I've been excited about sharing this wedding with you. I always love sharing the nuptials of a bride I know used Love My Dress as a resource for planning her wedding day like Jade here did (finding most of her suppliers through these pages). I also absolutely love that Jade has taken time to pour a tonne of passion in to sharing the story of how she planned her wedding, in order to assist and inspire others. I really enjoyed reading through Jade's questionnaire - she's one smart and pretty organised bride if ever there was one (I adore her wise words of advise in relation to weight and image issues). Smart I say, because she and her now husband Matt went and booked Laura McCluskey to photograph their wedding. And that was probably one of the best things they could have done, because look what Laura did!
Love My Dress Wedding Blog - Photography Copyright (c) 2013, Laura McCluskey Photography
Jade and Matt got married on 29th September last year at Buckland Hall, in Bwlch in the Brecon Beacons...
"We both love the 1920's and 1930's, and are slowly filling our flat with relics of this fabulous bygone era. I’m studying towards a PhD in American Literature, focusing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, and spend much of my day job immersed in old movies, reading about movie stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and imagining that I could go back in time – Midnight in Paris style – and meet my icons.
There’s so much more to that period than the stereotypical flappers and gangsters you find in fancy dress shops: Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine describes the "new generation - dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."
"The utterly fabulous and ridiculously talented Joanne Fleming Design made my dress. I didn’t have a ‘this is the one’ moment when I was dress shopping. The dresses I liked didn’t necessarily suit me: the 1920's silhouette lends itself better to tall, willowy types, and the vaguely 1930's style dresses I tried on were built towards exaggerating and even creating curves with their clever bias cuts, rather than working with them.
My bum and thighs were not impressed, and the unforgiving silks were leaving even the salespeople speechless (but not in a good way). I was on the verge of settling for a dress that was flattering but not really ‘me’, when I decided to investigate bespoke dresses..."
"I contacted a few dress designers in London and arranged appointments with a couple. They weren’t quite right for me, and were also slightly more expensive than I had hoped, and so I bit the bullet and admitted to myself that I had to at least try my dream dress designer, Joanne Fleming. She had been on my radar since early on in the engagement, and had even named a collection after a Fitzgerald novel, The Beautiful and Damned. But I hadn’t contacted her because on Facebook and her blog (both of which I had been avidly stalking) she had explained how busy she was, up to her eyeballs in commissions, and also she was based in Brighton, which was a little inconvenient for my Cardiff-based family (4 hours each way).
However, the dresses really spoke for themselves, and contacting Jo ended up being the best decision I made. (Apart from marrying Matt, of course). She was utterly wonderful – so understanding about time constraints and geographical issues, and she took a simplistic sketch I had made based on a vintage 30s dress, and made a few flattering adjustments, then brought it to life. It was an utterly wonderful experience, so much more reasonably priced than I had anticipated, and it felt great to support good old-fashioned British design."
"Flo & Percy were one of the designers I had my eye on from the very beginning, but eventually accepted that budgetary constraints were rearing their ugly head. Amazingly, my gorgeous Mum had ordered me the Chaplin Cuff as a surprise! It worked beautifully with Jo’s intricate concentric detailing on the dress, if I may say so myself.
I must mention that Susie Warner have the best customer service I have come across in a long time, and I would highly recommend them! I had a slight problem with the necklace I initially ordered with only a few days to go before the wedding, and they helped me choose an alternative and got the replacement necklace out to me so quickly and efficiently, avoiding a potentially stressful situation! Necklace and earrings from Susie Warner."
"We planned on a fairly long engagement (two years), but Matt’s job was transferred from London to Geneva in October 2011, which put a rather large spanner in the works. By the point of our move, all we had done was book the venue, which we had been told would be the keystone around which everything would fall into place.
Wedding planning took a back seat while we prepared to leave behind our families and friends and move to the land of cheese and snow. Since our engagement, I had taken to buying the usual glossy wedding magazines, which didn’t prove to be great value for money, as I’d end up post-it-noting a solitary image or website in each magazine, and flicking through page after page of adverts I’d seen before, which meant that I was paying nearly a fiver per lead to follow. I continued to buy the magazines though, month after month, like glossy wedding lottery tickets – hoping for one jackpot issue....
Luckily for us, our engagement coincided with the birth of Love My Dress, which I discovered in November 2009 via this fabulous 1920's themed wedding. I read the blog every day, and found the majority of my suppliers via Love My Dress's hallowed e-pages."
