Wedding cakes are a big feature of any wedding and are here to stay…despite the attempt of a hostile takeover by wheels of cheese! I don’t have many strong opinions and you know I’m all for making weddings personal to the couple, AND I swear this isn’t just because I don’t like cheese, or even that I think it shouldn’t be an option….but you can’t replace cake with cheese, THAT’S NOT A THING! Plus think of all those plus-one’s who know only the person they are with – THEY ARE THERE FOR THE CAKE! I jest, sort of, but that said…
Whilst most of us still love cake at our weddings, it’s not ‘wedding cake’ as we traditionally think of it anymore. Our in-house expert cake baker, Laura of Green Kitchen Cakes, gives us the insider taste on the cake trends she’s seeing come through for 2019-2020 (yes, it does freak us out slightly to think that far into the future too, but that’s the wedding world folks!).
Have you used any of the styles we’ve talked about in this video for your wedding? We’d love to see your photos!
If you’d like to know more about Green Kitchen Cakes, or even book their services, you can find them here.
It may be November and our thoughts starting to turn to the C word, but we’re still embracing the season with this foraged autumn leaf wreath DIY!
Use it to add a splash of autumnal colour to your wedding venue, either on the front door or inside your reception space.
Customise by adding a text banner across the front of the wreath to let everyone know who’s wedding they’re attending!
If you don’t fancy going foraging for real autumn leaves, or would just like to keep your wreath year after year, why not use artificial leaves like these ones from The Works?
And if you want to get your glue gun out, you could even add other seasonal decorations. Pine cones, acorns and conkers anyone?
I feel like it’s programmed into women in our society/culture that everything adorning our bodies on our wedding days has to be £££££. Whereas once upon a time, women did not wear a new, white dress for their wedding, but simply the finest dress they owned. And whilst I’m not trying to take anyone’s childhood fantasy of wearing the ‘big white dress’ and believe things should feel ‘extra-special’ in some sense, I’m all for bringing back a bit of that mentality where a wedding does not have to cost the earth. It’s not just the dress, it’s the jewellery, underwear, hair accessory…I have sometimes heard of Brides wearing jewellery borrowed or passed down to them by older female relatives, which is a lovely tradition, and of course handily covers of the ‘something borrowed’, this is a great start.
For my own wedding, although I wanted to create a fairly classically bridal look with my jewellery, I didn’t feel the need to spend big. To be fair, I should note that my necklace had been a recent birthday gift from my now husband, but my earrings were simply from Accessorize and I think they matched my Swarovski necklace pretty well! So when Laura and I started thinking about hair pieces for our latest video, we decided the High Street was a great place to start, namely, Accessorize. Today we are bringing you a range of wedding-worthy styles to inspire your wedding hair look – clips, combs, bands, slides, we’ve got it all to give you a taste of what is out there. (Product links below where available.)
Top tip: Take your hair accessory along to your hair trial so you can ensure it can be incorporated into your wedding hairstyle in a way you’re happy with. Or of course if you don’t have one yet, discuss what shape/style would work and what fastening they would recommend for your style.
Don’t forget to take a look at the Accessorize website here as I noticed they had some gorgeous pieces on there that were not available in store (or at least the store I went in to!).
Product links, (where available) in order of appearance:
4. 2x Whimsical Feather Hair Slides £10 (full single feather slide featured in this video was not available on their website, this is the two smaller clip version mentioned in the video)
If you’re planning an autumn/fall wedding you may be wondering how to incorporate some autumnal touches to your Big Day.
We’ve come up with a super simple idea for your wedding reception tables which include the cutest mini pumpkins!
We found these cute mini white pumpkins in Aldi and with the addition of a few fairy lights and some foraged conkers, have created a really simple, effective and seasonal centrepiece for your wedding reception tables.
Add some autumn leaves and pine cones to create even more of an autumnal scene.
Change up the colour of the pumpkins on different tables to create some variety, or keep them the same to create a unified look.
Don’t fancy including candles for your table numbers? Why not paint the number on to a pumpkin instead?
If you have a go at making the centrepieces, we’d love to see your efforts! Tag us in your Instagram photos or leave a link in the comments below.
Fall has arrived and here at Bride Society we’re feeling all those autumnal vibes! Pumpkin spice lattes, ankle boots, leather jackets, rich, red leaves on the pavement…I can get behind all that. Whilst at heart I’m (Rebecca) a summer girl, and the hotter the better, I find myself embracing autumn more than normal this year. Perhaps it’s because we actually had a more satisfying summer here in the UK and so the arrival of autumn doesn’t seem so cruel for once! That said I still came down with a cold the moment the temperature dropped, and autumn can keep it’s dark evenings, so I’m not entirely thrilled!
