His 1950’s Grandfathers Suit, Her Twirly Candy Anthony Wedding Dress & a DIY Packed Wedding Day…

“It will all be ok, in fact it will be better than ok…. Every so often Josh and I will look at each other and grin and say “we did it!” And this feels great, but being married to the person you love feels even better…”

 

Good afternoon loves 🙂 Did you drop by my {rather late} morning post? Do go have have a read if you’d like a sneak peek into what I was up to on Saturday in London – a touch of luxury on your behalf, of course 🙂

This afternoon I’m sharing the lovely wedding of Ali and Josh is fine, who tied the knot on Saturday 23rd July at Peterborough Cathedral.  Without wanting to go all vintagey, Hannah made reference to the 1950’s with her lovely short full circle skirt dress and cute pouffy wedding veil by the one and only  Candy Anthony – who let’s face it, makes the bestest twirly dresses in the world! 😉

“I had so much fun trying on all sorts of dresses in all sorts of places (even though no one tells you that trying on wedding dresses essentially means standing round in your pants in front of strangers…) but I knew from the start that I really wanted a shorter dress…”

Love My Dress Wedding Blog – Photography Copyright (c) 2011, Hannah Millard

“My plan was to buy a second hand dress and customise it but after months of searching on eBay and in charity shops, nothing was quite right and I was running out of time. I took my mum and best friend Alex to Candy Anthony for inspiration (there was no way I could have afforded one…) and was blown away by the whole experience. For a start you get a cup of tea which is so welcome after all that cheap Cava!

We talked about the sort of thing I liked and Rachel dressed me up but made me walk out into the shop without looking in a mirror. So I had no idea what I looked like, only that it was the first dress in six months that made my mum and Alex cry!”

“When I saw my reflection it was an odd feeling. I didn’t instantly know it was ‘the one’, but I just felt really calm. My mum said “what’s wrong with it” and I frowned and said “nothing… that’s kind of the problem, there’s absolutely nothing I don’t like about it”. My mum said, “right, that’s that then, it’s my treat”.

I almost fell over with shock and I still feel slightly sick when I think about it – not splurging on outfits was one of our biggest wedding ideals. I really wanted it – I knew I could never make anything half as perfect – but I said I needed to think about it because it was so out of character for me to be so extravagant…”

Josh wore a suit that belonged to his granddad in the 1950s…

“We didn’t really have a colour scheme (although Josh’s love of orange meant it made regular appearances!). We just wanted the wedding to be full of colour and light.  There was a nod to the 1950s with my dress, Josh’s suit and the cars, but this wasn’t obsessed over, it just kind of happened…”

I’m loving the colour choice for this wedding!

 

“Josh and I went to the King’s School in Peterborough where students are entitled to apply to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a Special Licence to get married in Peterborough Cathedral. However, weddings at the Cathedral are rare so were so, so lucky (with support of the Dean, our old deputy head teacher and our local parish priest) to get permission.

It is a spectacular and awesome (in the literal sense) building and it meant so much to us to get married in the church where we first met. We also wanted the wedding to be in Peterborough because our families and old school friends could stay at home rather than splashing out for a hotel…”

“No one gave me away ☺ My dad and I had some lovely long chats about this in the lead up to the wedding. Family is really, really important to Josh and me and the thought of me being given from one family to another (as well as anathema to our views on gender equality) was the opposite of how we envisaged our marriage; we saw it as two families becoming closer together rather than a transfer of members.

My dad is amazing and I’d always hoped he would walk me down the aisle, but we agreed that this would represent him supporting my decision to marry Josh rather than him giving me away. The Dean was also very supportive of this and suggested that we also omit the line “who gives this woman…?”

“We chose Wagner’s Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin for me to walk down the aisle to. It suited the Cathedral so well. It was so incredible hearing the opening notes as the doors swung open and my dad and I took a step forward… it still gives me chills when I think about it (in fact I’m listening to it on YouTube as I type this which is pretty sad!). We walked out to Widor’s 5th Symphony in F, Toccata which sounded phenomenal on the Cathedral organ…”

“We had a loose theme of “journeys” that we tried to weave in at certain points. We’d spoken at length with the Dean of the Cathedral (who married us) about our views and expectations of marriage and we both felt strongly that it wasn’t a culmination of our love, or a destination, but a milestone in our lives together – a very special milestone of course, but one day in a journey. The Dean – very wonderfully and very subtly – crafted our marriage service accordingly. He arranged for our guests to sit facing inwards which created a wonderful intimacy – difficult in such a huge building! – and each stage of the service led progressively towards the high altar.

