“I wasn’t the kind of girl who had dreamed about her wedding day since the age of five”, began newlywed Leah who married Simon earlier this year, “and being engaged on December 20th and getting married on March 31st didn’t give us a whole lot of time to plan anyway. So I found myself in a little deep at first, but a few days into discussing ideas, we realized how cool it was to be able to create an event from the things we love – nature, the woods, rustic details. Daily life delivers you many inspirational things, and having eclectic tastes we knew it wouldn’t be a cookie cutter or ‘paint by numbers’ kinda wedding.”

“We decided we wanted to be married in the forest”, she continued, “and so our feel of the day went from there. We stuck to earthy tones. The woodland didn’t need much decorating and the natural beauty of the Pacific North West was an inspiration in itself.”

“We had decorations that included antlers, natural burlap, feathers, herbs and mason jars wrapped in sticks and hemp. We wanted to do something personal for our friends, so we made the wedding favours from brown paper lunch bags and stamped with our ‘crest’ that I had designed and had made up at a local rubber stamp company. We stitched the bags along the top with string to seal them and in the bags, we put little jars of Citrus Chutney that my (now) husband lovingly prepared, a piece of Biscotti and a test tube full of vodka infused with thyme. These turned out better than expected and the tedious work of pouring vodka into those thirty-two test tubes was worth every second.”

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