Wedding styling can so easily go wrong and there are two big mistakes that people often make. The first is that they have so long to plan their perfect day that they go way overboard on the extras and the décor starts to look more boot-sale than beautiful. When you’ve made all the big decisions and have months and months left, you just keep getting ideas and it can be difficult to hold back. Just remember here that there’s only so much that your guests can do over the few hours between eating and dancing! Most people are just happy to catch up with those they haven’t seen for ages – they don’t want to feel obliged to do loads of gimmicky stuff. Less is most definitely more…
The second mistake that’s often made with wedding styling is that there’s no synergy. Everything can end up looking a little random and chaotic. If you struggle with mixing colours then stick to whites and ivories for your wedding finishing touches. Using plenty of whites is a great way to get a clean and elegant look!
Instead of traditional wedding favours, we chose to have charity wedding favours from the RSPCA instead. You can read all about those in a previous blog post, but needless to say, our guests loved the gesture and the kids particularly loved their RSPCA wedding packs!
One fantastic tip to keep costs down and make sure you get that synergy is to simply buy a can of spray paint! I used gold metallic spray paint from Rust-oleum and bought cheap and cheerful table names, signs and plain white luggage tags from Amazon. Replacing the string on the place-name luggage tags with white ribbon and giving everything a coat of gold spray paint is a great way to give them a nice finish. This spray paint is particularly great as the gold colour comes out as a very subtle champagne gold rather than a brassy yellow gold. You can find out more about my alternative wedding guest book on this previous blog post – it was so popular with our guests and we love the finished result!
As we were so lucky to have perfect weather and this amazing outdoor space – we really didn’t need much wedding styling here. We just placed loads of battery-powered fairy lights and battery candles in nautical storm jars dotted around. There was a load of kiddie games, but they preferred to run around and hide in the bushes! We styled the ceiling of the main reception room with fantastic wedding bunting and I’ve written a whole post about styling that too ; )
One wedding styling idea that I most definitely did steal from instagram was the ‘pimp your prosecco’ station. We had bowls of strawberries and blackberries as well as liquors for our guests to add to their prosecco if they wanted to! We chose sparkling elderflower as the non-alcoholic kiddie version and they loved popping the fruits in and the Belvoir cordial too.
Our wedding wasn’t totally nautical themed and we had touches of wedding styling that was personal to us too. Seeing as my husband is an amazing architect, he designed our wedding invitations. We used that design to create the wedding breakfast menus too – it saved so much time and money doing it this way! He also designed the wedding seating plan as an architectural drawing of the space! We had to measure-up the room as it had to be completely accurate naturally ; ) The flags on the table numbers are the Beaulieu river flags which tied in beautifully with our location.
The candles were an amazing buy – 99p each from Tesco Direct and they were a great size! They didn’t have a huge stock left and so I mixed up pink and clear glass candles. They looked amazing with all of our wedding flowers too.
So I’m all caught up on my wedding blogging now. A magazine is going to be featuring us next year which is really exciting! We still have our honeymoon to go on and we fly out on Boxing Day – it’s stretching out the post-wedding buzz for sure ; )
Natalia xo
