Lace Wedding Dress + Silver Words Wedding

Redding Materials Suggestion:

An Antique Lace Wedding Dress For A Beautiful Irish Bride

Silver Words Wedding

An Antique Lace Wedding Dress For A Beautiful Irish Bride

"Liam and I met at a music festival in Clapham, London. Liam is 6’4” so I saw his head pop up over the crowd grinning at me!  He proposed on a Saturday morning before taking me out in London for the day, it was completely out of the blue so I was very shocked. We were engaged for just over a year."

"My dress was sourced, designed and made by the amazing Jane Bourvis. I stumbled across her shop years ago on a crazy street near Portabello Road. It’s truly a stunning shop and she is just lovely.  Jane's shop is like no other shop I have ever been in.

You are guaranteed to leave with something truly unique and beautiful.  Jane sources pieces of antique lace and then styles them together into the most stunning dresses I’ve ever seen. The lace on my dress was over 100 years old!"

"I tried on a few of her dresses and I loved them all! But this one had a style all of its own and I just loved it from the first moment I saw it! It had a different belt to begin with so I changed that but it's more or less how Jane put it together. It's not white, it's a lovely golden champagne colour. I really didn’t want a classic off the peg 'wedding dress', but I also wanted something fairly traditional.

 I didn't wear a veil. I think the dress did enough! Jane did however give me the most beautiful old hair comb to wear on the day. It was costume jewellery but fairly old. It suited the style of the dress perfectly. She saw me admire it and she gave it to me as a gift a few weeks before the wedding."

"We searched high and low and scoured Pinterest for stylish bridesmaid dresses that didn’t look  'bridesmaidy'. I hated all of the dresses available 'for bridesmaids'. Why do they have to look like bridesmaids in a dress they'll never wear again?? And any dresses in the high street shops were too unsuitable as they were too short, tarty, tight, etc. 

We ended up falling for these ones which were on a website in America called Nordstrom. They're made by Maggie London (but ironically not available in the UK). They are really beautiful dresses and totally wearable, comfortable, stylish. I thought they were perfect but it's a shame we had to go so far afield to find decent dresses!"

"I went a bit off-piste and wore sky-high sparkly Carvella shoes from House of Fraser. I loved them and surprisingly they really worked with the dress. I wanted to be tall for my very tall husband-to-be and thankfully I didn’t break my neck!"

"Liam spoiled himself with a suit from Richard James in Saville Row in London. He'd been planning on getting a good suit for years, this seemed like a good opportunity to debut it!

He bought his bow tie from Mrs Bowtie. His shoes were from Barker as was the belt, his shirt was Hugo Boss."

"A lady called Kate from Dungannon did my flowers. I loved them! They were just what I wanted. She did both of my sister's flowers at their weddings."

"I designed and made all the invitations, orders of service, place cards, menus and table names.   I got the idea for the invitations online and I found the font ‘Landsdowne’ (for free) online. I wrapped the invitations in brown paper and string and bought decorative stamps from the post office website. I thought they looked like little packages from the war!   I bought cheap picture frames for the table names (for about £1 each from Tiger). I used luggage tags for the place settings and tied them to everyone’s wine glass. 

The table plan was written on an old window frame which my brother found in a salvage yard. I wrote all the names on each pane with a white glass marker the day before the wedding.   I found a lot of these ideas on Pinterest, it was great for original ideas!"

"We loved Larchfield from the moment we saw it so there was no question there really. The outdoor gardens were so established and beautiful and the old barn was just what we wanted.   

"We used my great-grandfather's car to take us around. My uncle has had it completley re-conditioned and kindly lent it to us along with Jim our driver! It was really perfect for the day.  Then we hired a bus to get everyone to/from the church and Larchfield. Liam's relatives had all flown/driven over from Wales or England, so they needed some help. It meant it was one less thing to worry about." .....

Silver Words - Mrs G’s Dancey Dance

Kevin is very into his music so he was a bit wary of hiring a DJ. He used to be a bit of a local pub DJ in his younger days and still has all the equipment so he did a playlist for the night (he called it Mrs G’s dancey dance) and everyone commented the next day on how amazing the music was.

What was great was that they were tunes that we both loved or meant a lot to us so it made it really personal. The only downside was that I don’t think I finished a single conversation as half way through I ran away from everyone towards the dance floor screaming the words “I love this song!”

Our first dance was “Silver words” by Sixto Rodriguez, it’s a song that Kevin has always loved and the first time he played it to me I fell in love with the lyrics so it felt like the perfect choice.

Red Velvet

Neither of us are big fans of canapés however, we are both very big fans of cake! So we decided to have red velvet cupcakes with prosecco and elderflower cordial for all our guests when they arrived. My very talented sister and her friend offered to make them for us and my equally talented auntie made our three-tiered Victoria sponge wedding cake which basically equalled a seriously sweet cake-tastic delight!!

We wanted a formal sit down wedding breakfast but still wanted it to feel relaxed. Papakata introduced us to Lesley fromSaunts, each course was a big dish that was put in the middle of each table with someone nominated to play mum and dish up. It made it really sociable and got everyone talking. So many guests commented on how amazing the food was, it was proper home cooked dishes that really suited the day.

My parents live in France and offered to bring all the wine for the tables back with them, we bought carafes for each table and the Saunts team just kept on filling them up throughout the meal. It felt like we had an endless supply of wine that just kept coming, there was so much we were even able to keep it coming the next day at the BBQ.

Take One Handmade Wedding Ring

One of the most important aspects of the wedding for us both was that we wanted it to be really personal and reflect us as a couple. This meant that we did a lot of stuff ourselves. We made all the invites and orders of service as well as any other stationery. To tie it all together, we used the same typography throughout; such as the vinyl we had made for the light box.

We also designed badges as favours for our guests. We attached these to luggage tags with guests’ names on which we pinned to a board then used this as the seating plan. We also designed stickers which the kids loved and stuck on just about everyone and everything.

The most time consuming yet, rewarding DIY thing I did was to make Kevin’s wedding ring. I made it from a silver American half dollar from the year his Dad was born. It took me what felt like a lifetime but now he gets to wear something that I’ve made for the rest of his lifetime, it sounds cheesy but I love it.
There was a lot of hard work involved and we had to prioritise what was most important but it was worth it when it all came together and it felt so personal to us.

The best advice I can give is to make your day as much about the two of you as possible. Try and plan it together, Kevin was much more involved in the whole process than most grooms probably are and it was much more rewarding knowing that the whole day really did reflect us both.

Many of our guests commented on how personal the service was this was because Kevin’s uncle was our priest and it meant a lot to us both that he could marry us, it also meant that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house especially Kevin’s!! (He cried a lot). The ceremony was by far my favourite part of the day, it’s the moment all the hard work and planning has been building up to and it’s an amazing feeling showing how much you love this one individual in front of everyone you care about. It’s so easy to get bogged down with the organisation of the reception but my advice is to put as much time and effort in to the ceremony, at the end of the day it’s the most important bit.