"Having our ceremony down in Cardiff and the reception up in the Brecon Beacons meant that it made sense to have two florists. Charlie at The Real Cut Flower Garden specialises in natural meadow-style arrangements, and each bouquet is unique
I was in contact with Charlie in the days leading up to the wedding and she was updating me on what was flowering well in the gardens that was within our colour scheme, and so we had the freshest, most beautiful blooms in our bouquets. Bouquets and Venue Flowers: The Real Cut Flower Garden.
The Secret Garden Florists were great at taking on board the theme and style of our wedding and creating vintage-inspired arrangements to complement our ideas. They come highly recommended for any South Wales brides! Church Flowers: Secret Garden Florists, Cardiff."
"I was adamant that all my beautiful girls should feel comfortable and suitably fabulous on the big day, and toyed with the idea of giving them a colour and getting them to choose their own dresses independently, but it would have been a shame to miss out on the group shopping extravaganza. Being out in Geneva added an extra element to the challenge, and my girls were spread between Cardiff, London, Windsor, Cheltenham and Cambridge, which meant that a ‘one-stop-shop’ approach would work really well. My lovely sister-in-law (to be, at that point) Kate discovered Maids to Measure, which solved our problem! They sent me swatches so I could decide on colour, and the girls perused the website to check out designs. We met with them in Cardiff to try on some sample gowns, get measured, and then the girls each picked a different dress, which would be made in the same colour.
A couple of the girls visited the London HQ for quick alterations, and we were good to go!
"Etsy is a great resource for beautiful and reasonably priced little trinkets, and I got my girls necklaces with three pearls representing our past, our present and our future hijinks from LRoseDesigns."
"We were really conscious that we wanted to go beyond some of more the hackneyed stereotypes of a ‘1920s wedding’ and our mantra became ‘would Scott and Zelda be impressed?’ Having said all of this, time and money are emphatically finite resources, and we could only execute a select few of our plans. However, every time I caught myself having a strop, for example because we couldn’t afford to hire 130 champagne coupes when the venue provided perfectly good champagne flutes free of charge, I reminded myself that this was a wedding day, and what we were celebrating was the beginning of our marriage.
It’s great to use your wedding day as a statement of style, and a big party for your nearest and dearest, but fundamentally, you are celebrating your marriage, which is the beginning of the rest of your life. I’m anticipating that there will be plenty of champagne coupes in our future (hint hint, Matt…)."
"We had a load of A1 prints made, of my favourite F. Scott Fitzgerald quotations relating to love and marriage. We commissioned Lela at Doodlelove Designs to design the posters, and also to design us a monogram, which we then used to add a professional finish to our DIY efforts! We used Moo to print stickers of our monogram, which we used on the front cover of our orders of service..."
"We were always fairly sure about going with a tuxedo – Matt was born in the US so it was a nice nod to American wedding tradition (along with the bridesmaids going down the aisle before me on the way into the church). We went with Austin Reed. Doesn’t he look handsome?"
"We made the Order of the Day, table plans, place cards, menus and orders of service ourselves. It was time consuming but fun! I downloaded an art deco font from the internet and then set to work with Word and Powerpoint! For the centrepieces, we bought scrapbooking cardstock from Graphic 45 and my mum sewed on some inexpensive lace trimming.
We had jam jars of flowers (having glued some ribbons round the jars), and our tables were each named after one of our favourite books. We had several copies of each book piled up on each table, for guests to dip into, and made colour photocopies of the covers to serve as table names. Matt had the genius idea of making colour photocopies of the book covers with copies of the books’ first pages on the reverse, which we then attacked with a star shaped paper punch to create confetti to spread around each table. It looked great, with alternating splashes of colour from the covers and text from the reverse."
"Laura McCluskey was a complete delight to work with. I worried about Matt getting shy in front of the lens, but on our practice shoot (I would say engagement shoot but it was 3 years after the engagement, and 3 days before the wedding, so…) it was me who clammed up and felt incredibly self-conscious! Laura was great at putting us at ease and her eagle-eyed sun chasing got us some incredible shots which we will treasure.
She really understood what we wanted, and we chatted beforehand about 1930's photography styles which we could incorporate (she even took some shots on a vintage camera) – she just worked so, so hard to capture the day, and has created images that we will treasure forever. I will also forever treasure her Dolly Parton-soundtracked pep talk in my back garden when it all started to get a bit much on the morning of the wedding. A very talented lady, and wise beyond her years."
