Lucy & Vicki

Are you ready to feel the love? Good, because this DIY festival themed wedding is off the chart adroable. Both bride Lucy & bride Vicki look absolutely stunning in their ASOS and Arielle by Heidi Hudson wedding dresses and the moments captured by Felix Russell-Saw & Ryan Winterbotham of them at their orangery ceremony and rustic tipi reception at The Grange, Belluton will warm the heart and inspire the mind. Now sit back relax and enjoy every minute lovely ones.

Dress

Vicki the Bride: We were keen to not spend a huge amount of money on the dresses as this wasn’t high on our agenda of things that we wanted to spend our budget on. Our style is very simple and we wanted our dresses to be relaxed and allow us to be ourselves and party away in them. Lucy found her dress very early on after ordering online, which seemed quite an alien thing to do. But once it did arrive she tried it on and knew it was the right decision. I tried on a number of dresses in traditional bridal shops, but the one that I could lunge in the best was the clear winner.

The Venue

Some of our best times together have been spent at festivals such as Glastonbury, so we were keen to have a festival inspired, outdoor wedding. We looked around various venues and buildings to hold the wedding in but it was only when we walked into a tipi when we absolutely knew we had to have it in one. It was magical! A colleague told us about Buffalo Tipi and I got in touch with Simon the owner. They really were really well organised and wonderful throughout the whole experience. It was amazing to see it being built and come to life. In fact we were so sad to see it come down! Once we had the tipi sorted, we needed somewhere to put it, which was actually quite difficult. We somehow found our way to Meg Thomas’s beautiful home, The Grange. Not only was this the perfect place for our tipi, but we could also legally hold the ceremony within the beautiful grounds. We had an intimate ceremony in the ‘Orangery’ of the house which also acted as a perfect backdrop for our photography. Meg was brilliant throughout and really allowed us to do whatever we wanted to make the venue our own.

Colour Scheme/Decor

As we are both designers, we were pretty excited to embark on the project of branding our own wedding. Lucy designed our invitations which was an illustrated map of the venue, rolled up and sent out in postal tubes. This also influenced the branding and colour scheme of our decorations, signage and favours. We handmade 100m of bunting, tote bags, seating plans and placenames. We also collected a lot of free items such as jars, gin bottles and pallets which we made into numerous structures such as a DJ booth, lost property, destination sign, serving stands and signage. This saved us a lot of money and allowed us to put our own personal style on the day.

Flowers/Florist

Lucy’s aunty Tina offered to kindly organise the flowers for the day. We gave her a moodboard of simple and wild flower arrangements which would suit our festival theme. Tina went above and beyond our expectations for the bouquets, table centrepieces and men’s buttonholes. She made a very early morning visit to Covent Garden to pick up the flowers and then arranged them all herself. They really were stunning!

The Wedding Party Fashion

We chose a simple navy dress from ASOS for the bridesmaid. This fitted in with our branding colour scheme. Vicki’s niece was the flower girl who accompanied the bridesmaid. She wore a simple ivory dress from Marks and Spencer. For the fathers and two best men, we knew early on that we wanted a light grey 3 piece suit and a navy polka dot tie to match the bridesmaid’s dress. We thought the combination was very sophisticated and made the men look very dapper! We also had Vicki’s young nephew in grey shorts with a grey waistcoat and blue polka dot bow tie. He looked adorable.

Ceremony

Because we were both brides and neither of us wanted to have to wait for the other, we decided to have two aisles and meet in the middle at the same time. This was carefully choreographed to ‘Toto - Africa’, which everyone spontaneously started clapping along to. This really set the mood for the day and put everyone at ease.

Entertainment

To continue the festival spirit, we chose a 10 piece brass band from London called Das Brass, who played a really upbeat set of classic covers and original music. They were incredible and had everyone of all ages dancing. We also had a playlist of specially chosen songs to dance the night away to. As a surprise at the end of the night, Vicki did a DJ set of classic dance songs while her best man MC’d over the top.

Food

Bristol’s finest Pieminister served pies from a festival style tent. They assigned us a day planner who helped co-ordinate and plan the timings of the wedding down to a tee. The day wouldn’t have gone as smoothly if they hadn’t of helped. They also chilled and served drinks, prepare cakes and evening food which we had organised ourselves. They even tidied and took the rubbish away. They were perfect and the pies were delicious. We tried to make the cakes a little more affordable by buying undecorated sponge tiers for the wedding cake and asked Vicki’s mum and sister to decorate and we hand made the cake topper ourselves. We also asked the aunties to make a selection of cakes to be served in a buffet style.

Photographer

We found Felix who was a friend of one of Lucy’s colleagues. We loved his documentary style of ethereal photographs and without many weddings under his belt, he agreed to shoot our wedding. He also invited his friend Ryan down for the day to help shoot the day from all angles, which was especially lucky because we had two aisles! Felix really took hold of the day and captured every moment with ease and a flare for beautiful details. They captured everything from the decorations, to the ceremony and the party celebrations in the evening.