Our first reading was from the Song of Solomon – about a man asking the woman he loves to come away with him. Our second reading was “If I should fall behind” by Bruce Springsteen…”

A flash of orange shoe and belt/accessory there, to compliment the Groom’s colour choice…

“A colleague, Deborah, does floristry as a hobby. Originally I had grand plans to do all of the flowers myself but at some point this fell by the wayside.

Deborah was heroic, she bought the flowers the day before from a wholesalers and made the bouquets, button-holes and wrist corsages. Then she drove to Peterborough on the Saturday and completely filled the hall with what was left over, as well as loads of wild-flowers from her garden – it was exactly what we’d imagined (we’d collected over one hundred jam jars in the lead up to the wedding and she filled them all!) and they looked so beautiful.

I love hydrangeas and the bridesmaids had huge white puff-balls. My bouquet was white hydrangeas with peach roses and cornflowers. The cornflowers were particularly meaningful because they were planted by my friend Liz who died last year. Deborah asked Liz’s husband if she could have some for my bouquet so Liz could be a part of the wedding. Finding this out was one of those overwhelming moments when you realise that however much effort you put into every single detail of the wedding, some of the best bits are things you would never even have thought of on your own…”

“We knew from the start we wanted somewhere we could have the freedom to choose our own vendors and somewhere we could indulge our DIY ideas. I had really fond memories of driving through a village with my parents when I was really young and seeing a wedding party on a village green, with guests spilling out of the village hall.

We looked at every village in a ten mile radius of Peterborough city centre and it wasn’t a difficult choice to pick Castor. It’s so picturesque, surrounded by cornfields and rolling hills and the hall is an old school with lead-framed windows, loads of light, high ceilings, a beamed roof and a wooden floor. What sold it to us though was how welcoming the hall-committee were, how flat-out helpful they were right from the off – they could not have done more to make things go smoothly. The cost also swung it; we paid £200 to have the hall from 9am on Friday morning until lunch time on Sunday! Amazing!”

“We didn’t have favours as such – we had loads of ideas but nothing seemed quite right.  We were putting so much effort into planning so many little surprises and treats for our guests that to force a favour into the mix just for the sake of it, or just because it was “expected” made us feel uncomfortable. Instead we home-made and home-bottled individual cocktails for our guests to drink during the speeches.”

“I’d always like the idea of having a coconut shy at the wedding. Josh built one as a surprise and I loved it!”

“We wanted the table plan to be part of the decoration. We’d inherited an enormous frame so we strung vintage lace trimmings across the frame and pegged the lists of names (backed with scraps of fabric) to the lace. To represent the tables we used large luggage tags and then hung teeny frames on ribbons with a message to our guests.

I made the “gifts” bunting for the present table (out of more scrap fabric and vintage lace) and the “props” sign for the photo booth out of photographs of letters.

Josh and I had also collected loads of brass candlesticks (from charity shops and off eBay) which lit the hall in the evening…”

“I made our cake! (….as you can probably tell…!) When my grandparents got married at the end of the war my granny was so upset that she couldn’t get enough fruit for the cake. My granddad, who was stationed in Cyprus at the time, used to send her parcels of “books” every week, and used these parcels to smuggle sultanas, dates and nuts to my granny so she could bake their wedding cake. I’ve always loved this story and thought it would be really special to make our wedding cake.