We set to thinking about all things autumn for this wedding season and we came up with these Apple Place Cards – perhaps inspired by a combination of the gorgeous red tones and my cold (an unconscious desire for vitamins)?! This is SO cheap to make and a delicious way of adding some colour to your tables, plus your guests can eat them afterwards! I mean, a wedding is nothing without cake, but an apple or two can reduce that indulgence guilt.
We hope you like them! Any questions or video requests let us know, we love hearing from you.
You’ve been picking out your bridesmaids and dreaming about dresses. You’re creating Pinterest boards every other day and you knew your colour scheme about 5 seconds after you said, “yes”. But when it actually comes to the practicality of the getting married part, the bit that legally gets you from engaged to married, what do you need to know?
In this week’s video we’re stripping back all the luxuries and trimmings of a wedding, as much as we love them, to give you the wedding 101 in what you actually NEED to get married in the UK. What that costs, what your choices are and what makes it legal – the bare bones. *Serious face*
Watch this before you start planning as there’s a surprise or two in there where movies may have led you astray! Hint: In the UK, you can’t legally get married just anywhere, anytime.
N.B. Please note that whilst all the information in this video is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of filming and on the date the video was launched, UK law in constantly evolving and for the most up to date information you should consult the government website here.
We hope you find this helpful! If you have a request for a future video, get in touch!
Summer might be just about over but you’d be mistaken for thinking it was still in full swing with these colourful, floral biscuits!
We’re getting our bake on again with some really easy biscuits/cookies, decorated with seasonal edible flowers. They’d be perfect for your wedding favours or a great addition to a dessert table.
They’re really quick to make, can be made a few days in advance (perfect if you’re making them yourself for your own wedding!) and have the wow factor.
Add your own twist by adding the juice and zest of lemons or limes, or how about a dash of vanilla or almond extract for a different flavour?
Make sure your flowers are edible, from a reputable source and know which bits of the flower you can eat! We bought ours from https://maddocksfarmorganics.co.uk/
Getting married in a different season? Don’t despair, as seasonal edible flowers can be found at most times of the year in the UK.
If you have a go at making the edible flower biscuits, we’d love to see your efforts! Tag us in your Instagram photos or leave a link in the comments below.
It has been a glorious summer in the UK and I’m sure it’s made many Brides and Grooms very happy, as for once they have not had to contend with ‘inclement weather contingency plans’ that is the Brit norm. Let’s face it, ordinarily you’d have to be crazy to plan a completely outdoor wedding here. As standard we expect gale force winds and heavy showers – aka heavy rain, likely to cause minor flooding. But no! Nothing of the sort! In fact when the rain did finally return, I, along with many of my neighbours, all stood at our windows watching this strange wet stuff falling from the sky as if we were experiencing some kind of new, miraculous phenomenon! (Bear with me, I’m British, I’m supposed to go on about the weather.)
I hope you all got to celebrate weddings of loved ones in the sunshine, picking your outfits without having to factor in cover-ups or deal with your shoe heels getting caked in mud. We too had a wedding or two to attend this summer, which as you may imagine, we really look forward to. I (Rebecca) recently attended the wedding of an old university friend – we’ve spent the last couple of years chatting about his upcoming wedding and I know he’d been tuning into Bride Society, mostly to support my endeavours, but hopefully he got something helpful out of it along the way too, so I was really looking forward to seeing him saying his, “I do’s”, and to finally meeting his imminent wife-to-be!
So I thought why not include all of you at Bride Society in the excitement? Join me as I get ready for my day as a Wedding Guest and take a sneak peek at the day itself…spoiler: it was super lovely.
NB. The weather had returned to British standard by then.
Any questions or video requests, let us know in the comments below – we get very excited when we hear from you!
The Great British Bake Off is back on our screens. Hooray!
So if it’s inspiring you to get in the kitchen and bake, we’re showing you how to make these cute mini-lemon cakes. A great alternative to cupcakes but still with the same convenience for serving.
Of course you can change up the flavours to whatever you prefer (Rebecca would have definitely opted for chocolate!) or why not have a selection of flavours so everybody’s happy?
If you’re making them for your wedding or event, create a tower of the cakes to make a real impact. Add a larger cake at the top of your tower and you have a cutting cake too!
Making your own anything for your wedding is a pretty big commitment. Firstly, there’s the time it takes to do all things crafty (ALWAYS longer than you think!), time how long it takes you to make one and times it by the number of guests you have attending if it’s anything place setting / stationery related etc, and you’ll see what you might be in for. Enlisting helpers is a massive plus…unless you’re a control freak like me (Rebecca) and so it just causes you more anxiety, but you’ll likely find people are keen to get involved. I was big on, let’s call it, ‘quality control’ behind the scenes – which I feel bad saying as people were kind enough to give up their own time to help me, though that said, in reality it went better than I feared it might! In my mind, my wedding was a representation of my husband and I, and therefore every detail a reflection of us – that said, I’m perfectly prepared to accept that this could just be my neurosis and you do not have to be that way! Read; perfectionist. My goal was always for my wedding to be as personal to us as possible, as well as to save money, therefore I made a lot of the details, but I wanted to do it without it looking ‘home-made’.
