table plan Archives - The Natural Wedding Company

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Charlie

Favourite Natural Wedding Details: favours, table plans, wedding cakes, DIY projects, transport & children-friendly weddings

Charlie

Natural Wedding Details

For the third part of our Real Wedding Favourites mini series we are bringing you are Favourite Natural Wedding Details. As you might imagine, choosing ‘favourites’ in this category is really hard. It’s also a lot down to personal preference. My suggestion is to enjoy browsing through our blog archive for inspiration for your wedding details.

All our picks are chosen from the very first Real Wedding we featured up until spring of this year. You can find all the links to our Real Wedding Favourites here.

Our Favourite Wedding Favours

Hot Chocolate Mugs with a Vintage Welsh ‘Love Teaspoon’

Nik was one of our first TNWC Real Brides and together with her husband Chris they created a true-to-them chilled out wedding at their home. We followed many of the details that Nik created for their wedding, but it was hot chocolate inspired wedding favours that I really loved.

Nik decorated a mug for each guest that they served hot chocolate in at their wedding, and gave the mug along with a vintage teaspoons with the words ‘LLwy Garu’ (Welsh for ‘love spoon’) stamped onto it as wedding favours. Useful and beautiful.

Charlie’s favourite wedding favours come from Nik and Chris’ chilled out rustic coastal farm wedding. Vintage teaspoons from Rescue & Revive and mugs hand decorated by the bride. Photography by Pete Cranston Photography.

Nik’s wedding dress was also one of our favourites, which you can see in our Natural Wedding Styles post.

Charlie

Nikki and Ben’s rustic Pimhill Barn wedding with a pastel dahlia bouquet, hessian jam jar lanterns and gypsophila buttonholes

Charlie

This week’s Real Wedding is delicately rustic, pretty and full of pastel florals and sprigs of gypsophila. Set on a beautifully sunny July day at Pimhill Barn in the fields of rural Shropshire, Nikki and Ben focused their plans around their extraordinary venue. They chose handmade signage and cut log decor to complement the 16th Century vaulted ceilings of the barn.

Nikki and Ben decided upon Amy Taylor Imaging Photography to capture the best day of their lives, a photographer from our eco wedding directory whose photographs we always enjoy. You can see other weddings from photographer Amy that we’ve featured here.

Bride Nikki caught up with us to give us the inside knowledge on the couple’s planning and ideas for their rustic Pimhill Barn wedding…

Charlie

Poppy and Mark’s colourful meadow festival wedding with outdoor ceremony, hay bale seating and bridesmaids in yellow maxi skirts

Charlie

Poppy and Mark’s colourful meadow festival wedding in Wales is not only full of inspiration and pretty details, but it just oozes love and fun. It’s a beautiful example of a British summer wedding at it’s best, with hay bale seating, sunflower yellow bridesmaid dresses, and romantic meadow photos.

This wedding was captured by Michael and Andrea of Bohemian Weddings, one of our recommended wedding photographers. If you’re on the hunt for photographers for your 2017 wedding, you could win your wedding photography with Bohemian Weddings this month via our blog – full details here on how to enter.

Here’s what Poppy and Mark said about them…

“We met our wonderful photographers, Michael and Andrea of Bohemian Weddings, at a friend’s wedding the previous year (Lizzy and Graeme had found them by contacting The Natural Wedding Company after being let down last minute).

We wanted to capture the feel of the day rather than have hours of posed photographs, and as we’d seen them previously we knew they would be perfect. It felt like having friends take our photos rather than official photographers, and their friendliness and ease spread to all the guests throughout the day.”

Over to Poppy to tell us more about their colourful meadow festival wedding…

Charlie

Claire and George’s country farm wedding with tractor transport, hay bale seating and pink floral bridesmaids dresses

Charlie

Our Valentine’s Day Real Wedding is just gorgeous. You’re certain to love the couple and their particularly personal country farm wedding, and I’m sure your heart will melt when you see the photographs of their little boy giving a speech at the reception. Adorable.

Groom George is from an agricultural background and as such, the couple decided that there was only one way they could plan their big day. Tractors, bunting, hay bales, a tractor wheel seating plan, straw dollies and wellies filled with flowers.

Bride Claire got in touch to share their day with us after being inspired by our site so I’ll hand over to her to give us the details…

Charlie

Lizzy and Graeme’s country fete inspired Cheshire wedding with vintage ice cream van and cottage garden flowers

Charlie

To describe this wedding at a country fete inspired wedding is really to do it a disservice, because it is so much more than just that. The bride, Lizzy, told me that her photographers “truly captured the happiness and love felt”, a wish that I imagine most of us have for our wedding day. Lizzy has put into words so many of those feelings we have in the lead up to our wedding day, so if you are a bride-to-be then I encourage you to stop a while and read as well as soak up all the pretty details.

For an overview of this beautiful wedding this slideshow put together by photographers Bohemian Weddings gives you a little of the magic these two shared on their wedding day, and includes lots of extras captures. A lovely alternative to a wedding film, and I get all teary watching it despite not knowing these two…

As a quick aside, you might also notice that we’ve changed up the format of our real weddings a bit, we have crafted a new questionnaire for our couples which we hope gives them more freedom to tell us the story of their wedding in their own words. For this reason I imagine that the appearance of these features will change from wedding to wedding, but I’m sure you’ll agree that it will truly allow the stories to shine through.

