Helen & Craig

This industrial floral wedding with gold luxe details has got me in a frenzy. The hanging chandeliers are amazing, the centre pieces are stunning and the floral initials are utterly adorable. If you love flowers, you will most certainly love this wedding. I'm also absolutely loving the brides full tulle skirt princess gown by Mori Lee teamed with the most fabulous blue suede peep toe shoes. And by her side a squad of her best girls in adorable white lace ASOS dresses, making their fabulous orange and red hued bouquets POP against the neutral shade. Full of emotion, romantic glances, laughter and adorable tales, this botanical wedding is the perfect inspiration for a Monday morning.

The Dress

Helen The Bride: I am normally in love with everything lace and vintage inspired, however as many brides find, what you have in mind, you don’t always like. So the princess dress it was! It was also very similar to my Sister’s dress and by the same designer so felt like it was destined to be mine. My shoes were my something blue and with the full skirt and beautiful shoes I felt like Carrie Bradshaw!

The Grooms Fashion

We feel in love with the blue wool suits with the white fleck from Debenhams. To stand out Craig wore a taupe brown waistcoat and a pocket watch which was given to him by his mother the day before, for his birthday.

The Venue

We chose Ditchling firstly because it is where my mum went to school and my grandparents owned a pub. We fell in love with the Church and my mum used to be in the choir there so it felt nostalgic. We also were won over by the Charms of Father David, who knowing Craig was in the RAF suggested paper planes as confetti and the Damn busters as our exit song.

Colour Scheme/Décor

Our theme was industrial floral glamour and so bright flowers were interjected with golds lustre finishes and glitters. I don’t like any particular colour and in fact love bright colours and mixing them with natural greens. This is why we chose a floral theme instead of a single colour. I love filling the house with flowers in every room and love the seasonality of them, which is why we didn’t really choose anything out of season. I also like the smell of eucalyptus and it was so fragrant in the room whilst we ate dinner. My mum potted all of the place names with little Violas and every guest could take these as a favour and myself and Craig potted the plants for the table plans. We found lots of our decorations on Etsy and ebay and also picked all of our brass candlesticks for the Church up from the Lille vintage fair in France. The chandeliers came from BHS where I work as a buyer on the lighting department, as does the marquee lighting which I decorated with flowers to be in keeping with the theme.

Flowers

Our theme from early on was industrial floral, which was quickly interjected with pops of glamourous gold and glitter finishes to give it a luxe edge. We chose Hannah from Petal and Feast as she just understood everything we wanted. Being a lighting buyer I knew that I always wanted glamourous chandeliers filled with flowers at the wedding and she took on this challenge and couldn’t wait to get her hands on them. The day before the wedding she meticulously propping the bottom of each chandelier with flowers so it was all you could see when you looked up at them. I wanted the bouquets to be bright and colourful with a dark edge and so she chose dahlias for our colour pop and roses for subtlety. She added a dark edge to them with beautiful cascading flowers in mauve and dark purpley red. I wanted the bouquets to look like they had been gathered from the garden and hand tied and she chose a vintage spool of linen tape she had found at a market to tie the bouquets with long flowing bows. The bright bouquets looked great against the bridesmaids dresses and my wedding dress, all of which were white.

The Wedding Party Fashion

We had a small flower crown for our flower girl and a basket of petals, also provide by petal and feast. All of the bridesmaids wore vintage style lace cocktails dresses from ASOS so that the flowers stood out. The groomsmen had matching suits to Craig with their bright floral ties and button holes in keeping with the theme.

Ceremony

We came into the Church to Clair de Lune by Debussy (my favourite song!) and exited on the dambusters as a nod to Craig’s RAF career. A highlight was the throwing of the paper planes, one of which hit me in the head…. We had poems and religious readings in the Church by Hannah Geddes and Ged Lawrenson and for the speeches my step dad and dad shared the father of the bride speech, which was both emotional and embarrassing with stories of me being naked in the bath and amazing affirmations of pride. My dad was proud that he had made all of the girls cry – mission completed were his exact words. Other special moments are when we had our first dance to Tom Odell Grow old with me and then went straight into singing Erasure, Little respect with the bandeoke band. An amazing moment when you finally feel like a rockstar. Also one of guests had to strip off at the wedding breakfast as he had split his trousers and my sister (bridesmaid) had to sew them up…there is a great image of him standing on the chair in his boxers with our reactions to his semi-naked state.

Entertainment

We had a photo booth in the evening which my dad made up for us and a bandeoke band which everyone sung too!

Food

We had steak and Sussex ale pie with puff pastry hats for main and chocolate roulade for pudding. Our wine was provided by Court Garden and it was their own wine grown at the vineyard, which was beautiful. I made the cake – and it took 24 eggs, 5 bags of icing sugar and two days to make. Maybe I took on too much! The top layer was a carrot cake using my favourite Hummingbird bakery recipe, the middle layer was chocolate which, again was a recipe from the hummingbird bakery and the bottom layer a standard vanilla sponge. I decorated this with flowers from petal and feast and a topper I found on ebay. The evening food was provided by Pizza Amore, we wanted it to be really casual and at the end of the evening everyone left, pizza box in hand for their midnight feast!

Photographer

The amazing Marianne Chua. We fell in love with her photo journalism style and unposed shots. We didn’t want a huge amount of formal shots and my favourite photos are when I stepped into my dress and the bridesmaid are all helping, the reactions to the speeches and when we decided to climb the hay bales. I also love see all of the reaction shots from my guests and seeing their natural smiles and grimaces!