Preloved Member: A Handmade Wedding

Preloved member Sally Crossley combined creativity and thrifty tendencies to create the decorations for her son's wedding. Having been given the brief of Village Fête, she got to work immediately!

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Back in 2014 my son & his then fiancée announced that they were getting married in April 2015 and asked if I could help with decorating the venue; the village hall in Millbrook, Bedfordshire.

Aimee and Jack were keen to go with a vintage look, 'Village Fête' was the brief, but both are Hobbit/Lord of The Rings fans too. They sent me a picture of a cake and asked if I could copy it for them.

Going with The Lord of The Rings theme, I bought a scruffy copy from a charity shop and cut out heart shapes from the pages. I bought a Martha Stewart butterfly paper punch and cut out hundreds (it seemed like hundreds!) from two end of range rolls of wallpaper. I then sewed the butterflies onto the hearts with my sewing machine to make pretty strings of bunting for the top table decoration.

I already had a collection of old hand embroidered tablecloths so I got searching for more until we had enough for all of the tables. We collected old jam jars and decorated them with old lace and ribbons then on the day, raided my Mum's garden for flowers to keep the florist cost down and more paper butterflies were used on the tablecloths as confetti.

I found an on line tutorial on how to make little boxes for wedding favours and made enough for all of the male guests which were filled with jelly beans. I had a pretty old remnant of net curtain which I made into lavender bags for the ladies. The idea was that each favour would double as a table place marker with the name of the guest attached with ribbon.

I made bunting from old lace doilies and remnants of fabric that I had from previous craft projects and an old suitcase was decorated with luggage labels printed off from copies found on the internet and used as a place for guests to place their wedding cards.