A Button Bouquet for a Bonny Scottish Bride…

Good afternoon all :)  Sorry for the slightly sporadic blog post schedule of this past week. I'm away from home at the moment working on a master plan for Love My Dress, but all is well now and I'm forging ahead with lots of gorgeous posts to share with you over the next week or so :) 

I do hope you've had a chance to read this morning's post about The State of Grace – and watch that video when you have a 20 mins to spare too – it provides a very honest and insightful expose on how bespoke bridal really works – and how it needn't cost you a fortune.  I'm so excited about meeting Lucia Silver, the founder and Creative Director of The State of Grace at The Luxury Wedding Show tomorrow.   But for this afternoon, I'd really like to share this lovely wedding with you.  This is Jen  & Graham, and they got married on 28th May this year at the Atholl Palace Hotel in Pitlochry (Scottish Highlands).

Jen's dress was 'Marcia' from Joyce Young By Storm – a full skirted dress with dropped waistline and softly pleated bodice made in crushed taffeta. Detachable halter neck straps gives the dress a 1950's look…

"I was really worried about finding the right wedding dress for me, and found the task really daunting. I looked through magazines, and eventually found a dress I loved, but it was in London. I went to try and it on, but it wasn’t right for me. I wanted something classic, and vintage (either original, or vintage style} but definitely no “bling”…"

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

Jen's Bridesmaids were kitted out in Dessy dresses and shoes from New Look… 

"The girls’ dresses were Dessy dresses. Because my bridesmaids and I were scattered about the country, I did a lot of online research before actually going shopping for dresses. I thought Dessy was a good idea due to their huge range of dresses.

I wanted different styles and colours for all three of my bridesmaids, but one the day we went shopping we ended up finding a dress to suit all three of them. We chose three colours, pink, green and grey to complement each other…"

"I toyed with the idea of a tea length dress, as it’s a style I wear a lot, but then I realised that this is really one of the only chances in life you get to wear a full length gown! I tried on what felt like hundreds of dresses in many boutiques until I found the dress for me at  By Storm.

It was the 50’s style I love, and highlighted all my good bits while hiding the bad bits! The fabric was amazing and I felt really elegant in it…"

 

"The make-up for my mum, bridesmaids and I was done by Lynne Mills at EyeCandy. She was brilliant, and really listened to what I had to say. I wanted make-up that was similar to what I wore every day, but actually stayed on!

 My hairstyle was from a book called Vintage Hairstyling by Lauren Rennells who runs a blog I love called Bobby pin blog…"

"I wasn’t one of these girls who dreamed about her wedding day when she was little. I was too busy trying to be a scientist.  So when it came to planning my own wedding, I started from scratch. I had only ever been to one wedding before I started planning my own, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and that gave me the confidence to do whatever was right for us. It was Graham who had the more traditional opinions and had to rein me in at times! We also had very supportive families who let us do whatever we wanted to do for the day.

I’ve always loved pin-up girls, and that inspired my look (as it inspires my every day look), and the wedding theme itself was a mismatched theme of 50’s and Alice in Wonderland fantasy…"

 

"I got a beautiful vintage style comb from Glitzy Secrets.   My bracelet was my beloved Pandora charm bracelet. Graham has bought me all the charms for it and each one means something special. I couldn’t have been without it on the day. For my “something borrowed” one of my friends let me borrow a pink and a green charm to match my bridesmaids!"

 

"I wanted a pair of really cool shoes for the wedding, but I struggled to find ones I liked. I had a pair of irregular choice shoes in mind, and was waiting for them to go on sale when I was randomly surfing the net when I came across a pair of Vivienne Westwood jelly shoes with cherries on the front. I used to absolutely love cherries when I was younger, and they really reminded me of my younger self, so I bought them straight away!"

"I really didn't want flowers at my wedding, because when looking at typical wedding budgets, the cost for flowers seemed mad to me: 10% of the budget on flowers, are you mad?! So I decided early on I wasn't going to have any flowers, much to Graham's dismay, as he wanted some thistles! Instead I found a seriously cool button bouquet by Letters4lilly on Etsy. I  liked the idea of something I could keep forever, and it wasn’t too much more than prices I was quoted for bridal bouquets.
 
So all I had to do was decide on something for my three bridesmaids. I sent them options of things like fans and parasols, but they couldn't agree on anything. Eventually I rethought the idea of flowers for Graham's sake, and got speaking to Emma at Coach House Flowers. She was brilliant, and really changed my opinions of floristry in general. I told her my theme, showed her the colours of the bridesmaid dresses and she fired ideas at me. I told her that I'd like something a bit different and she definitely delivered! She made pomanders from hydrangea and rose, and they were seriously cool! Even though I never even met her in person, she had really picked up on my style and taste, I was so impressed!"

The boys all wore kilts in a matching tartan called Scotland Forever…

 

"We chose the Atholl Palace Hotel because it was everything we wanted and more. The location is amazing, you can see the palace as you enter the village, and it really takes your breath away. The style of the hotel really suited our vintage theme and when we saw they had a Japanese garden with Redwood trees we were sold! One thing we struggled to find in other hotels was a good function room, and we found that here: it had loads of light and a huge dance floor, all the better to ceilidh on!"

