnic cutlery

A cream tea wedding reception

After that came the trickier task of finding a company to do the cream tea for us. Lots of the caterers we approached seemed keen to sell us their idea of what we wanted rather than what we wanted. A simple cream tea became a full-scale afternoon tea. It all sounded amazing but it wasn’t what we wanted.

Thankfully a friend then recommended the lovely Hannah and Sima from The Kitchen Table in Totnes. They have been brilliant, sticking to what we wanted, answering many questions about scone sizes (seriously, how did I turn into someone who worried about the size of a scone?) and even talking us down on quantities.

Even better they are advocates of using local produce, which fits our day perfectly. They will provide the mini pasty canapés, sit down cream tea and all the salads and rolls for the evening do, plus some vegetarian options. Their food looks beautiful and I can’t wait to try it all.

Salad with edible flowers

Victoria sponge wedding cake

They also put us in touch with Queen Bee Cakes, who make the most amazing wedding cakes and are a supplier on The Natural Wedding Company. Sadly they were already booked for our weekend leaving us with no choice but to try and re-create something similar ourselves.

So my lovely Mum and Aunt have gamely taken on the challenge of making the cake. From reading about other weddings I know this is quite common but my Mum is not the most expert of cooks, once serving up a dessert of sausage pie and custard – don’t ask!

Her cakes, however, are normally really good and with the amount of practice runs she’s been doing I’m sure it’ll be great, even if we won’t fit into our dresses any more! She will be making two sponges, which will sit on top of a fruit cake which my Aunt is busy soaking with brandy.

I’m planning on adding a liberal scattering of flowers and icing sugar to make it look pretty! Hopefully it will eventually turn out something like these cakes.

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TNWC Real Brides: Vicky’s been creating her vintage railway poster inspired invitations for her Devon wedding

Charlie

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Vicky’s back today to tell us all about the fab vintage railway poster inspired wedding stationery she’s had designed – I love this idea!

>> View Vicky and Steve’s DIY village fete wedding here <<

Over to Vicky…

Vintage railway post inspired invitations

It is now starting to dawn on me that our wedding is a lot closer than I want it to be and there seems to be an awful lot to do!

Much to Steve’s never ending dismay I am the sort of person who buys Christmas presents in October and arrives at the airport at least 6 hours before I should, just to be safe!  Organising a wedding where lots of it can’t be done until much closer to the time is killing me!  And driving him mad – so much so he’s gone off to Scotland on a motorbike holiday for 2 weeks!

However there was one major thing I was able to tick off of my ever-increasing list last month – getting the invitations sent out.

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Who to invite to our wedding

The actual process of deciding whom to invite has probably been the hardest part of the planning process for us so far. It seems that trying not to upset anyone while keeping the numbers manageable is a tricky balance.

One of the major issues was whether we should invite children or not. If we invited everyone’s children our numbers rose by about 20 meaning we had less space to invite other close friends. In the end we decided that we couldn’t invite children and luckily all of our friends seem quite relieved by this. They all say they are looking forward to being able to relax and enjoy themselves without worrying if their children are getting bored or restless. One of my bridesmaids is so excited at the prospect of being childfree that she’s booked the grandparents for babysitting duties from the Thursday until the Sunday!

A friend to design our invitations

When we announced our engagement one of my old friends, James, immediately offered to design the invitations for us. As he’s an amazing artist there was no way we were going to say no. I’ve always loved his work and have had a particular hankering for his vintage railway style posters for a long time. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get him to do one for us.

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TNWC Real Brides: introducing Vicky and Steve’s DIY Devon country village wedding

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: introducing Vicky and Steve's DIY Devon country village wedding

Plans for a DIY Devon country village wedding

It’s really lovely to be back again to introduce you to our second TNWC Real Bride of 2015 – Vicky – who is getting hitched this summer to her Mr-to-be Steve. I really love how hands-on Vicky and Steve seem to be with creating their wedding (helpful when your Mr is a builder!) and that they have chosen their home village as the spot to hold their celebrations.

>> View Vicky and Steve’s DIY village fete wedding here <<

Over to Vicky to tell you more…

A proposal in Greece

Hi my name is Vicky and I will be marrying my fiancé, Steve, this summer.  Steve and I have been together for over 6 years now and much to the relief of our friends and family we are finally getting married this July.

Steve proposed last year in Skopelos, outside the church from Mamma Mia, with a beautiful ring he’d bought in secret. It totally floored me. I’m not sure what actually amazed me more, the proposal (I’d have staked a lot of money on that never happening after 6 years!), the fact he had managed to get the ring to Greece without losing it or that he’d been confident enough to tell practically everyone we knew what he was planning – even announcing it in the village pub before he left!

Typically he waited until the very last day of the holiday before asking me, leaving our families at home convinced he’d changed his mind at the last moment! Once I’d got over the shock I finally remembered to say yes and started crying – which pretty much carried on all day! As you can see from the photo!

TNWC Real Brides: introducing Vicky and Steve's DIY Devon country village wedding

Planning a Devon village wedding

Since then it’s been full steam ahead with the wedding planning. I can’t honestly say I had any real idea of what our wedding would be like when we started planning it, we probably had more idea of what we definitely didn’t want. Steve didn’t want it to be in a hotel where we had to fit in around them and I didn’t want it to be too prescriptive with a set colour scheme and matching outfits etc.

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