“We’ve decided it’s time to put on some fancy clothes, lay on a special party

and stand together in front of our friends to vow to each other a lifetime”

 

 {Quote taken from Matt & Ronni’s wedding invitation}

Matt proposed to Ronni at San Giorgio Maggiore on a tiny island in the middle of a vast lagoon in the romantic city of Venice, her favourite place in the world…….. and they married on a proper English day at a proper English venue that reflected their shared love of history & architecture. Travel is another of their shared passions and I loved welcoming them out to Ibiza for a pre-wedding shoot and their first visit to the island (which you can see here and here).

Now, how much time and love you want to spend on your wedding details is an entirely personal thing, and there’s no right or wrong way about it, but it’s definitely true that taking time and thought to choose lovely details for your wedding can make it really personal and unique to you.  Planning a wedding can be a really fun and creative and wonderful project if you would like it to be, and here is a couple that really did take it to a whole other level. I’ll let them tell their story….

“We knew we wanted stationery that was personal which, for us, meant that it had to capture an element of the places we have travelled together.  After months of searching for stationery, we were completely stuck how to combine our love of travel with our vision of an English country wedding.  Most stationery with a travel angle was either based around modern cityscapes or was more suitable for a destination wedding.  The more traditional invitations we saw felt impersonal.

The ‘eureka’ moment came when we saw a chocolate box that incorporated a vine design with images of European places.  We googled the name of the chocolate box designer and sent her an email that day asking if she would consider working on a wedding project!  Luckily Lydia was keen to get involved despite never having worked on a wedding before.

The result is a labour of love.  We spent hours creating ‘briefs’ for Lydia over the next six months.  We designed the stationery format and dimensions; found a font that we loved; and wrote long lists for Lydia describing places and hobbies that were important to us, with links to photographs and wikipedia pages.

One of the great things about using a designer was that we wrote all of our own wording.  Our RSVP cards were very lighthearted, which encouraged people to write messages on them.  We now have a collection of them that we will keep forever.  In the same way, we knew that we did not want a formal invitation, but we did want to show how excited we were about the day.

Lydia took our scribbles and turned them into something beautiful.  We were so excited when we received her first designs.  It was great seeing the reaction to the stationery after it went out.  Friends we lived with in Hong Kong noticed the sam pan boat, the skyscrapers and the Chinese lanterns with the ‘double happiness’ symbol.  Friends we studied with in Nottingham noticed the Robin Hood statue.  Friends really in the know noticed San Giorgio Maggiore, the place where we got engaged.  Lydia also drew our venue, which looked stunning on the Save the Date and our Order of Ceremony.

We hand-wrote our envelopes and decorated them with vintage-style postal ink stamps.  We used stamps with images of Britain for our Save the Dates and 2012 Olympic stamps for our RSVPs.  For our invitation packs we bought hundreds of stamps ranging from 1p to 25p and arranged several stamps on each envelope up to the value of a large envelope stamp.  The man at the post office thought we were slightly insane!

In all, our wedding stationery took up by far the largest slice of our wedding preparation time, but it’s also the part we are proudest of!”

For me Matt & Ronni’s stationary is just a little glimpse into how creative, thoughtful and stylish this pair are, and to what a great team they make together. And I didn’t even mention the badgers (you’ll have to look closely for those), the beautiful dress or the bunch of lovely fun people; the music, marvellous speeches or millions of fab flowers at this wedding….there was so much more, but the stationary is a good place to start.

To Matt & Ronni, long may your teamwork and delightfully adventurous & thoughtful approach to marriage and life continue…. with much love for the future xxxx

 

Venue: Cain Manor; Bride’s Dress: Sassi Holford; Bride’s Shoes: Emmy; Bridesmaids Dress: Two Birds. Hair: Severin Hubert at The Hepburn Collection, Make Up: Katy Messer; Stationary: Studio Binky;  Cake:  Wonderland Bakery; Flowers: Bex Morgan at Blush Floral Design; Band: Anthem