Informal Hand Made Beach Wedding

Jump for joy, we’re headed to the beach. Yippee.

WWW readers Lindsey and Andy were married at Branksome Dene Community Room in Dorset on a beautiful summers day. They wanted to create an informal party atmosphere all on a £5000 budget. Much of the celebrations were home made, complete with brooch bouquets, fun pin-wheel wall and chalkboard signs.

The chalkboard cake was just epic, a creation hand crafted by Lindsey and it was placed alongside some scrumptious desserts. Lindsey donned two gorgeous frocks, one in the day and another in the evening, Andy chose a relaxed waistcoat and chinos look, while the maids wore mint multi way dresses. Just perfect.

Thanks so much to the fabulous Lydia Stamps Photography for sharing these wonderful images with us.

THE PROPOSAL | Andy proposed to me at home, I came home to find all my favourite foods ready and waiting for me. Unfortunately all my favourite foods is fish based, which Andy is allergic too, but he didn’t want to ruin the moment so we ate everything together over a candlelit dinner. He then spent the next 12 hours vomiting, apparently he doesn’t regret a thing!

THE VISION | This was Andy’s second wedding and he had done the whole “top hat and tails” things before, it isn’t either of our styles so we decided fairly early on to go for something a little more relaxed and a little more fun, much to my mother in law’s horror!

We were plumping for informal beach party but with better outfits and no burnt sausages.

THE PLANNING PROCESS | I am a little bit of a control freak so I actually really enjoyed this part. We are both workaholics so finding the time was difficult, and quite a large amount was last minute, but coming up with the concept, searching for suppliers, putting items together, I found it quite satisfying. Andy on the other hand spent a lot of time nodding, and whilst he is not the type of person to sit for hours on end looking at all the different elements it was so useful to have someone to come and look at something and say Yes or No straight away. I think the only planning he really enjoyed doing was the menu. We are both massive foodies and spent far too much time working on our menu, however, the food was amazing!

BUDGET | We had a very very small budget of £5,000. Which we actually did manage to stick to, rings and all. Thankfully we have an amazing set of friends who were quite willing to pitch in and help us out with all manner of things, otherwise I don’t think Andy and I could have afforded to get married.

THE VENUE | The venue was completely Andy’s choice, and it was such a good one! The venue is right on the beach and a small community centre owned by the Council that we could rent out for three days. It was a complete blank canvas and when I showed various people the pictures they looked… dubious. It can look a little run down and dishevelled, and when you are taking people round to see it in the dead of winter it is a bit of a hard sell, however, I knew with a bit of clever decoration it would look amazing, and it was such a brilliant location and price that I was determined it was going to work.

THE DRESS & ACCESSORIES | I had two dresses. I bought my first dress in the early planning stages, a tea length ivory dress with lace overlay and little lace ¾ length sleeves, it was so difficult to find a dress with sleeves, and I really liked the style of the dress as it meant I could wear a bra and feel comfortable in the day. I literally saw the dress online and ordered it from China that day, a grand total of £49.00 including delivery. Luckily my mum is a seamstress, so she took the hem up for me and altered the sleeves so that it fitted someone who is only 5ft tall, it was a classic wedding dress and appeased the traditionalists in the family.

My second dress however I saw whilst out with a friend, I saw a short version in Miss Selfridge of all places, with very little convincing she persuaded me to order the full length gown and that was what I wore for the evening. A beautiful beaded 1920s inspired floor length dress, I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.

FINDING THE DRESS | I hate clothes shopping, and when searching for a wedding dress when you are 5ft tall and slightly more busty then you would like to be, it just made the experience really uncomfortable and stressful for me. I did go to Bridal shops but I lost patience with it when I kept being told what I should be wearing because that would compliment my frame, rather than listening to what I wanted to wear. So I shopped online, not only was it budget friendly but it just took all the stress out for me, I could try things on in the comfort of my own home, and I am lucky enough to have a VERY honest mother so I didn’t have the fear that anything would be poorly fitted. My only advice for shopping online however, find a good seamstress, as it will need altering!

GROOM’S ATTIRE | Unless its a wetsuit Andy doesn’t like to wear it. So we decided to go pretty informal with his outfit, we ditched the jackets, nobody wears them on the beach anyway, and we went for a sand coloured suit, shirt sleeves rolled up and a cream tie just to finish the outfit.

THE READINGS & MUSIC | I walked down the aisle to Temper Trap’s “Sweet Disposition”and we had our first dance to Elbow – “One Day Like this”, just as the sun was setting behind the cliff tops.

BEAUTIFUL BRIDESMAIDS | All of my bridesmaids are such different heights and shape that I didn’t want to go for one style of dress, instead I picked the multi-wear dresses. Again another online find, but it meant the girls would all be matching but could wear the dresses how they felt most comfortable, they all looked stunning, and although when I ordered the dresses I didn’t think the colour would be a bright as it was I was really pleased how they looked on the day.

