Honestly? I struggled with what to write about today. Usually on a Sunday I’ll post something non-wedding related that’s caught my eye or I’ll share something exciting that I’ve done in the week. But I shared my Photography Farm retreat escapades in this week’s Thursday Treats and since then I’ve basically been chained to my computer replying to the squillions of emails that came in whilst I was away and writing as many blog posts as physically possible. I also spent rather a lot of time on the phone to Cosmopolitan Magazine. NO BIG DEAL (more on this soon!)
And then this wedding pinged into my inbox and it all became clear.
Show me a rainbow wedding and I’ll show you a very happy wedding blogger. Of all the weddings I feature, I think I’ll always be have an extra special place in my heart for a wedding with so much colour. Like, seriously, what’s not to love?! With $12,000, Jason & Gwen planned this colourful explosion in Jason’s Mum’s back garden. “It isn’t always cheaper to DIY,” wrote the bride. “But we never could have done so much ourselves without the mega-ton of help we received from our friends and family. I am so glad we did it that way though, because we had some great times working on projects, planning, and being excited with our closest people.”
“It’s hard to want things different from the norm sometimes”, Gwen continued. “Some people had a hard time understanding some of my ideas, but overall people were great. I really wanted the wedding to represent us and our styles, and to do what felt right to us, not what it felt like we should do to fit into everybody’s idea of what a wedding is supposed to be.”
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Jordan & Michael wanted a wedding that truely reflected them and the things they love, so they grabbed their children and were married in private on top of a mountain in Canada. “Our inspiration was definitely nature and our love of hiking”, explained the bride. “We chose Gros Morne National Park in the beautiful province of Newfoundland and Labrador known for its mountainous terrain and unbelievable views. This in our minds made the perfect backdrop for our quiet intimate ceremony. We knew that hiking boots were a must so why not include them on our special day? We kept our attire simple and clean and focused on more important details like the photography and the food!”
The bride wore a short and simple dress which she bought from a thrift shop for $14. It was by Club Monaco and was perfect for a hike and a wedding! “Our favorite part of the wedding had to be our vows”, Jordan continued. “We simply asked to each other ‘why do you love me?’. I also loved the fact that we had absolutely no schedule for the entire day. Making it stress-free was our motto.”
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Eileen & Peter were married at Glasgow University Union. They had a tiny budget, but with the help of wedding blogs sharing affordable and DIY options, they were able to plan the wedding of their dreams.
“We really just wanted to have a fun wedding that meant something to us personally rather than just doing things because you are supposed to”, explained Eileen. “I was really inspired by blogs like Rock n Roll Bride that showed how you can have a wedding anyway you want. We had to explain our decisions a bit more than most to some people who didn’t get it but I knew it would all come together in the end. Things like not having a religious ceremony. This upset our families to begin with but they later realised that they had pestered us for so long to get married that any way we wanted was fine just as long as we did it! So we had a small intimate ceremony filled with songs and poetry we love and lovely romantic things we had said about each other. Then we just wanted to have a big fun party to celebrate with all our extended friends and family. We didn’t set out to be ‘Rock n Roll’ but we definitely ended up that way. Ha ha!”
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This beautiful wedding was sent over the channel to me by French newlyweds Virginie & Julien. They were married at Church of Saint Joseph des Fins in Annecy. After cocktails at the adjoining church hall, their simple reception was held in a restaurant, La Ferme des Ollieres, in Les Ollieres.
The bride handmade her outfit including her dress and headpiece and she wore shoes from H&M. “I own a ready-to-wear clothing line but I plan on making a bridal collection because I had so much fun making my own dress!” she explained. “I bought my shoes for 7€ (about £5) from the high street two days before the wedding! I was planning to wear off-white shoes but I found this pair much cuter.”
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Yes, that’s me in a jacuzzi in my dress… and what?
Oh hello September how glorious you’ve been so far!