"I walked down the aisle to "Beach song" by Hans Zimmer taken from the soundtrack of the Quentin Tarantino film True Romance, one of our favourite films. Our “walking back down the aisle” song was Chicago by Sufjan Stevens…"

"Graham and I met on a blind date. Graham was dating a mutual friend and said we were “Too alike not to be together.” She gave Graham my number and insisted he call me. A week later we met for a blind date, and the rest is history!

Because we had a humanist, we weren’t bound by religion. My best friend read “A lovely love story” by Edward Monkton, which was both beautiful and weird, and brought a tear to everyone’s eye.  It was also nice to be able to choose our own music, as music is so important to the both of us…"

"Wedding cakes are another one of those things that I find eat up you wedding budget. My sister is a budding amateur baker, so our wedding cupcakes were made by my Mum and sister in an amazing feat of home baking. They made hundreds of cupcakes in 4 different flavours, with different coloured icing, all wrapped up in cupcake wrappers that I found in TK Maxx (in my exact wedding colours would you believe?). They did an amazing job, and the cakes looked totally professional.

The cake topper was a comic from xkcd that makes me go “Awwwww”…"

"I wasn’t sure what to do for wedding favours, because I know they often just get left on the table, or chucked in a bag and never thought of again. We ended up coming up with the idea of having charity favours. Graham’s mum died of ovarian cancer a few years ago, and we knew her presence would be missed at the wedding, so we chose contacted The Eve appeal (a gynaecological cancer charity we’ve tried our best to support for a while now) and gave them a donation in return for some charity pins for the girls. We also got in touch with MacMillan and sent them a donation for some keyrings for the guys. This meant that even if no one liked the favours, at least the money we spent on them went to a good cause. And any spares we had, we could just sent back to respective charities, so we don’t have excess favours lying about forever!"

What a wonderful idea Jen.  Readers might want to read this article for ideas of how to include relatives who have saddly passed away from cancer or who are unable to make it through illness, on your wedding day. 

"Our first dance song was chosen by Graham, and was a surprise for me. It was the Postal service song "Such great heights", covered by Iron & Wine taken from the Garden State soundtrack. He hadn’t edited it to make it shorter, so it felt like we were dancing there forever!"

"Graham and I love a good ceilidh, so it was never a doubt in our minds that we would be having a ceilidh at our reception. Graham was in charge of all thing music, and he hired Benachally, a local ceilidh band. They were fantastic, and run the sort of ceilidh I love, one steeped in chaos. Stepping on people's toes, bumping into people, spinning until you can't see straight and teaching strangers what to do is what makes a ceilidh great. Afterwards we had a bit of a cheesy disco, with the longest Abba medley known to man. Since my dress was a death trap during the ceilidh (someone slipped on it and almost broke themselves), I really enjoyed the disco, but both the elements combined were great…"

Words of Wedded Wisdom…

"During the run up to your wedding, and on the day, be yourself. Integrate your personalities into your wedding. Try to look like yourself on the day (but a little prettier). You want to look back on the experience and see yourself, not someone that you were for that one day. One of the nicest compliments I had about my wedding was “You really put a lot of thought into this, it’s so different, it’s so you and Graham!”

Also, if it’s not important to you, don’t do it. You aren’t going to regret not spending £300 on a cake if you don’t actually like cake…"

Huge thanks to Archibald Photography for sharing these lovely photographs with us all today. By the way, if you are Bride in Scotland and a regular reader of Love My Dress, Archibald Photography have some preferential rates set to one side just for you – contact Donna to find out more.

"Our photographers were Archibald Photography. We chose them because the photos taken by Mark really stand out from the crowd. They truly are stunning. When you see one of Mark's photos, you know it's his straight away. We also liked the idea of having some reportage style photography so we could really capture how we were feeling on the day.

We went to meet Mark, and knew right away that he was the right photographer for us. We didn't even go see another photographer. His ideas of what makes a wedding great really matched our ideas, and we clicked straight away."

Aint that lovely folks?  Waving to all you Scottish Brides to be – drop a comment below to say hi if you're one of them, I'd love to know what you have planned for your big day? Will you be going with a subtle 50's look like Jen? 🙂

Have a lovely Friday afternoon folks 🙂

Much love,

Annabel xXx

♥

Photographer – Archibald Photography
Venue – Atholl Palace Hotel in Pitlochry (Scottish Highlands)
Brides dress – 'Marcia' from Joyce Young By Storm
Brides shoes – Vivienne Westwood Melissa
Brides accessories – Glitzy Secrets
Groom – Kilt
Bridesmaids –  Dessy
Hair & Makeup – EyeCandy + hair style inspired via Bobby pin blog
Button Bouquet – Letters4lilly on Etsy
Flowers – Emma at Coach House Flowers.
Cakes – Baked by the Bride's Sister