Which brings me to my second point that whilst DIY’ing your wedding can be great, it’s important to hone your skills, practise. For example, the first time you ever painted something, brought it home and your parents stuck it on the fridge. Probably not your best work to date! You practised and improved to something that your parents maybe even liked having as part of their home décor! Maybe. I am still on stick figures, painting is not my strength.
Today we are walking you through how to make your own bridal bouquet. We’ve gone for a loose, hand-tied bouquet with a range of fresh flowers and foliage that were in season at the time of shooting and that complimented each other. Have a play around to see what works for you, and bear in mind the shelf life of fresh flowers! Whilst you can have a practise run to work on those skills, the final one will have to be done relatively close to the Big Day so it’s not wilting before the “I do’s”.
Any questions or video requests, let us know in the comments.
If you’re looking for an alternative table plan, which you can enjoy long after your wedding day, our plant pot table plan could be the answer. Use plants or herbs to coordinate with your wedding style or colour scheme to really personalise this DIY.
For our table plan we’ve used white paint on 11cm terracotta plant pots with pink cyclamen.
Display your pots on a stepladder or on a pile of crates to complete a rustic look.
The plant pots could also be used as your wedding table numbers/centrepieces, without the name markers of course!
Don’t forget to take them home or give to loved ones as a lasting reminder of your special day!
If you want to keep your centrepieces simple and cost effective then why not try our latest DIY, which is also helping the planet by doing a bit of recycling!
We’re turning some glass drinks bottles (labels removed and washed out) into a wedding centrepiece, perfect for your rustic wedding tables.
Get your friends and family involved by asking them to collect bottles in the run up to the Big Day too and you’ll soon have enough for all your tables, without any added expense!
Then all you have to do is get creative and add your personal touches. We’ve shown you how to decorate the bottles with some twine and offcuts of ribbon, but you can tailor them to your own wedding theme! And for a splash of colour, why not pop in a few flower stems.
If like me (Laura), you struggle with being presented with the blank page of a guestbook at a wedding, trying to come up with something meaningful but also not just copying what the person before you has written, then this may be the video for you!
Having a guestbook of some description is an excellent way of providing you with a lasting memory of your wedding day. And let’s face it, who doesn’t like to read comments saying how wonderful you are over and over again?!
We’ve come up with a number of ideas for your wedding guestbook, from the traditional to the slightly more alternative (Jenga guest book anyone?). Check out our latest video below.
You’ve set the date (YAY!), you’ve booked the venue (double YAY!) and now you’re looking at wedding invitations wondering how it is possible for it to cost so much just to ask your guests to attend your wedding. Now of course it’s all good if at this point you decide an e-vite will do you just fine! A totally legit option…assuming your granny knows how to use a computer. But if you’re hoping to find an option somewhere between gold plated and electronic, then maybe it’s time to have a go at making your own. Caution: Know your skill level, time availability and price out the materials for the number you’ll need (factoring in a few extras for spills, smudges etc)!
If you’re feeling game for having a go at the DIY approach, then we’ve got a really easy one for you to try that will look pro. I’ve always loved the embossed look on invitations, so we’re showing you how to add some detailing design to an invitation that you can just make and print out onto card at home. Of course you could also give the text of the invitation itself the embossed effect if you have a stamp made – if you’re giving me a vote, I’d say do it!
Any questions or requests for future videos, let us know in the comments below.
Children can bring joy and laughter to your big day. They can look super cute in a mini tux or a tiny tutu and to them it’s all a magical fairy tale. But let’s face it, our little bundles of joy do not tend to excel at sitting patiently for extended periods of time!
If you’ve decided to have children at the wedding, then all power to you. Give them little jobs and their own responsibilities where you can – it will make them feel super special (and keep their minds occupied). If there are lots of children coming, and you have the budget for it, you could go all in and keep them entertained with a professional crèche service, or book a bouncy castle.
Less children? Smaller budget? Put together individual activity packs for them based on their age and whatever you may know about their likes/dislikes. Get your Ushers to give them out at the ceremony so they don’t start getting twitchy during the vows, or put them on their place setting at the reception to help them through the speeches. That way no one starts having palpitations when you hear a voice during the, “does anyone know of any lawful reason why these two cannot be joined…” portion of the event! Everyone wins!
We’ve put together a sample pack to give you some inspiration in today’s video. Check out what we put in…
…if you’re looking for the super cute kids party crowns we mention in this video click here, they are available from Sainsbury’s, £3 for 6.