Anyone that follows me on twitter or instagram will know that this week I’ve been living it up at the Photography Farm retreat. Basically, everyone who comes on the Farm always wants to come back, so Lisa & I thought, hell, let’s just hire it for a week and hang out! So we did. And it was fabulous.
We drank cosmos, we sat in the jacuzzi until we were wrinkly, we laughed, we danced, we talked about weddings A LOT. It was perfect and just the break I needed. Everything’s been a bit full on and crazy recently so it was SO GOOD to completely unplug and decompress.
Although needless to say it does kinda mean that I haven’t got the usual plethora of yummy treats to share will you, so instead I thought I’d make you all a bit jealous…
It’s all so lush & green down on the farm
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Taylor & James kept things small… tiny in fact. They were married at home, the bride’s father officiated, and their only guests were their immediate family – 6 adults in total, with one extra, Taylor’s sister, who watched the ceremony over Skype.
“We are who we are and we do what we want,” explained Taylor, “so I guess that makes us Rock n Roll! The things that make us happiest about us is that we have metal dust running through our veins… literally probably at this point! Casting was one of the first things I realized that James and I both were in love with. I gave James iron ore as part of his wedding gift… it’s what iron truly is at its core. It’s beautiful and it comes out of the ground. It’s probably the most meaningful gift I could give anyone ever that shares that love with me.”
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I think green is a totally underrated bridal colour. We see brides in white, red, even black, quite often, but rarely in green – and doesn’t Ruth show us how wrong this is? She looks incredible! “I remember looking at photos of my Gran in her wedding dress from 1960 which was blue with a pink petticoat and telling myself that I was going to wear my favourite colour when I got married too”, Ruth began, “and so the green dress was born. My something old was my Gran’s actual pink underskirt from her wedding dress.”
“Finding a green dress was hard work though. At first I tried on bridesmaid dresses but I never really felt myself or special enough. I was also being pushed into trying on white dresses by everyone but I didn’t recognise myself. I’m a total tomboy at heart and the concept of being feminine for the day felt alien to me. I still don’t understand the concept of feeling like a princess on your wedding day. The most important thing was to feel like me. I found Vivien of Holloway online after looking at the adverts on Rock n Roll Bride. After three trips trying on various Vivien of Holloway dresses, I ended up ordering from a limited run of only 4 (!) plain green circle dresses. I love the fact that I can and will be able to wear my dress again and that I’m only one of 4 people to have bought it!”
Oh but the colour doesn’t stop there, even the boys got in on the action – I’m totally dying over those rainbow ties from Me and Matilda on etsy. I guess you can see where this is going… Ruth & Alex had a rainbow wedding – woohoo my favourite!
The wedding was held at Keele University, where the couple both studied and met. “We met each other whilst at Uni,” Ruth explained. “It turned out that we were at the same socials as freshers without meeting each other but we had a mutual friend. The year after we both applied for private halls (back in the day everyone lived on campus in their 1st and 3rd years) and were put together in the same flat as we shared an interest Guiding and Scouting. It seemed only right that we would start our married life back at Keele just as we had started our adult lives back there too.”
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I was asked recently by a new blogger how I went about making my industry connections and friends. Like, how did I approach people and ask if they’d like to work together or collaborate on various projects and shoots without coming across as a bit of a weirdo? So I’m telling you what I told her…
If it would be weird in real life…
…it’s weird on the internet!
This is a general rule of thumb that I always employ when I’m chatting to people online. It doesn’t matter if I’m talking to someone because I just want to chat or if I want something from them. I think it’s vital to be yourself, to be honest and to be genuinely interested in other people. Taking the time to get to know people, with no ulterior motive, will stand you in good stead when it comes to taking that relationship to the next level and working together. You should never make your first communication with someone one where you’re asking them for something. Rather, be interested in who they are as a business person and a real life person first. In other words, establish a relationship before you start asking them for favours!
When I first started emailing or tweeting people I admired, I would go about it as I might in real life. Basically I’d make myself as useful as possible. Sometimes it can appear, with Twitter particularly, that everyone is best friends and you’re sat on the sidelines, so how on earth do you strike up a conversation without coming across as strange? Answer – be helpful.
