Special Tuesday treats for you my lovelies – two weddings in one day! Have you seen the first wedding we shared this morning? This afternoon’s wedding is a different vibe completely but one we love just as much. Zoë, a development engineer for Triumph Motorcycles married Dan, an Army veteran turned web developer on 6th July this year at Blackfriars Priory in Gloucester.
“Love My Dress is so clean cut and up to date, and captures the essence of each wedding featured – and Pinterest was my bible. I wanted everything as natural and neutral as possible, the last thing I wanted to see was coloured sashes and chair covers. My dream was to elope and marry on a mountain in Oregon, but family ties pulled us close and we decided to have a wedding in the UK.”
Film + Photography by Grace Elizabeth Photography
“We chose Blackfriars Priory because it is close to where Dan’s Army barracks were when we first met, the Gloucestershire area seems very special to us because of all the time we spent there on his weekends off. The whole venue was such an ethereal blank canvas. The moment I saw it I knew that, filled with candles, it would be the perfect ceremony room.”
“Our photographer was Grace Elizabeth – she was everything I hoped she would be, and the photos she produced blew me away! Truly talented photographer. Grace had a brilliant attitude, was flexible and full of ideas.”
“My dress was designed by myself and hand made by Rachel King at ‘The Dress Suite’ in Nuneaton. The dress was one of the hardest decisions; I didn’t want too much fuss but at the same time wanted to be dramatic. Nothing I tried in the stores matched my vision – though I did have my heart set on a Berta Bridal gown originally.”
“I wore a simple moonstone pendant, I wanted to keep it simple and bohemian and wore mixed silver rings.”
Zoë chose not to wear shoes, opting instead for some silver foot jewellery from ASOS.
“We didn’t get a florist, my maid of honour and I ransacked a garden centre for greenery and her mother’s garden, and then went to a supermarket for white roses and put all the bouquets and buttonholes together, by ourselves, on the front lawn of the hotel, the evening before the wedding.”
” I wanted them to be overflowing with green with an elegant touch of white.”
“I ordered some French silk tulle and cut the veil myself. I also wore Valentino scent – we wear his and hers, they smell divine!”
“We met classically through friends, and shared the same twisted sense of humour. I instantly knew Dan would be the man I’d marry.”
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“We were engaged for almost two years before our wedding day.”
“My Dad, Warren accompanied me down the aisle to the sound of ‘Experience’ by Ludovico Einaudi, I chose it because it was so intense and beautiful.”
“We didn’t tailor our own vows, we only say very personal things to each other in private so the civil ceremony vows were enough to show our guests what we want out of our marriage.”
“My little sister recited a reading completely off by heart, everyone was so impressed and cheered.”
Zoë’s bridesmaids wore floor length foaty grey dresses from Missguided and shoes from Forever21,
“We stole half an hour away in an old empty room in the priory, we just lay on the floor together and stared up at the wooden beams of the ceiling.”
“It was so content and peaceful to just be alone with each other and reflect on the day.”
“For a ‘cake’, we opted for a stack of white chocolate tiffin, and I made these two days before the wedding, in my maid of honours kitchen.”
“I hand made the wedding favours, making a seed packet design on illustrator, printing onto a matt textured card, cutting them all out and filling them with wild flower seeds.”
“I spent months, and many hours, emptying hundreds of jam jars and hand making candles with soy wax, they added such a beautiful glow to the venue and could be used all day and night they lasted so well. I also ordered dried hops, I had planned to drape these down the aisle but we decided to scatter the dry hops instead and create an aisle from the buds and leaves (and just hoped the guests remembered their hay fever tablets.”
“The invitations were from an independent designer on Minted.com by Kaydi Bishop. We ordered them in Toasted Almond and had silver pressed foil. The Place cards were stones that my maid of honour and I drove all the way to Wales to get from a pebble beach, she then wrote each name out using a white paint pen. The table numbers were glass that I took from picture frames and painted the numbers on with white enamel paint.”
“We had two amazing singing waiters supplied via The Big Entertainment Company – they really surprised the guests as we had kept it all a secret. One of my bridesmaids was about to chuck them out as she thought they were genuinely bad waiters ruining my day! We loved them!”
“We chose ‘Saturn’ by Sleeping at Last for our first dance. It has a really long instrumental start and the main lyric ‘how rare and beautiful, it truly is, to simply exist’ just summed up the feeling we wanted from our first dance song.”
Words of Wedded Wisdom
“I would’ve made more of an effort with how I looked! I put so much effort into all the little touches of the day and making sure everything was taken care of, I think I overlooked myself a little!
OhZoë, you really need not have put any further effort into how you looked! One of the things I love most about this wedding is your most beautiful and effortlessly natural look – it’s a joy to see and compliments the natural, organic aesthetic of your wedding so beautifully . You looked just perfect.
Readers – I hope you’ve really loved browsing through this beautiful wedding as much as I have – Zoë and Dan, my thanks to you both for sharing your beautiful day. We are also grateful to photographer Grace Elizabeth for sharing her beautiful photography with Love My Dress today.
Love Annabel x
