Morning lovelies :-) It’s F-F-F-Friday!! Woohoo… i am hoping you have marvellous events planned for yourselves… unfortunately i think mine will be spent on the sofa, with my blanket and a stash of tissues… boooo. I hope you liked this morning’s special offer, and stay tuned for one more posting this afternoon.

A quick {big} apology for the site issues yesterday… {www} has been doing so well she needed her own server, and there have been some teething issues. Fingers crossed we are all good to go now and the site is extra super fast for y’all now ;-)

Anyhoo let’s get on with today’s scrumptious wedding. Claire and Anthony were married in October at The Olde Bell in Henley on Thames. They decided to have an intimate ceremony with a full on party in the evening… now that sounds perfect to me!!!

Claire looks oh so elegant in Augusta Jones, i adore her simple viel and cream bloooms. There are so many gorgeous touches in this wedding, and the photography is incredible.

Thanks so much to the amazing Source Images for sharing their photographic genius with us today….

Names… Claire and Anthony. We met nearly four years ago via mysinglefriend.com. I knew he was the man I wanted to marry within the first month of dating him.  Anthony proposed on 10th December 2010.

Wedding Date… 15th October 2011

The Vision for the day… A beautiful, relaxed and intimate English wedding with a big party afterwards.
We quickly decided to have just close family at our ceremony (there were 27 of them attending) and all our friends for a party afterwards. We started the party at 5.30 and had 100 people packing themselves onto the dance floor and celebrating with us.

The Planning process…  Over ten months we plotted progress in our trusty excel spreadsheet and tried to keep things as simple as possible. Anthony was very hands on which meant that we could divvy up tasks between us and ensure we were ticking things off the list at a reasonable pace. We sorted the rings out first as my engagement ring was my grandmothers and is an unusual shape – Taylor and Co came to our flat and helped us choose the materials and size for a perfect ring to fit around it.
Booking all our suppliers felt quite easy. I went to an open day at our venue with my parents and met with some ace suppliers who were all recommended by the Olde bell. In one day we found our florist, cake lady, make up/hair artist and took the details of our photographers. Most of the suppliers we worked with are very small companies and we loved the personal touch and attention this brought.

Budget… We wanted to spend less than £20k (and expected it to be nearer £15k). In the end, including everything, we spent £22k and it was worth every single penny.

The Venue… Finding the venue was easy. We remembered staying at the Olde Bell the previous year and both knew is was the right place for us. Alanna is their wedding planner and she really looked after us through the process – making our visions become reality and giving us some great ideas along the way. There were two key reasons why this venue works for us – the feel of the Malthouse with its five separate rooms and beautiful wooden panelling was perfect and the food at the Olde Bell was amazing. Our wedding breakfast was delicious and I have never seen such beautiful deserts as the passion fruit trifles that were served in enormous antique glass sharing bowls. It was the hands down the best trifle I’ve ever tasted. We didn’t even mind when the ‘naughty’ table decided to play a game we’d never heard of – no hands duff. We turned round to discover they were all face first in trifle with their hands behind their backs racing to finish.
Given it was mid October, we hadn’t banked on the weather being at all useful for us and were fully prepared to enjoy spending all day inside in the beautiful rooms. We were delighted to wake up on the 15th and discover a completely perfect day that was even warm enough to have our drinks reception outside in the lovely gardens.

The Dress + Accessories… I initially fell in love with a very 50’s dress from Candy Anthony but when once we had the venue sorted I knew that Augusta Jones’ Judy was the one for me. I found it at Morgan Davies in Islington where they took time to ask lots of questions about the feel of the day, there ceremony and my own personal style. I tried on a number of lovely dresses and knew this one was perfect as soon as I tried it. I didn’t need any adjustments other than a few cm’s from the length… it was as though it was made for me. The team at Morgan Davies even helped shoo-away a traffic warden when I went to pick the dress up and saved me from a parking ticket.

My engagement ring is an antique from my grandmother and it was the centre of the theme of my outfit. I borrowed a pearl necklace from my sister (which she had inherited from the same grandmother), had some blue ribbon on my shoe, had my old engagement ring and my new dress and I was all ready to go! I bought an antique crystal necklace from vintagebridaljewellery.co.uk and a crystal hair comb for the evening to ensure that my dancing wouldn’t be impeded by my veil.

Make-up…  I booked Sarah Kate Thorne from the Old Bell open day. She didn’t meet Sarah as Sarah was being represented on the day by her mum why was utterly charming. There was a trial at Sarah’s house in Cookham and then on the day she turned up early and set to work. She really made us all feel relaxed and was such a perfectionist that she passed my sister on the way to the Malthouse, stopped her car and jumped out to administer one final layer of hairspray! I was lucky I booked Sarah early as she was also working on the X factor and had stopped taking wedding bookings for a while.

Groom’s attire…  Anthony wanted the traditional tails look and spent quite a long time looking for the right waitcoat/tie combo. In the end he plumped for a doubled breasted duck egg blue waistcoat with cream piping and mother of pearl buttons, with a burgundy pickwick tie with white polka-dots. Quite a contrast and he looked delish. He also wore cufflinks which belonged to his grandfather. A very important touch as we both wanted to include, as much as possible, those family members who couldn’t be with us on the day.