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What is it was all the exotic weddings I’m getting submitted recently? I think the universe must be telling me I deserve a long, sunny holiday!
Well when Myles & Barbara’s Bali wedding landed in my inbox I just about spat out my cuppa with the anticipation of blogging it. Have you ever seen a wedding party so a) cool, b) expressive, & c) hilarious? No, me nigher. I couldn’t wait to hear more…
“Myles proposed whilst sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankle. In Elfish,” explained Barbara. “It really was very romantic… I promise you. We just wanted our wedding to be a big party, fun and happy with a little bit of looseness mixed in.”
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Ahh Palm Springs you are on my travel wish list for sure, and seeing weddings like Tasha & Curtis’ makes me yearn for your palm trees even more.
The wedding was held at the achingly cool Ace Hotel in June. “I’d describe our wedding theme as 1970s Rock n Roll”, explained the bride. “Curtis is much more traditional than I am (shockingly – he has long hair and tattoos covering most of his body!) so we wanted to find a way to use the traditional ceremony but make it feel really personal and our own. We had our parents walk in at the front of the wedding party, then all of our ‘Allies’, as we called them, came in separately (no boy/girl pairs – they each stand alone in awesomeness) and then we came in together. The wedding party walked in to a string quartet version of Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ and we walked in together to Citizen Cope’s ‘Somehow’. We had a good friend as our officiant and instead of having my dad ‘give me away’, we had a question/response where my parents accepted Curtis into their family and his parents accepted me into theirs. It was really beautiful. We also had a call and response where our guests ‘gave us away’ to each other!”
For the reception decor the couple went all out with coming up with something creative. ” I loved the table settings – horseshoes, vintage books, milkglass vases with billy balls, mason jars with candles and these amazing rope number signs that one of my Maid of Honor’s made (I had two!) Plus i’m obsessed with the placecards. We made them by picking out old casettes specifically per guest and I used a vintage label maker to put their names on them.”
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Oh Dita you are so wise.
There will always be someone, somewhere who doesn’t agree with you or like what you do. But you know what? Screw ’em! The best lesson I’ve learnt through running my business is that I can’t please everybody so I shouldn’t to waste my time trying. And, in all honestly, if people are annoyed enough to tell you that they don’t like what you’re doing then you’re probably doing something right. Hell raisers, game changers and trend setters unite!
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Shep & Sarah were married at Ettington Park Hotel, an elegant 4-star venue just outside Stratford Upon Avon. With its tranquil location and beautiful architecture it proved to be the perfect place for their glamorous and slightly gothic wedding. The exterior of the hotel was actually used as the setting for the 1963 film The Haunting.
“Neither of us liked the idea of an ‘off the shelf’ wedding, so although our wedding was small we wanted to look after the details that meant something to us”, explained Sarah. “These included the music and the decorations for the reception. I really enjoyed making the wedding stationery despite my totally uncharacteristic swearing at the printer! Shep is a classically trained guitarist and so he wrote and recorded the music played before and after the wedding ceremony itself. We also both chose the all the music for the reception.”
The celebrations started the day before the wedding with many of the family staying over at the hotel. “We stayed at the hotel the night before the wedding. Shep and I had separate suites and we had a private evening meal in the family chapel with our closest family who also stayed before the big day.”
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As a girl who’s more than slightly obsessed with weddings and photography, there’s pretty much nothing more thrilling to me than discovering new (to me) wedding photographer that is INCREDIBLE. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does I feel like I’ve won the wedding-blogging-lottery. And don’t even get me started on what happens when I discover a videographer with as much talent as this. Actual tears people, there were actual tears.
I saw these images and the video on Saturday afternoon. A photographer friend of mine emailed me the link and said, and I quote, “This is possibly the best wedding film and set of images I’ve ever seen… I thought you might like to see! Holy shit it’s all so beautiful.” And you know what dude, I couldn’t agree more.
