DIY Boho Wedding Filled With Colour Laughter & Music

WWW readers Steph and Chris are kindly sharing their epic DIY boho wedding with us and what a feast for the eyes it all was.

The love, effort and creativity poured into their wedding was just incredible, with loved ones all coming together to draft their day of dreams. It really made their day so personal, natural and unique. From the glorious outdoor ceremony to the homegrown flowers, stylish attire and rustic wooden touches, you are going to adore every single little detail.

Jade Maguire Photography I can’t thank you enough for sharing with us these unbelievably joyous images. Such a fun day.

DIY Boho Wedding

Are You A WWW Reader?

Yes, especially when researching wedding suppliers, and getting inspiration for decor. We also found it really helpful reading through all the blogs about couples who were taking on their own DIY wedding, and reading how happy they were with their big day and how their ideas came to life.

The Proposal

June 2019. We took a trip to my home town on the Isle of Wight, took him all day and a couple of beach walks to find the right moment.. 1st proposal attempt being on a beach, after a silly jumping photo resulting in him thinking he had lost the ring… only to find it a few stressful moments later caught in the lining of his coat pocket…

Acouple of beaches and liquid encouragement later, the time came, after in a cute private beach cove he announced.. ‘this is it’! And he got down on one knee <3

The Vision

It sounds completely cliche, but after Covid and postponing, our vision and what was most important to us was just being surrounded by all our family and friends, seeing all their beautiful faces, all that laughter and closeness… all the things before, that we had taken for granted, was now all that was important to us.

Because of this, we really wanted a day that was personal to us in every way, with consideration to being as eco-friendly as possible and as handmade as it could be. Luckily because of our super kind best friends and their family offering us their beautiful farm grounds for our venue, this dream was possible!

It gave us the blank canvas to go wild, and the extra space for fire pits and camping! The plus side of having the wedding postponed meant that we had time to grow our own flowers, alter my own wedding dress, and the bridesmaid dresses, how I had envisioned them, and to handcraft all the decor too.

Budget

We were aiming to keep it under £10,000, we experienced a couple of hiccups with vendors, postponements and deposit losses, but nevertheless worked out wonderfully in the end, and didn’t take us too far over budget.

The Venue

A beautiful garden ceremony with a traditional style marquee for the reception, on our best friends parents farmland.

Your Outfits

I was torn between wanting the challenge of making my own wedding dress, and also loving the tradition of trying on gowns, and saying yes to the dress in a bridal boutique. So I compromised.

I found a dress in Love Me Do Brides, that was the exact lace that I had my heart set on, but found the style wasn’t quite to my liking, and also found the lining quite heavy and the skirt too full. So I took it upon myself to take out the lining, turn the neckline into a sweetheart, and add some fun fringing to the arms and the back. I was super proud and happy with the result!

The groom/groomsmen/best woman jackets were from Moss Bros and Chinos from Next. We were on the hunt for a sage green suit, something bright and summery, but found this jacket in Moss Bros and the fit was so perfect he couldn’t say no, so we paired it with stone chinos for a more relaxed, summery look.

The bridesmaid dresses were from Boohoo. brought as a plain yellow dress, I added some floral ivory and green applique detail to the dresses to make them more unique and tie in with the groomsmen outfits.

The Ceremony & Music

For the ceremony, we had an incredible acoustic duo that are part of the band Bloomfield Avenue. They played The Beetles, Here comes the sun whilst I walked down the aisle. Our exit song was not only just a song that relates to us, but has the most awesome philosophy, and the catchiest tune… Hakuna matata!

The duo continued to play some wonderful acoustic, chilled indie tunes during our reception drinks and nibbles too!

For the evening, we had a 4 piece folk festival style band, called ‘Just for tonight’. They played an arrangement of Ed Sheeran’s ‘photograph’ and Mumford and Sons ‘I will wait’ for our first dance. The dancefloor was filled the whole night, and they seriously made it a night to remember!

Your Photographer & Filmmaker

Jade Maguire Photography

The Styling & Decor

We wanted to make/build as much for the wedding as possible. We had a lot of fallen hazel trees at work, perfect size and shape to make two tipi type arch structures, one for the ceremony arch and one for an outside seating area backdrop. We dressed it with white chiffon fabric, fairy lights and some colourful artificial flowers.

We chopped hazel into smaller pieces too, with a little slit through the middle for our table names and menus to be placed in. We also made a square structure with the same materials for a photobooth backdrop, which we placed behind us during the meal so we had a nice backdrop during the speeches too.

We used a lot of pallets for the wedding too, we stacked them on top of each other to make tables, with haybale seating dotted around, used them to make a board for the seating plan. My lovely brother in law painted one for our order of the day, and we made wooden planters out of them too for our homegrown flowers. For the signage, we had some old pointed picket fence panels, which we and our wonderful family spent a day in the sunshine painting Yellow and with black writing.

For the ceremony we laid down rustic looking rugs for the aisle, bought Wayfare from Facebook marketplace and borrowed from family members an I sewed 12 hessian pouches to fill with dried petals for the confetti and tied them to the back of the chairs in front with brightly coloured ribbon.

As well as growing our own flowers, and siblings kindly growing beautiful arrangements of flowers too, we also ordered a couple of DIY flower buckets from Chobham Flower Garden, and were so blown away with the gorgeous abundance of colour and variety we were given.

We used these flowers for mine and the bridesmaid bouquets, the groomsmen buttonholes, and all of the table centrepieces too! My sisters in law have a very good eye for flower arranging, and they did such a fantastic job with all of the flowers! They looked incredible along with the most delicious cake made by The Looby Lou Cake Company, which was completely covered in bright and beautiful edible flowers.

The rest of the decor included colourful gin bottles with fairy lights, ladder frames covered in photos from our adventures over the years. Huge round hay bales with tree on top to make more tables with lanterns and scattered flowers.

The Honeymoon

We enjoyed a lovely little weeks staycation at our favourite place in Cornwall, our first trip with our spaniel pup… so lots of nice long dog walks, beach days and pub lunches! it was absolutely perfect.

Memorable Moments

Something we will never forget, and will be eternally grateful for is the generosity of our family members and friends, whose talents and kindness knows no limits. All the favours asked and strings pulled, they made setting up and packing down so seamless, fun and memorable!

Our dog running down the aisle with the bridesmaids!

Our vows, the speakers and speeches, and surprise poems… Every single word was heartfelt and witty.

Best friends traveling far and wide, to be by our sides.

Turning around after our first dance to see Chris’ face everywhere… masks of his face had been passed around and everyone was wearing them!

Advice For Other Couples

Nothing will prepare you for how many emotions you will feel all in one day, and how overwhelming your big day can be. With this in mind, with the sort of wedding we had and with all the separate vendors, and especially because of covid postponements, I think perhaps hiring a wedding planner would have taken away a bit of pressure.

Nevertheless, our day was perfect and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world! Make sure you and your spouse take moments to step away from the wedding and be a fly on the wall, take it all in and enjoy watching all the joy around you!