THE FLOWERS | We didn’t have flower bouquets, instead I spent my Sunday with my Mum going to car boot sales looking for vintage jewellery. I then made our bouquets from our finds, I really enjoyed putting them all together and found out Andy had a talent for it also, so we spent a couple of weekends sat in the garden together wiring them all up ready to put them into a bouquet. They were a statement on the day and we all still have them now. We had a few flowers on the tables in the venue, I bought enough milk bottles for each table and then spent the Wednesday before the wedding with my sister putting them all into a display ready to put on the table the night before. My Mother made the button holes on the morning of the wedding whilst she was having her hair done.

THE CAKE | I was really worried about the cake as it is what I do for a living and I felt a lot of pressure to have something really outlandish and crazy. I wanted a statement, but not that much of a statement. We had used blackboards throughout our wedding, from the invitations to the menu boards so I decided to go for a black cake… again everyone was dubious, with our names and date of wedding hand painted in calligraphy in white to imitate the theme. I made some bright sugar flowers to match in with my colour scheme just to lighten the cake. I actually ended up finishing the cake off at the venue the night before the wedding, and one of my lovely customers supplied me with a dessert table, which was delicious!

YOUR PHOTOGRAPHER | We had the amazing Lydia Stamps. This was probably the biggest part of our budget but she was just amazing, I hate having my picture taken, and Lydia really listened to what we wanted and what we didn’t want, I really didn’t want to do very many posed shots and loved her style of natural photography. Lydia made both Andy and I feel completely at ease, she was so calm, funny and friendly we forgot she was there to photograph the wedding, which is probably why some of the most beautiful shots that she captured we didn’t even realise she was photographing. Even the posed group shots that I was dreading ended up printed up and put on the wall as they were simply gorgeous. You know the photographs are good when everyone asks for a copy for their own home!

THE DETAILS & DÉCOR | Most of our details were handmade. We had used chalkboards throughout our wedding theme, thankfully I have a really fantastic artist who works for me and was also a Bridesmaid so she did a lot of painting for me, Andy and I also bought some small stamps and white ink which we used on place settings and smaller details. I wanted something bright and fun so we spent a long time making paper fans to go on the wall to brighten the venue up as well as bunting, and everything from the table plans to the drinks menu was painted by my Bridesmaid Amy. Andy, my sister and I made miniature bottles of salad dressings, chutneys, flavoured oils etc which were placed on each table so everyone could dress their own salads etc. Andy had made litres upon litres of ginger beer which everyone consumed throughout the night, I had even bought vintage straws to match my colour scheme to sit on the bar. My dad had painstakingly taken all the labels off the inexpensive bubbly we had bought and had put our home made labels on them, as well as money in the corks for whoever was lucky enough to open that particular bottle on their table. We took out all the tables and chairs which were originally in the venue and hired old fashioned trestle tables and benches, this transformed our venue completely and it looked better already. I hired all my tableware, glassware, crockery and cutlery from an events company, we set the tables the night before so the venue looked the part and the best thing about it was no washing up! The groomsmen and the bridesmaids went around the whole venue at dusk and lit all the citronella candles we had bought, not only did it keep the mosquitoes away but it meant the whole venue and patio area was lit by candlelight which looked amazing in the evening.

THE HONEYMOON | Our honeymoon was arranged for us. We had no idea where we were going to or what we would be doing until it was all booked. We had a three week break away, we turned up at the airport hopped on a plane to Nova Scotia, Canada, arrived at the other end to find a car waiting for us, a selection of maps and a lot of Canadian money. We spent the next three weeks whale watching, hiking, exploring and even managed to fit in a road trip to New York whilst we were there.

MEMORABLE MOMENTS | Andy’s speech. Andy decided to wing his speech, which I can honestly say, please never do! He hated every minute of it, we all however sat there and cried throughout the entire thing. It was so heart felt and emotional that the whole wedding party sobbed, even the photographer welled up. It is honestly my favourite part of the wedding, one of my favourite pictures is an image of Andy sitting down after he had finished, tissue in hand.

ADVICE FOR OTHER COUPLES | Don’t worry about the small things, it really isn’t worth it. Get a good photographer as the pictures will last forever. Work out what you want and not your family. Have a really large drink when you are getting ready in the morning.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE |

Photography | Lydia Stamps Photography

Tables, Chairs, Bar | Virginias Vintage Hire

Venue | Branksome Dene Community Room

Cake | Sweet Serenity

Dessert Table | Cakes by Ana – on facebook

Caterer | Christian Orner

Lindsey and Andy, what a marvellous day you had. Thank you so much for sharing your story on WWW xo Lou