When I think back to when What The Dad Said and I were planning our wedding we joked that as soon as a bakery, florist or similar knew that the items we wanted were for a wedding the price doubled. As we were paying for our wedding ourselves we were on a budget but still wanted to have a personalised wedding without the additional cost that generally goes with it. So we set about looking for ways that we could add personal touches to our wedding at a fraction of the price.
Organise a personalised wedding without the additional cost
Wedding Flowers
For as long as I can remember I have always looked at my Mam’s wedding flowers sitting in my Granny’s display cabinet from when she married my Dad. Opting to have silk flowers instead of real flowers allowed me the luxury of admiring them whenever I went to visit my grandparents. With the cost of real flowers coming in way over budget I was pleased in a way to be able to opt for silk flowers just like my Mam so that I too could keep hold of them and allow my children the same luxury of admiring them as I did as a child.
Instead of choosing a local florist who all came in over budget, I found a lovely florist on eBay who showed me examples of her work and allowed me to change the colours of flowers etc to match our wedding theme. We managed to purchase all our wedding flowers for under a third of the price real flowers would have cost and be delivered in advance so there was no worry about things going wrong on the day.
Wedding Cake
Wanting a traditional tiered cake we visited many different cake suppliers in the local area and was surprised at just how much a wedding cake was going to cost. It was my Mam that suggested that we bought plain iced cakes and decorated them ourselves. So we ordered three plain iced cakes from Marks and Spencers (one fruit and two sponge), added our own tier pillars that we had purchased from eBay and then decorated them with the same flowers we were using for my bouquet and the buttonholes along with matching ribbon around the bottom edge of each tier.
Wedding favours
One of the things I would change about our wedding would be the wedding favours that we chose. We decided to stay traditional and have sugared almonds in little pillow boxes on the tables for the evening reception. However, come the end of the night there were so many leftovers and the ones that had been opened were left behind too as it appears that nobody actually liked sugared almonds.
If we were choosing wedding favours now I’d add mini curly wurly bars, love hearts or Haribo’s on the tables as I’m sure everyone would appreciate them plus it would save time filling pillow boxes and painstakingly tying a ribbon around them.
Decorations
We held our wedding reception in a local hotel that provided the basics in terms of decorations, with tablecloths, chair covers and red carpet upon arrival other than that it was really down to us to decorate the room further. We originally looked at adding flower arrangements to the centre of each table however the cost involved was unbelievable so we opted for balloons.
We found a local company who was able to supply and deliver balloon centrepieces and a balloon arch over the buffet table at a fraction of the cost of the flowers which allowed us to add disposable cameras (we did get married 11 years ago so not even sure you can buy disposable cameras anymore) on each table for our guests to take photos of our big day. The balloons turned out to be a big hit with the children and they loved being able to release them into the sky at the end of the day.
These are just some of the ways that we managed to have a personalised wedding without the additional cost.
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