I'll be honest, I felt quite emotional preparing this blog feature. The bride, Chelsea, is a long time and loyal reader of Love My Dress. Chelsea writes her own blog, and I remember her first ever few comments she left on Love My Dress, then the fact she went on to win this engagement shoot competition with the super talented Lisa Jane Photography and Tiffany Grant Riley. Chelsea has even donated family photography towards my vintage wedding gallery project in the past and even my book!
So it really is with such pleasure that I'm finally able to share Chelsea's wedding with you today. Chelsea married her long-term love Chris on 17th March 2013 at Villiers Hotel in Buckingham. I'm so proud that she was able to gain so much inspiration from Love My Dress in planning her wedding and love the fact she found her beautiful original vintage wedding dresses from one of our much loved spnosors, Heavenly Vintage Brides...
"I got most of my inspiration from Love my Dress - I loved the personal feel it had. I guess i felt like it was more than just what was pretty and what wasn’t. For me, I think it was the vintage element that gave it that depth - when you’re talking vintage its inevitable that people will mention their family and history and Love My Dress really seemed to care about people’s stories."Love My Dress Wedding Blog - Photography Copyright (c) 2013, Lucy Turnbull
"There were a few inspirations to helping us create our wedding. The venue, Villiers Hotel in Buckingham, used to be the old town hall and has history dating back to 1577 so had a real vintage theme to it and i always knew i wanted a vintage dress.
I’m someone who does live in the past a bit so that was always going to be a factor. I’m also obsessed with skulls, i always have been, but far from being gothic, i’m quite girly and i love pastel tones therefore our ‘pastel pirate wedding' theme was born."
"The reason I didn’t want a floral bouquet is i wanted a keepsake so i got a felt bouquet from Jennifer Rae with matching buttonholes for the men. I lost my Nan last year, something that really affected me, and on my bouquet i wrapped around some ribbon that read ‘You are my sunshine’, a song she constantly sang to me and i sprayed the bouquet with her perfume, it was the perfect reminder of her."
"I got my dress from Heavenly Vintage Brides. My friend and I got engaged around the same time and we were both talking about how we disliked modern dresses. I said i wanted to have a vintage dress and she was curious about the idea, something she hadn’t considered. It was about two years before the wedding so i had no plans to actually buy a dress yet but we decided to go shopping anyway as it might give us a feel of style etc. I always thought i would go for a typical 50’s dress as its close to my everyday style (although i did surprise myself by really liking some 20’s gowns) but when i tried on my dress i knew i was in trouble, i was grinning like a moron.
I went back home and announced to my parents that i had found 'the' dress and we brought it that weekend. It checked every box for me, it was tea length (worked with my petite frame), lace (pretty!), had sleeves (march wedding), had a belt (slimming) and it wasn’t white making it feel really different.
I wore a necklace i got from Asos, at first just purchased so that I could try on the style with the dress before buying a ‘proper’ necklace. However I actually ended up loving it and keeping it and wearing it on my wedding day."
"We met at school at 16 (a drunken New Years party! Classy acts). When we were 18 we both decided to go to the same university as we didn’t feel that long distance would work for us. We ended up moving in together as a consequence (more for convenience i suppose than for anything else) but it made our relationship so much stronger and when we were 21, after already deciding the day we wanted to get married (our first anniversary after we both had finished uni) we went ahead and made it official and became engaged.
There was no proposal however Chris did go out and get me a ring, a black pearl (to represent my love of pirates of the Caribbean!). By the time we were married we had been engaged for two and a half years."
"Chris wore cufflinks that were lego pirates. I brought them for him from Crimson King on Etsy. He also had a buttonhole that matched my bouquet."
"As we had a civil ceremony it allowed us to have a lot of freedom over our vows. Obviously there is the contractual stuff but we both decided to read the same vows, an adaption of the ‘I promise’ by Dorothy Colgan;
'I promise to give you the best of myself, to respect you as your own person, to grow along with you, to constantly realise just how lucky i am and to bring joy, strength and imagination to our relationship. Above all i promise to love you in good and in bad, with all that i have to give and all that i feel inside, in the only way i know how, completely and forever'"
"On each table the centre-pieces consisted of a trio of items. The first was a fishbowl glued to a painted candlestick which i had created myself and then filled with flying saucers. The second item was a painted mini easel on which we stuck postcards that we had on our fridge and the third item was a paper-mache skull obtained from Hobbycraft one Halloween which i had first painted either pink or blue and then used liquid chalk to write the table numbers on and decorate them.
Each table setting had a pink paper doily underneath and i used candy necklaces for napkin rings. We scattered pastel heart confetti on the tables too."
"I purchased a A knuckleduster handbag from Ebay..."
"I made the favours myself. I brought some small organza bags from Ebay, and within each bag i had the following poem:
'We all have those days when we feel a bit blue, but this bag contains things to help see you through,
An eraser to rub out mistakes with one swipe, A candle to light up the gloomiest night,
Cash when you feel your backs to the wall, a marble to make sure you don’t lose them all,
String to stop everything falling apart, and a hug full of warmth that comes straight from the heart.'
"We had two readings too. Alia and Aidan, dear friends of ours, carried out one reading. They’ve been together 10 years, a mean feat at 23, so they’re very similar to us as a couple. They read the popular story ‘The lovely love story’ which i just adored and got Chris as an anniversary present many years ago.
Our second reading was by my close friend, Rima. Its called the Union by Robert Fulghum and it spoke to me because of the fact that our age has meant we’ve spent a vast amount of our relationship looking to the future, at 16 marriage felt a long way away."
"My bridesmaids dresses were from For Her And For Him, brought when the site first opened so we got them at a discount and with free shipping. A risk but it paid off!
I also bought vintage 1940s and 50's pearl bracelets for each bridesmaid sourced from Etsy and Ebay."
"Our cake table was heaving! I wanted to have cake pops, i think they taste so good because the cake is so dense and a friend of mine said she knew someone who did them. I met up with Almas of Scrumptous Pops and her cake pops tasted delicious and then while discussing the wedding themes she said she may be able to develop a skull cake pop, i was so excited! We had so many people commenting on the cake pops at the wedding, they went down so well."
"We wanted a cake to ‘blow out’ as well (we didn’t want an awkward cake cutting pose so decided to blow out candles on the cake and make a wish instead). My mum said she would be willing to make us a small cake for that purpose however she ended up making us two, a red velvet one and a sponge one. On the cake table we also had a lot of sweets and macarons (from Marks & Spencer).
On our cake table we had paper roses made from vintage dictionaries which we brought from Etsy and various glasses all obtained from the Next homeware section (that place is lethal!). We had a memory table which i decorated with various pictures of the family, it was important to me for people coming to the wedding to get a real idea of who Chris and I are as people and our family are a big part of that."
"I was incredibly lucky to find Lucy Turnbull, she captured the wedding exactly how i wanted it to be seen yet in a way i could never imagine. We explained we didn’t want any posed pictures, just natural shots and the whole day we didn’t even seem to be aware of her or her husband, Chris, they were experts at blending in. They stayed really late into the night as well capturing some fantastic evening shots, we couldn’t recommend her highly enough."
Continue reading "A Vintage Wedding Dress And First Look For a Pastel Pirate Inspired Day" »
