On December 10th, Vicky & Martin were married in a gallery space, which they made their own. They didn’t have the easiest wedding planning journey, with not one but two venue’s cancelling their bookings, but at the end of the day the wedding was perfect.
“We were not the luckiest of couples when it came to our wedding planning as we had two different venues cancel our booking!” Vicky told me. “We booked a local hotel’s wedding package a year in advance and believed that everything from the food to the centerpieces was taken care of. With six months to go they called and cancelled our booking, leaving us panicked and miserable. After considerable research we booked our local youth hostel for a weekend festival in their beautiful medieval building – they cancelled our booking with less than four months to go!”
“After a tortuous month of searching we eventually booked local gallery space ‘Fruit‘ with only three months remaining to the wedding. As a venue, this was really a blank canvas but these experiences made us realise that we really just wanted to be ‘us’ and much of the other ‘fluff’ just didn’t matter to usat all. We were free to have black and white movies playing in the background all day, art on the walls, our own band, decorate it how we wanted and serve the food and drinks that we wanted. In the end we ended up getting a wonderfully personal wedding filled with many details that just screamed ‘us’!”
Because of the cancellations, and booking an ‘empty space’ of a wedding venue, the couple ended up DIYing as much of the day as possible. “Martin designed and made the AWESOME 7″ single invitations, my wonderful Mum made and decorated the cake by herself and I did the flowers and my own hair and makeup,” Vicky continued. “This wasn’t so much a money saving thing as much as we wanted the day to be really personal, and not the ‘package’ deal which we originally thought we wanted.”
“All of the decorations for the venue and the evening buffet were a combined effort by everyone attending and this meant everyone got involved. We carried this theme of involving people through the day by asking all the guests to draw us a picture on our table-mats - I was so surprised at everyone who joined in with this and we have so many touching/funny mementos from the day!”
However it certainly wasn’t all bad luck for this couple as they won free wedding photography with Hannah Millard through a contest on Rock n Roll Bride (yey!) “Hannah Millard was the best photographer we could have hoped for! Hannah’s quirky style really suited our informal day and we have been left with photos we love as they are so full of personality. Hannah really put us at ease and you can see how relaxed we are in the photos, we just cannot thank Rock n Roll Bride enough for putting us in touch with her!”
“Our inspiration came from our resilience as a couple,” Vicky concluded. ” Our attitude towards the wedding was extremely laid back as anything that could go wrong could not possibly be as bad as a cancellation! We had more wedding stress than we could handle and so the plan for this wedding was just to have fun! Some traditions, such as the first dance, were important to us – but most of it was just a huge knees-up! The lack of conventions is what made us different, Martin did not want a traditional suit and I wanted to change into a dress I could dance in for the evening. We both wanted sweets and veggie food, vinyl records and astrong music theme. We just wanted to party and that’s what we did!”
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