Our low budget wedding

Hello,

 

I got married last March. Me and my husband were engaged for 2 years and half and kept postponing our wedding because it never felt like the time was perfect. First I was finishing my PhD and had lots of stress, then we went through a less nice phase where we were both unemployed and when we moved to the UK for our new jobs, because of my family.

In the end of last year, a friend of mine got married out of the blue. She went on holidays with her boyfriend and got married on the beach, just like that. That got me thinking, there is never a perfect time for anything and marriage is about the couple not about pleasing other people. Thus we decided to stop postponing our lives and just do it.

We knew what we wanted: get married in a simple low budget, but beautiful ceremony, surrounded by people that we love and love us and are happy for us.

We had a civil ceremony here in England (in the registration office). We had only 14 guests, I made the invitations cards, email-invitations would have been cheaper but I still like to send letters. For our venue we used the services of a small tea house that we go to every Saturday. The owner is really nice, the place has this warm and shabby chic style. We prepared the menu with her advice, she also did our wedding cake (picture). In total, dinner + space (towels/plates/cutlery) + menu was only 400£. Furthermore, Waitrose has this really nice service where you can hire glasses but only pay if you break them.. which we didn’t so it was free!

 

As for the decorations, we had little flower arrangements in little glass vases that I had at home (see picture of the top of the cake) distributed along two tables. We made lotus flowers from paper napkins (see how to pictures) and place markers from bamboo sticks (see picture). I also bought same LED lights (rose shaped) and wood Mr and Mrs letters for an extra touch.

 

 

 

My husband sister is a talented photographer, she does it on the side of her main job, so we asked if she could take a few pictures for us. We just wanted a few with only us, with the family and so on. The cake picture is from her and you can see how good she is!

The flowers for the table decorations, cake and bouquet were bought by me the day before the wedding. A couple of weeks before I went through our local market and had a chat with one of the florist. My initial idea was to have a big hydrangea as a bouquet but she mentioned that they are a bit trick. I ended up choosing purple anemones (my favourite colour and the colour of my dress), white peonies, purple country flowers that look like lavender (I don’t remember the name!!) and goldenrod flowers. I made my own bouquet (see picture) together with my husband buttonhole, the afternoon before the wedding.

 

As people were coming from abroad we didn’t want any other gift however you know how family and friends are. A couple friend of ours came up with a really neat idea – the honeymoon. We choose a place where we would like to go and they organize it, everybody contributed so we spend a couple of days in Oxford which we really enjoyed it.

As favours we prepared small paper bags with nice chocolates and English candies. We wanted to give something that people could really enjoy and not end up in a pile of yet another wedding favour with no real purpose. If you can bake something nice it’s better, more personal and cheaper however, I didn’t want too much stress as everything went quite fast- we decided in December 2014 and  got married in March 2015.

I hope this post gave you nice ideas in case you’re planning a simple, kind of handmade wedding!

Have a lovely day