What A Beautiful Wedding....These Past Few Weeks Have Been Full On!

With just three months to plan a village hall wedding reception for my son and his partner, life has been rather full on just lately with Xmas in between, but we finally managed to pull it off  last Saturday..and what a magical day it was! Thank goodness the snow stayed away, but blimey it was freezing. The actual wedding took place in the morning at Oxford Registry Office, utterly lovely and emotional with just family and two very close friends...and then the reception/party took place at a local village hall for just under 150 people later in the day! The bride looked radiant and beautiful, her brother sang and played the guitar as her father walked her up the aisle...was a very special moment indeed.  

The  vintage brooch and fabric flower bouquet was a sensational success....phew! The dress was made by the bride's friend - it was gorgeous.

Our brief given three months ago from my daughter-in-law to be and my son had been "a twinkly, sparkly, woodland kind of effect on a minimal budget and an informal big party for family and loads of their friends"...they definitely did not want a stuffy, expensive and formal do.  So that is what we gave them and we used as much creativity as we could muster between us all!

 In the centre of each of the 24 tables a pile of vintage books were placed and standing on top of each pile we had an old style Mason jar, a purple ridged glass jar plus a tiny mercury glass tea light jar - all bought for a snip in bargain shops or in sales - we never paid full price for anything! The  jars were filled with a combination of white and blue battery lights  on a string, and tiny submersible battery lights bought from Ebay and Amazon  (cheaper when bought in bulk). To aid the seating plan, every two sets of tables were named after a famous musician, complete with an image of the artist stuck to a wooden spoon stood in a glass...I was on the Jimmi Hendrix table:)

The lights in jars gave a stunning magical effect when the hall lights were dimmed. Running along the table centre  from each side of the books  were fairy lights (bought from Poundland in November before the Xmas rush) wrapped in eucalyptus leaves. 

Very pretty indeed.

My ginger cat Freddie was very impressed with my cans too!

For the two massive  main hall window sills, we used large empty Morrisons grapefruit tins, decorated with cheap braid and tiny wooden butterflies from "The Works" sale...16p each! Special thanks must go to my friend who very kindly munched her way through the tinned grapefruit when I couldn't face eating anymore!!! 

 

I then sprayed large beech twigs with white paint on my patio...

but unfortunately even though I had covered my patio with bin liners before spraying....I still managed to create a rather splendid white border around the outside!!!! The one photo of evidence of this can be seen above, taken on my mobile, completely out of focus because I was in complete shock after I removed the bin liner - I  thought I had been so careful. It did eventually come off after much scrubbing with water and a broom though. 

 Then the twigs were fixed into the cans filled with gravel and  more battery fairy lights were draped around the twigs. Large Mason jars filled with battery lights, coupled with draped ivy completed the look and really did look pretty, especially as the lights reflected in the windows against the backdrop of the black wintery night sky.

The hall walls are covered in bright blue accoustic boards all the way around the room and we were not allowed to pin anything to them...they were so dominant and quite hideous actually (why on earth have them bright blue?)....so much head scratching was spent over what to do about them. But then my lovely sister-in-law had the ingenious idea of perching loads of the tiny battery tea lights along the top. The effect was truly magical, as they created wonderful shadows above. 

In the food hall we used slightly different decorations.

 More empty cans of grapefruit decorated in the same way as the others, but filled instead with pretty pussy willow twigs and decorated with fairy lights. Large floor standing tins bought half price from a local florist (they were old and bashed) were filled with willow twigs from a friend's garden and more pussy willow with fairy lights. Additional cheap Mason jars with blue and white lids were filled with more lights, and tiny crinkled coloured tea candle holders were filled with battery tea lights to decorate the food tables. We dried fennel from our gardens, sprayed them gold and placed them in green wine bottles filled with coloured fairy lights. Special thanks must go to the friend that supplied many of the empty bottles:) The overall effect was very pretty indeed. For additional lighting we purchased cheap uplighter standard lamps from IKEA (just under £6 each) and they were perfect to help give a real informal atmosphere when the main lights were dimmed.

Each guest brought a pre-arranged dish of their choosing for the food....I was seriously worried about this concept but blimey, everyone excelled themselves and what an amazing feast we had!! And as my son's bride is a music therapist and singer, all the music was supplied by her talented friends (and she sang a special song she had written herself especially for my son - how romantic).  There was even a wonderful ceilidh band...great fun!!!

Sadly I don't have any photos on hand just yet of the entrance hall completed, but we had a massive branch covered in fairy lights, and decorated in vintage style clip on butterflies and birds borrowed from a friend. 

I did take some pics of the components last week as we were experimenting with the lights...seen above.

 With everyone pitching in to help and contributing to the food, a real warm and cosy communial atmosphere was created, with much fun, music and laughter. So job done well methinks :)

This is why I have been distracted these past few weeks from KT Miniatures and I am now utterly exhausted. So much hard work went into that one day and it just seemed to all be over in a blink of an eye. But now life has to get back to some sort of normality, therefore by the end of this week I hope to have begun listing vintage items to the website and with Thame Dolls House Fair just a month away, I will need to knuckle down to some miniature creating. 
Celia