A Pale Blue Self Portrait Dress for a Handmade and Stripped Back Wedding

One of the things I’m most proud of when it comes to this lovely wedding blog, is how we’ve created a community of brides who feel they can truly be themselves on one of the most important days of their lives. That they don’t have to confirm to any kind of tradition if they don’t want to, but that it’s completely cool and OK if they do. Step forward most beautiful bride Amelia, in your non traditional, non white, high street brand wedding dress. The Love My Dress community salutes you for following your own style and creating an occasion that was a lovely, honest, authentic representation of you and your love.

Visual Merchandiser Amelia married her Musician and Chef husband Lee on 8th July this year with a ceremony at The Most Holy Redeemer Church in Billericay, followed by a reception at Hutton Poplars Hall. I love this wedding for it’s effortless elegance. Friends and family played a big role and pulling off these celebrations, providing the catering, styling the flowers, baking the cakes and helping to decorate.

“Love My Dress was the only wedding blog I referenced during the engagement, after finding it through Pinterest. I absolutely love It and it was a daily routine for me to look at all the lovely weddings to get inspiration. It’s probably why I kept changing my mind as there are so many amazing ways to style a wedding, that it becomes a bit easy to get carried away. I love that you can search for specific themes and locations and always found the details of where things where sourced in each feature extremely helpful.”

Photography by Three Flowers Photography

“We always wanted our wedding feel ‘stripped back’.  We worked at a wedding venue for a few years whilst we were younger so had experienced very traditional weddings time and time again.  This experience made us realise we wanted to make our own wedding experience different to that, and very personal to us.”“We did the flowers ourselves. After a very last minute change of plan, having the florist tell me he was actually on holiday that week we opted to go to Covent Garden flower market the morning of the wedding, with help from our bridesmaid Elise and her lovely mum.”

“Having never been to the flower market before, I wasn’t sure how hectic it would, be but we arrived at 8am and it was extremely quiet and still full of flowers.  e ended up spending a lot less than we had planned to and came away with a car full.  <yself, my bridesmaids and my aunties then spent the afternoon making the bouquets and flower arrangements for the room.”

Amelia’s beautiful pale blue dress was from Self Portrait. I absolutely love the pretty ribbons and sweet detail.

“During the week we had gotten engaged, I’d bought a white jumpsuit from Finery to wear. But a few months later I happened to stumble across the Self Portrait website and saw my dress.  Although not white, I become obsessed with it and thought it was very special with lovely detail.”

“It was sold out, so I then needed to have it even more!  I bought it on Christmas eve so it was a lovely Christmas present to myself! Our Bridesmaid Joanna’s mum made the adjustments for me so it fit perfectly on the day.”

Amelia’s maids wore gowns from a variety of stores including Finery, Reformation, Zara, &OtherStories and ASOS, which they paired with shoes from Urban Outfitters, New Look, Office and Sweedish Hasbeens clogs.

One of Amelia’s bridesmaids styled her hair and makeup on the day.

“I made my own floral headpiece on the morning of the wedding.”

The couple’s ceremony took place at the beautiful Most Holy Redeemer Church in Billericay.

“This is where my parents got married and is in the town we met. The reception was at Hutton Poplars Hall, an amazing venue which we stumbled across online. It used to be a school hall at an all-boys boarding school, where I found out the week before the wedding that my nan worked.”

“We met in school, and although I was only 13 – I know it was love at first sight (or maybe actually just lust at the time!). He was new to the school, a year older and I was very interested in getting to know him.”

“After a while he finally gave in and we got together in the summer of 2005. On our 10 year anniversary, we went away to the countryside and I was woken up to a lovely photo album that Lee had been making in the weeks prior. When I’d finished looking through it, he proposed, using his great grandmothers wedding ring.  One year, one month, one week and one day later, we got married.”

“My Dad accompanied me down the aisle – seeing him at the church was when I finally cried.” 

“HNTR (Lee’s Band) played an acoustic version on Sufjan Stevens’ ‘Death with Dignity’ to accompany us. It has such a lovely melody and it was really important for us to have HNTR be part of the wedding.”

“Our rings were made by the lovely people in Lord of London in Billericay.  After trying a few of the bigger named jewellers in London, where we sadly experienced some terrible service, we popped into a jewellers on the high street and had such a pleasant experience; amazing advice and absolutely no pressure.

We were so excited after our visit and both felt it was extra special to be purchasing rings in the same town where we met and would marry.”