Lizzy + Graeme, July 2015

So many of the real weddings I share have extra special meaning to me, and today’s wedding is no exception. I was contacted by Lizzy after her wedding photographer cancelled just 8 weeks before her wedding, asking if I could help. After I emailed all of the wonderful wedding photographers in our directory, Lizzy received over a dozen replies, and from those she fell in love with one couple – Michael and Andrea of Bohemian Weddings. I understand the four of them really connected and I am just so delighted to be now sharing Lizzy and Graeme’s wedding with you. Over to Lizzy…

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Lisa’s handmade napkins and bunting, vintage crockery collecting and other last minute wedding preparations

Charlie

For any of our regular readers you’ll probably have realised that our lovely TNWC Real Bride Lisa is now married, however she got so busy in the lead up to her wedding day that it’s only now post-wedding and post-honeymoon that she’s been able to fill us in on the final aspects of her wedding planning.

Over to Lisa to tell us more…

Vintage crockery, stamping, bunting, lots of napkins and trying to get ahead…

In the run up to our big day, we realised that a lot of the things we wanted to do could only be done at the very last minute, such as our favours which were Welsh cakes, the flowers (which Tom’s mum was growing) the drinks for the drinks dispensers etc. We also found that we were still coming up with ideas even up until the eleventh hour! Below are some of things we did manage to do in advance (thankfully!!).

The hunt for vintage crockery

For our reception we had beautiful Kata tents, if you are not familiar with them they are a type of interlocking tipi and are absolutely beautiful inside. You could pretty much leave them as they are without doing very much decoration, I can imagine them to look stunning with very simple table settings and lighting. However I have always had my heart set on a very colourful, mismatch of styles filling the tables and all around.

Izzy

‘Grow the Love’ with these beautiful ideas for incorporating living flowers and plants into your wedding from Wedding in a Teacup

Izzy

Today Hester from Wedding in a Teacup tells us about how to use living potted plants and greenery in weddings, rather than cut flowers. With some super helpful tips, it’s a must-read for any brides-to-be looking for quirky eco-chic ideas.

Over to Hester…

We love the idea of living flowers and greenery at a wedding. They look natural and informal and are a great way to add practical decoration, but more than that – there’s something about having something living on your day that is so wholly positive!

We like tables named after love-in-the-mist or sage, with pots and gardeners labels to mark them; tiny flower pots doubling as place markers and favours (check out our personalised labels created with these in mind); and an apple crate of herbs or flowers as a luscious table plan holder.

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Sarah’s been busy with her family working on a number of DIY craft projects for her wedding

Charlie

At about this time I will probably be meeting Susanne from The Blue Carrot in deepest Cornwall, over 300 miles from my home. If you’ve just joined us, this week I am on a TNWC South West Roadtrip travelling around Somerset, Devon and Cornwall visiting a number of the lovely wedding businesses listed in the directory.

This afternoon I have Sarah one of my TNWC Real Brides who is sharing some of her DIY projects that her and her family have been busy creating for their upcoming wedding.

Over to Sarah…

Hi everyone! In this blog I will be writing about some of the creative projects we are doing for the wedding, with less than 3 months to go everything is starting to get a bit crazy!

One of my projects is using a gorgeous old gate dad came across, we were thinking of painting it but soon decided it was perfect as it was. I’m going to use it to display picture of myself and Lee. I’m also going to decorate it with lovely trinkets and bunting along the top.

My mum has been busy making bunting, we were told we’d need 150 meters worth – my mum nearly fainted at the thought! She’s making lots of progress after lots of trouble with it – we sourced our fabric from charity shops and eBay, and I bet it will look stunning!

Izzy

Holly and Laurie’s English picnic wedding in Shropshire with country garden flowers and handmade details

Izzy

English picnic wedding

I have got some truly lovely exclusive real weddings coming up for you on the blog, so I do hope you’ll check back over the coming weeks to soak up all the wonderful inspiration these brides and grooms have to share.

Today’s real wedding is beautiful. I feel like I’ve got to know bride Holly over the past year or so as she emailed me a couple of times in the lead up to her wedding – not only was she inspired by my own wedding stationery, but she also won her wedding photography via a competition that I’d promoted on the blog!

Holly and Laurie got married in Shropshire on the 15th of September 2012 with a wedding ceremony held at Ludlow Castle, and followed up by a picnic wedding reception at Henley Farmhouse on the Acton Scott Estate.

Over to Holly to tell us all about their wonderful day…

“We both just wanted a really relaxed wedding where all our guests could just have fun. We wanted a day that was personal to us – we didn’t have a huge budget so we knew from the start that we would probably be doing lots of the work ourselves – with the help of our friends and family.”

“We actually found searching for a venue one of the most stressful parts of planning, we were looking for a blank canvas without lists of suppliers we had to use and we didn’t have lots of money to spend so we struggled to find somewhere. I grew up in Shropshire and loved the idea of a Shropshire country wedding.”

Charlie

TNWC Real Brides: Emma’s latest crafting projects and and worries about the small things on their wedding ‘to do’ list

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…

All The Small Things (seem to bring the biggest headache)

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.

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