Tips for a hand made wedding!

I want to be clear, we didn’t set out to have a themed wedding >.< but after throwing it around as a joke we realised that it felt right! So we created a brief; ‘Wes Anderson meets the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance from Back to the Future’. This meant it ended up having some strong Life Aquatic vibes but we were definitely also inspired by Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel. The theme was important as we referred back to it in all our decision making plus it helped prevent us from falling down the wedding vortex of what you ‘should’ do! So I actually really recommend building your day around a concept!

We started off with a Save the Date which you can see centre top, the inspiration was a vintage ship’s luggage tag; all our guests then thought we were getting married on a boat! The invite came later and was risogrph printed on ‘Candy Pink’ GF Smith Colorplan paper. At the point of designing it we’d really gotten to grips with the concept of being ‘Under the Sea’ and so it clearly illustrates that. Though a lot of our guests still thought we were getting married on a boat! After the Save the Date I made some nautical flags using felt and wonder web which we bought from Abakhan when visiting Manchester. Firstly I designed them in Photoshop based on the colours we had, then I printed everything out as line templates to follow; cut and stick. Lots of ironing later and we had three large pendants. Nathan finished them with some metal tubing and slim rope! You can see me and my mum sat under the third design below. (weird face as I’m picking me teeth!)

Next we really wanted some 3D decorations so I got to work recycling our take away pizza boxes and the wrappings from our Who gives a Crap toilet roll into Jelly fish! To make the Jellyfish I cut two cardboard shapes that would then be sandwiched together (4 for each jelly) These were painted on one side. Then I used double sided sticky paper to double side the loo roll wrappers for tentacles so that they could be long and sturdy. They were then cut into long strips both straight and wobbly! The tentacles were stuck to the unpainted half of the jelly fish before the two cardboard halves were sandwiched together with a glue gun! Finally I cut a slot halfway up in the bottom of one half and a slot halfway down in the bottom of the other. Before finally slotting them together to make a 3D shape! Hopefully the pictures below make this a tad more clear! Meanwhile Nathan was sticking together and carving layers of polystyrene to make a 3D Shark! Which he then paper mâché-d before we painted it Jaguar shark style!

With all these craft projects going on we decided it was time to take a trip to Leylands to pick up some paint which really cemented our colour scheme. We chose colours that we’d already used in the invites plus colours that complemented the streamers that we’d purchased from Party Puffin to create the ‘Waves’ above our heads, after all we were going under the Sea right?! FYI loads of streamers left so if you need some get in touch! ;)

Nathan runs a fine art framing business Lord & Duplooy so he started to bring home large sheets of cardboard; the packaging from his acid free papers. Those we started cutting into coral and seaweed shapes as well as seahorses and anchors using the paints to bring them to life! He also made us some bespoke Lightboxes with stands which you can see 3 images above, for those all I did was design some typography and get vinyls printed with Nutmeg Studio

Now we are getting close to the big day and there is just a few jobs left; Place names which I decided should be sardine tins! These I designed as you can see above and then got Risograph printed using Medium Blue and Fluorescent Orange! Then I wrote in everyone’s names using a colouring pencil that was a good match for the blue ink!