Alice & Gareth

Mmm such a delicious palette of mint green and gold for this afternoons classic country wedding. All inspired by the gorgeous decor & furnishings of the ceremony room at Botleys Mansion. The Atrium reception is pretty spectacular too. Decorated with the sweetest DIY gold spray painted safari animal place settings and truly spectacular tall big bloomsey centrepieces. Talk about WOW factor. Alice wore a stunning lace and jewel encrusted Ellis Bridals gown that twinkled in the glorious summer sun. Just. Perfect.

The Dress

Alice The Bride: I wanted a lace dress, nothing too big and found a lace dress that fitted really well with added straps and belt.

The Grooms Fashion

We wanted to keep Gareth's suit simple. We'd always liked blue as found it to be more of a summery shade.

The Venue

Our venue Botleys Mansion in Surrey, near Otthershaw is large country manor based in landscaped grounds and parkland surrounding it. We held our ceremony in the green room and the wedding breakfast and dancing took place in the Atrium. We always wanted to have the ceremony and reception at one venue. We managed to organised the wedding in 7 months. Bijou are brilliant as they have in house suppliers, great recommendations and can assist with a lot of the planning.

Colour Scheme/Decor

Our colour scheme was mint and gold, to compliment the ceremony room and venue. We added handmade small gold safari animals for name places as Gareth is South African.

Flowers

I liked the idea of having elegant flowers, whites and pale pinks with lots of Gypsophila to make it soft.

The Wedding Party Fashion

The bridesmaids wore mint green dresses from True Bridesmaids to go with the theme as they were the perfect colour match.

Ceremony

We had two readings which were, May be (unknown author) and On your wedding day (unknown author). Gareth's sister read one reading and my best friend read the another.

Entertainment

We hired a band called Groove Addicts. Two time slots were agreed, outside during the reception in the afternoon & then in the evening and to play for our first song (Ben E. Kind – Stand by me). The acoustic afternoon set was play by two band members and the evening set was played by the full 5 piece band. They were full of energy and got loads of people on the dance floor.

Food

The food was all provided for by Bijou weddings. We opted for a summery menu of canapés were served outside during the reception drinks and the Wedding breakfast menu was as follows:

Appetiser

Peat-smoked salmon, pea shoots & beetroot with charlotte potato salad & edible flowers Red onion tart, spinach & saffron shallot, mascarpone, redcurrant & balsamic (V)

Main course

Roast breast of guinea fowl, confit potatoes, caramelised onions & green beans with sauce chasseur

Sweet

No dessert was served as we had a vintage sweet tricycle out all evening provided by the venue which everyone loved

Photographer

Faye was recommended to us by Bijou weddings as a preferred supplier. We liked her work best out of all the photographers they had and luckily she was available! Faye is really easy to work with and we love our photos!

DIY

Gareth is originally from South Africa so we wanted to have a smidgeon of Africa within the theme so we decided to create the name card holders from African animals and paint them gold to follow the theme. Animals included: Lion, Giraffe, Elephant, Zebra, etc. The DIY project commenced with us trying to find the right sized animals that would not be lost on the table nor take up large amount of space. Numerous plastic animals were purchased and looked at before settling on the right size. Once we had the size sorted we looked into ways of painting each animal, so we tried spray the animals directly however the results we too “sticky”. We tried different spray paints but had similar results however we then tried using a primer initially and then applying the spray paint a few days later, the results were much better. The following task was finding the correct clips to hold the cards, this was not too complicated as we knew approximately the height that we wanted them to be and fortunately there was a large selection of them on ebay and amazon. Once the clips had arrived we had to piece the animals with the clips. This was done by heating the bottom end of the metal clip cable and forcing it into the animal. Time was spent making sure that the clips all straight, faced the same way and were more or less the same height. Then came the tedious task of spraying the animals, a selection of animal at a time, and leaving them to dry for a couple of days before applying more spray paint to the opposite side!! Several days and cans of spray paint later the card holders were complete. And I must say they looked amazing