“We had Ruth’s Statement of Love 1:16-17 and a reading from 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8 during our service. Lee isn’t religious, so although we married in church, we tried to choose readings that we felt resonated well with us but were not too focused on religion. We also had some bidding prayers which my brother wrote.  I wouldn’t let him do a speech, so thought this was a nice/good compromise.”

We made the confetti with help from our friends and family, this involved cutting up a lot of tissue paper (left over from my brothers wedding).  We had soooooo much confetti, it was amazing! And we have so much spare too.”

I do have to giggle at these images – it kills me everytime the grooms attempt the ‘lifting of the bride’ post – hehehe!

“Our lovely friend George drove us to the venue in his beautiful VW Beetle.”

“Our photographer Charlotte of Three Flowers Photography was so lovely and kind right from the beginning, with amazing communication.”

“We love Charlotte’s style of photography and were so pleased when we managed to book her in for the day. She and Lesley-Ann (the second photographer) were both inconspicuous and made us feel really comfortable.”

“And it didn’t just end after the wedding – Charlotte has spent so much time answering all my questions and helping me get the photos together for Love My Dress, she’s a gem!”

“After seeing some gold scallop bunting on Love My Dress I knew that’s exactly what I would like. I always planned to have touches of gold and the simple scallop bunting was perfect decoration for the room.  Luckily we planned this around Christmas when there was plenty of gold wrapping paper about, I had everyone cutting round plates for months!”

“I really enjoyed setting up the room in the morning – I had been looking forward to it for so long and it as so special to see it all come together just how I’d imagined with help from my lovely friends.

“Another favourite part was when everyone was dancing.  After worrying that no one would enjoy themselves, it had been so nice to see our friends and family mixing throughout the day and everyone having a good time and sharing that with my new Husband!”

This is such a common worry amongst brides – I remember worrying so much that no one would really enjoy the evening, or want to dance. You’ll find that you’ll struggle to get folk off the dance floor! By that time, most people are feeling merry, even those that don’t drink and they just want to have fun. So if you’ve been grappling with the same concerns, try not to worry!

“We got some lovely Liberty Print bits for the cake table.”

“My bridesmaid Joanna and I made our cakes – we had a lot of practice runs and ended up making a chocolate brownie cake and a blood orange polenta cake, all of which went down very well. It was quite daunting at first but after lots of fun practices and some burnt cakes on the way, on the actual day it all went so well.”

“We made the cakes in between going to the flower market and making the flower arrangements, this was all the day before the wedding and although it sounds like a lot it was such a fun day and it was so lovely for everything we had been planning and practising for to finally be here, we even had some time to sunbathe in the garden.”

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“The main wedding cakes went on our lovely cake table where we invited our family to bake and bring their specialities, it was great to have so many varieties and it looked so homely.”

“Our very talented friends, Tiche and Bec did our catering. We told them what sort of thing we wanted, ie, meats and salads and they came back to us with the most amazing flavours and choices, all cooked on a jerk pan!

It’s the best lamb I’ve ever eaten and it was so nice to have friends cater for us on the day. We also had Scotchtails Scotch eggs for ‘canapés’”

“Our first dance was to Leon Bridges ‘Coming Home’. We only decided to have a first dance about two weeks before the wedding and only recently started listening to Leon Bridges too. We just thought the song had a nice meaning. We also had a last dance – this was something I was very adamant on from the start after hearing it in a shop a year before! It was St. Vincent’s ‘All My Stars Aligned’.”

 

Words of Wedded Wisdom

“I recently read some great advice about discussing at the start with your other half how they would like to help, if they are not the Pinterest/blog reading type – this is something we probably should have done. It’s very overwhelming to plan a wedding and personally I’m used to planning events and executing them in a short space of time, but a year to wait for the event is quite a long time so I did change my mind on things quite a few times which I’m sure was quite annoying.

My advice would be to ask your friends and family for help as they probably want to be involved and it’s great to share those experiences with them. I’m so glad that the private/approved access only Love My Dress Facebook page for brides to be and newlyweds was created at the start of my engagement, it’s so good to be able to ask questions which may feel silly and have other people be so kind and supportive even if they don’t have the answers.”

Love and thanks to you sweet Amelia! I am so grateful for all your kind comments about Love My Dress – it really makes my heart swell to read such kind words and I’m delighted that we were able to assist and inspire you on your wedding planning journey.

My gratitude also to Three Flowers Photography for supplying these lovely photographs.  Readers – you can see other brides wearing non-white wedding dresses here.

Love Annabel x