WWW readers Amy and Josh back this afternoon with their amazing wedding day.

Amy and Josh held their wedding at their church in Worthing with their reception in a marquee in a friend’s field. They wanted their wedding to reflect them both as a couple and to stay within their £5000 budget.

They went down the homemade route, crafting and delegating much of their wedding to loved ones. With hand crafted bunting, carved wooden signs, a rustic cake, stationery and wooden tree favours… wow.

Amy looked incredible in her ‘Snow White’ dress while Josh went for a stylish tweed suit with braces and scrabble cuff links. I so love this couple.

Thanks so much to the lovely Ruby Roux Photography for sharing her images with us today.

The Proposal…. After 4 years of dating and lots of hints, Josh took me for a lovely picnic at one of our favourite haunts (he’d even gone to the trouble of baking lemon and poppyseed muffins – my favourite!). In an attempt to look casual, he started doing lunges – apparently to look like he was trying to warm himself up – and then got down on one knee and popped the question with an engagement ring he had designed himself!

The Vision for the day…. The main vision for the day was for it to reflect both of us, and to be really personal. We’re both crafty people so we wanted as much of the wedding as possible to be handmade and to reflect both of our styles. Josh is a carpenter and is always full of amazing ideas so he was able to be really involved in creating wooden bits and bobs for the day, and I like doing anything crafty so I wanted to be able to make all the decorations and put my stamp on it too. We’re lucky to be blessed with lots of family and friends who were willing to give up time to help us and make the day really special.

The Planning process…. We got engaged in December and were married in July, so everything had to be planned rather quickly! Once the venue and church were booked everything else seemed to fall into place as time went by – neither of us is particularly organised so we did things as and when they came up, and it seemed to work okay for us! It was nice to be able to spend time making everything for the wedding, and meant we could do it in our own time too, but I would strongly recommend designating jobs too, otherwise it can get a bit overwhelming.

Budget…. We had a budget of £5,000 for the wedding (not including my dress), as I’m a student and also we didn’t want to spend crazy amounts on it as we’d rather make everything ourselves. We did actually manage to stick to the budget, amazingly!

The Venue… As Josh and I are both Christians, the ceremony was held at our church in Worthing, and the reception venue was held in West Chiltington in a marquee on a friend’s land. Due to the horrible weather the week before the wedding, our original field was waterlogged and the grass couldn’t be cut, so we ended up pitching the marquee in his back garden!

The Dress + Accessories….. My dress was called ‘Snow White’ and was from Alfred Angelo’s Disney collection. I wore a fingertip veil with it, and a pair of small diamond drop earrings.

Finding the dress…. I’d seen my dress in a shop window a few months before I got engaged, and had absolutely fallen in love with it. When we went wedding dress shopping it was the first dress I tried on and it ruined all the others for me! We tried several shops afterwards to make sure I’d given everything else a chance, but even the lady who sold it to me said she knew from the beginning there wouldn’t be another dress for me! It made me feel so special and even now I have to resist the urge to try it on at least once a week!

Groom’s attire… Josh didn’t want to go down the traditional top and tails route, so we started looking for suits online, and eventually found his on ASOS. It was tweed, which wasn’t the most appropriate fabric for a wedding on one of the hottest days of the year, but he looked so dapper in it! We bought him a grey/blue tie so he would stand out from the ushers and fathers, which actually worked perfectly because we wouldn’t have had enough yellow ties otherwise!

The Readings + Music…. We chose two readings from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 and Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, and asked my aunt and Josh’s granddad to read them during the service. I walked down the aisle to ‘To Build a Home’ by the Cinematic Orchestra, then during the signing of the registers, a group of friends and my sister played a cover of ‘Holocene’ by Bon Iver, and finally Josh and I walked out to ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ by Stevie Wonder – a classic!

Beautiful bridesmaids… My bridesmaids were amazing, a few of them were already (or were soo to be) married so they were brilliant at giving me advice, and they were all so great at helping me out on ‘sweatshop nights’ when we would sit around until ridiculous hours making name tags and orders of service. Similarly to my own dress, I had seen their bridesmaid dresses in H&M a few months before I was engaged and cursed the fact I couldn’t buy them, but when the time came to choosing their dresses they had been reduced down to £7, it was like it was meant to be!

The Flowers… Josh’s mum is brilliant at flower arranging so she made all the beautiful floral decorations in the church to go on the pew ends and on the stage, and then the button holes, my bouquet and the bridesmaids’ bouquets were made by the  lovely Rachel from Greenfingers in Worthing, and they were even more amazing than I could have imagined – I was even able to have peonies, which was one of the loveliest surprises in the morning! All the flowers at the reception were put into jam jars by my lovely mum and bridesmaids, and came from a local greengrocers and the flower beds in the field.

The Cake… My uncle is the most amazing chef and works at a cake company, so we were thrilled when he said he would make our cake for us. We’re not fruit cake fans so every layer was a yummy Madeira with jam and buttercream, covered in a cream cheese frosting and completed with foliage put together by Josh’s mum and handmade cake toppers made by the bride and groom!

Your Photographer…. Photos were one of the most important things we wanted from the day, because it goes by so quickly and these photos are going to be in yours (and your parents!) houses for the next 60 odd years so you need to be happy with them! I’m sure you can see from the pictures, our photographer was AMAZING! Liz is a family friend, and Josh and I both loved her work, so we were extremely excited when she agreed to take the pictures for our wedding – even though it was on her birthday! Neither of us are very comfortable in front of the camera but she made us feel so at home, and the engagement shoot helped clear some of our nerves too. We are unbelievably happy with how the photos came out, and love how Liz captured so many special parts of the day, even if her insurance didn’t cover us getting up on the hay bales!

The Details + Decor… As I mentioned earlier, most of the decorations were handmade, which both cut down costs and allowed us to put our stamp on the day. With a group of friends and my mum, we managed to sew together around 200 metres of bunting for the church and marquee, and also made the invitations, name tags, cake labels, table plan and loads more. I’d been collecting jam jars like a fanatic, which we covered with lace and ribbon, and my sister drew each of the designs for the table names onto the wood. Josh also made his mark by making 110 unique wooden trees as favours, and cutting up wood for the table names and cake table, making arrows to help people find the venue – even making our very own wooden male/female toilet signs! There wasn’t really a theme for the decoration, but we wanted it to look very natural.

The Honeymoon…. We went to Crete the day after the wedding, it was so lovely to sit and do nothing, knowing there were no confetti cones to make!

Memorable moments… As the venue was on a farm, it wasn’t long before we came across a truck piled with hay bales, which obviously the ushers and groom felt compelled to climb. Despite the worried comments from our guests, my bridesmaids and I soon found ourselves up there too – not something I ever imagined doing on my wedding day, but definitely a photo to show the grandkids.

Advice for other couples… Plan ‘non-wedding’ dates when you can do things together as a couple, and ban wedding talk. It’s so easy to let the wedding take over everything, but don’t forget the reason you’re doing it in the first place, and try to come back to that as often as you can.

Credit where credit is due…

Bride’s dress: Alfred Angelo – http://www.alfredangelobridal.co.uk/company/homepage.aspx

Photography: Ruby Roux Photography - http://www.ruby-roux.com/

Marquee: http://www.comfort-hire.co.uk/

Cutlery & Crockery Hire: http://www.place-settings.com/

Flowers: http://www.greenfingersflorists.com/

Just beautiful. Thanks so so much to Amy and Josh for sharing their brilliant wedding with us today XOXO Lou

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