Just stop what you’re doing for 4 minutes, enlarge the video to full screen view, and completely immerse yourself in this…
I quickly shared the link with a couple of photographer friends of mine and we spent the next hour messaging back and forth about our obsession with the entire thing. Who were these amazingly awesome people? Where did Whit & Colby get off being so damn bad ass, sexy and cool? Who was this photographer? Who was this videographer? How could we subtly insert ourselves into their lives?! Could I pull off an undercut?
I just knew that I had to share it on Rock n Roll Bride so I emailed the photographer, Brooke Davis, to ask if I could. I then crossed all my fingers and toes and hoped and prayed it wasn’t already promised to another wedding blog. Within an hour she emailed me back to say she’d be thrilled for me to feature it and that she thought it was perfect for my blog. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.
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After knowing each other for 16 years the couple were keen to walk down the aisle as soon as Phil proposed! So after just a 6 month engagement, the couple were wed in a movie themed wedding in July. The bride wore a custom made dress and yes… her bridesmaids wore dresses made of Star Wars fabric!!
“Rock n Roll Bride was the site we kept looking at when we got engaged, and we especially loved the retro weddings – cassette tapes, dayglow, lego & zombies”, wrote the bride. “It took us a while to figure out our theme but in the end we went for a movie theme. We wanted it to be fun, a big party for everyone involved. Having George Clooney there (as a cardboard cut out) was awesome. Collecting all the objects to build our theme was really fun, and getting all the right people on board was really important. We’re so happy our photographer Mick was there to capture everything as he totally got the theme. I framed photos of Phil and I alongside photos of Hollywood couples (I was gutted I had to lose my Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes one!) and my dad surprised us with his on-theme Star Wars tie! One of our readings was a poem from the film Before Sunrise, I walked down the aisle to the score from Shopgirl and our exit music was the Jurassic Park theme!”
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Seeing double? Photo nicked from Alexa Kent’s Instragram
On Friday Gareth & I packed up the car (again!) and drove down to Brighton (again!) for another School of Rock blogging workshop. The event was fabulous, my class were ace, and the whole thing left me with a warm n fuzzy feeling inside. As we drove away that night (slightly topped up with the celebratory after-workshop-wines – don’t worry Gareth was driving!) I turned to him and gushed away about how incredibly blessed I feel. Like, how is this my life? As someone who tentatively dipped her little toe into the blogosphere all those years ago, I can’t quite believe that people now line up to come and hear me speak about my journey. Like seriously… this is nutso. Even Darren Rowse of Problogger is singing my praises. Yeah no big deal or anything…
The ‘R’ keychains that the School of Rock students have taken home, made by the super fabulous Finest Imaginary
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Are any of you considering getting tattoos to commemorate your marriage? Well Rob & Kit not only did it, but they had their wedding photographer, John Nicolay, come along to take photographs of the event. Oh it’s like all my favourite things rolled into one – I LOVE this idea.
The couple’s relationship and wedding plans were anything but standard – they actually had two weddings! – as Rob explained, “We met in September 2007 as office mates but we never really spoke to each other. Our first conversation lasted for 30 seconds and we only spoke a total of 5 words combined. I simply complimented the comic book that she was reading. Then in December I finally confessed my feelings for her but she told me she didn’t want to be in a relationship. Gutted. But I was persistent. I wrote a poem for her daily for the next 4 months. In March 2008 she finally cracked and agreed to be my girlfriend but quickly after she had to leave the country to work in Qatar. We maintained a long distance relationship 5000 miles apart by writing each other daily emails. We’d make the subjects ‘Day x of 365’ – counting down the days until we’d next see each other. With Kit’s help, in February 2009 I landed a job in Qatar too. I proposed to her the moment I saw her in the airport. We married in June 2009 in The Philippine embassy, a civil wedding. Then in February 2010 we decided to get our matching tattoos. We had them on our shoulders and we wrote each other’s name. We also decided to get married again, and this time to have church wedding, the following year.
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