While sourcing our ingredients was less epic (ummmm I just went to Waitrose) it really was a labour of love. I spent an entire weekend baking the two tiers and two huge sheet cakes from a Dan Lepard recipe and then fed them with brandy every week for the next six weeks. My sister found the knitted bride and groom in a craft shop in the Netherlands and I customised these so the groom wore an orange tie (at this point I did not know that Josh was going to have a huge beard for the wedding!) and the bride had a big bow. I made the cake bunting from a string of craft pearls and little cake-decoration hearts…”

“We had a vague idea that we’d learn to waltz but Josh – who is an actor – was working 300 miles away for five of the six weeks before the wedding. Because of our schedules we saw each other twice in this time and a quick, highly un-coordinated twirl around the car park of a Travel Lodge was as much practice as we got! We spoke to our band who were fantastic and they said they’d play a special first dance called “over the threshold” – Josh and I started it off and everyone else joined in – it was great fun…”

Words of Wedded Wisdom…

“This is going to sound like something out of a self-help book… but you have to “own” your wedding. During our engagement I went to Nigeria for work and spent 4 weeks in a village with no internet access. Prior to this I had completely saturated my mind with ideas, gleaned from my borderline obsession with wedding blogs. Not only was I thoroughly confused, I also felt really inadequate – like our wedding wasn’t going to be as cool or as fancy or as original or as stylish (etc) as the ones I saw online. Being away from the wedding industry and taking a break from spending every spare second reading about other people’s weddings gave me the chance to step back from it all and really think about the kind of wedding that we wanted and that would really represent us. I’m not suggesting brides-to-be take a trip to Nigeria! Just that there comes a point when you have to stop thinking about other people’s weddings and start thinking about your own, and that’s when it gets really exciting.

In relation to this, while it’s great if your wedding represents who you are as a couple, it doesn’t have to represent every single facet of your personalities. There was a point at which we were trying to shoe-horn about twenty different themes into one small village hall and it was complete “Ali&Josh-overload”. You have the rest of your lives together to demonstrate your loves, your dreams and your values to your friends and family and you don’t need to showcase everything on that one day. We found it really helpful to list all of the things that people expect of a wedding and for each one ask ourselves: “Does this really say anything meaningful about us?”

“The best bits of the day are likely to be the bits you don’t expect and the bits you agonise over will likely fly by unnoticed. Josh and my shared favourite memory of the day is at the end of the ceremony, just the two of us standing before the Dean and the priest at the high altar, belting out Jerusalem at the tops of our voices and beaming from ear to ear.

Do listen to people – you don’t have to take their advice but sometimes people are wise! Josh and I – for lots of reasons – originally imagined a less extravagant day than we ended up having. We planned a wedding we could completely fund ourselves but our lovely families were so generous and also helped us to realise that some of our original choices were based on cost rather than grand ideals.

We still stayed within a budget (half the cost of the average UK wedding, we think), we maintained most of our ideals, we spent months on end working on DIY projects and we sourced everything as locally as possible. However, we had planned to do EVERYTHING ourselves and we really appreciate that our families convinced us that it was ok to ask/hire some people to help. We were also able to have some treats that made the day really special – for us, and our guests. People say to you “it’s a big day, but it’s just a day”… we learned that “it’s just a day, but it’s a big day….” 

I just love this! Lots of lovely DIY touches and a couple keeping it real and true to themselves – whilst simultaneously looking rather stylishly fabulous 🙂

Congrats Ali and Josh! And thanks to Photographer Hannah Millard for submitting these lovely images 🙂

“Hannah was a dream come true – quite literally – because a photographer was out of our budget. I kept reading blogs that said “you really need to prioritise photography because when the wedding’s over the photos are all you’ll have left to remind you of the day”.  We’d tried to put a positive spin on it and kept telling ourselves that we’d just have loads of candid shots that our guests took.

Despite all this, not having a photographer was the only wedding-decision we’d made that I felt slightly sad about. When we discovered Hannah, I loved her portfolio – her style is so natural and fresh and she was absolutely great to have around on the day/”

Are any of you going to be baking your own cake? What about incorporating orange as a colour?  Or perhaps you’re after a super twirly Candy Anthony dress of your own?

See more 1950’s, Candy Anthony and orange inspiration here on Love My Dress.

I’d love to hear from you whatever your plans are 🙂

Much love,

Annabel xXx

♥

Photographer – Hannah Millard
Venue – Peterborough Cathedral
Brides dress + Veil – Candy Anthony
Brides shoes – Rocket Dog
Brides accessories – Borrowed
Groom – Original 1950’s blue suit {belonging to the Groom’s Grandfather}
Flowers – Family friend
Cake – Baked by the Bride
Entertainment – Elusive Black Dog