Save the dates and invites… Anthony painted a sign for our save the date cards. We wanted to get some nice pictures of us holding it and make them into little postcards. After roping in Anthony’s sister Jane to be our photographer, we spent some time taking pictures in Richmond Park with the signs: serious pictures, amusing pictures, arty pictures, pictures of us jumping in the air, cheesy posing pictures. We went back several times of the course of a weekend to satisfy the perfectionist in Anthony but after several sessions, a number of stings and scratches and being moved on twice by the police for dumping the car wherever we saw the perfect background, we got  our shot and made the cards with the help of the lovely Dan from Printworx in Chiswick. We did similar for our thank you cards. We got Jordan and Ines to take some shots of us with the ‘Thank You’ sign that Anthony had made and have now just about got them all sent out. Slightly confusingly, we’ve started receiving ‘thank you for the thank you card’ texts!

Anthony designed an emblem for us to use with our invites. It was based on the shape of my engagement ring and was very individual and personal. We had some very simple chic letterpress invites made by Strawberry Sorbet. They also made us a sign for our favours.

The Readings + Music... The toughest part of the planning was agreeing on the music but we got there. We had Perry, the pianist from The Dukes, playing classical music for the ceremony, the Dukes playing a live set as our party guests arrived and then a perfect cheesy wedding disco a bit later on. We booked the Dukes through the Wedding Music Company who were recommended to us by a friend. We had two readings during the ceremony. My sister Karen read my favourite poem – Yeat’s He wishes for the cloths of heaven – and Anthony’s dad John read an extract from the last page of AA Milne’s The house at Pooh corner. We struggled finding the second reading but knew it was the right one as soon as we stumbled across it.

Beautiful bridesmaid… I just had one bridesmaid – my niece Daisy. Daisy was 22 months old at the time and looked incredibly cute in her little dress. I was slightly worried that she would not feel comfortable at the point her mum (my sister) left her outside the main entrance to the Malthouse with my Dad and I but I soon realised my actual challenge was going to be persuading her to leave my dad. She is his number one fan and was completely relaxed. She walked down the aisle wonderfully, clutching her tiny bouquet and her Peppa Pig, only made noises when our registrar was asking if anyone had any objections to our marriage (thanks Daisy!) and then fell asleep on my dads shoulder.

The Flowers… I met with Mandy at Sonning flowers before the wedding at their lovely big barn/office to go through the look and feel of the day. They made it very easy for us and the flowers were completely perfect. It all felt very real when they arrived on the wedding morning and I got to hold my bouquet for the first time. It was lovely to be able to give the flowers away to our relative the next day as well.

The Cake… The cake we tried when we met Ann from cakes unlimited sealed the deal for us. We have been to lots of weddings where there was a mixture of cake types or just lovely sponge cakes because a lot of our friends prefer it to traditional fruit cakes. We both love a nice boozy fruit cake and decided to have four tiers of it. We stuck to a fairly simple design to fit with our theme and Ann did a marvellous job for a very reasonable price. It was my salvation as I got so into the dancing I forgot to eat anything from our evening food so ‘had’ to have several bits of cake to make up for it.

Your Photographer… Alanna introduced us to Jordan and Ines Banks at a wedding show in London with a ‘these guys will be perfect for you’ and she wasn’t wrong. They did an amazing job and

The Details + Décor… The venue was so perfect that we didn’t need to go to town on decorations. We had 10 old pictures of our grandparents framed and on display on a beautiful sideboard in the Malthouses’ hallway. None of our grandparents are alive so it was important to us to have them with us regardless. Anthony also made our favours which we had out for our party – three types of English Herb Jellies in lovely little pots – Sage & Sauterne, Lavender and Elderflower.

The Honeymoon… We booked our honeymoon through Hugh at Travelbag. We spent a week at the Shangri-La in Borneo relaxing, eating, talking about the wedding and had a trip across the island to visit the Urang-Utans. We followed this bliss with the hectic craziness of a week in Hong Kong. We loved it all and really enjoyed the opportunity of two weeks together to start out married life. We expected that we would  get bored of two weeks relaxing by a beach which is why we settled for the two destinations and it was perfect.

Advice for other couples… Everyone said to us ‘enjoy the preparation and take everything in on the day because it goes really quickly’. That would be my advice…. It really did go incredibly quickly because we were having such an amazing time. We made sure we spent time with each other on the day as well (mostly on the dance floor) and didn’t worry about any of the details on the day. We knew Alanna and the team had everything covered but we also knew that the most important thing was that the two of us and our families were there and that was really the only thing that mattered.

Credit where credit’s due…
Rings: http://www.taylormaderings.co.uk
Venue: http://www.theoldebell.co.uk/
Photographer: http://sourceimages.co.uk/
Dress: http://www.morgandavieslondon.co.uk/
Make up and hair: http://www.sarahkatethorne.co.uk/
Cake: http://www.cakes-unlimited.co.uk/cms/index.php
Music: The Dukes via James at http://www.weddingmusic.co.uk
Florists: http://www.sonningflowers.com/
Printing: Dan at http://www.printworx.co.uk/
Invites: http://www.strawberrysorbet.co.uk/

Thanks so much to Claire and Anthony for sharing their seriously elegant wedding with us today xoxo Lou

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