The Ex Expat

10 September 2012

For a while I’ve been considering blogging about our wedding, which was quite a DIY affair, and sharing some of our ideas with you. With our third anniversary coming up this week, I thought now would be a good time. We’d decided pretty early on that we wanted to have a fairly low key wedding, that we wanted to do it our way (and not what either of our respective cultural traditions dictated), and that we wanted to do as much of it as possible ourselves, from the service to the decorations to the entertainment. No wedding planners or professional caterers for us.

In Edinburgh, I was a member of two churches - a Scottish one and an German one - and we decided to have the service in one and the party in the other. For the party, we chose the one that was just a two minute walk from our house and didn’t have a service on the next morning. This made it easy getting home and meant we could leave the clearing up till the next day :-)

We chose a garden theme, and the husband designed beautiful invitations and service sheets with grass and leaves and lady birds. We then took that as the basis for our party decorations. First of all, we cut green craft paper to look like grass and stuck it up as a border round the entire church hall! We then decorated the grass with flowers, toadstools and insects that we’d painted in some fun craft sessions with our friends in the months leading up to the wedding. You can get a general idea of it in the picture above. The giant tree was another thing we painted, to be our “guestbook”.

This is the lounge next to the church hall where we set up the buffet. We had signs for drinks, sweet, and savoury, in the same leafy design, more insects, napkins with butterfly and garland with flower patterns. One of my favourite features was the games corner, which we’d kitted out with a large astroturf carpet, a sign saying “Please play on the grass!”, and a basket full of fun games such as Jenga, Bop It or Pop Up Pirate.

Here’s a close up of the tables. We didn’t have assigned seating. Everyone was free to choose where they sat. We covered the tables in green paper to give them a grassy look. As table decorations we had spider plants (which I’d started growing several months before from offshoots in our kitchen) and wind up bugs, both of which guests were invited to take home with them at the end of the evening. Jam jars with polka dot ribbons and tea lights gave it a bit of a ‘picnic in the garden’ feel. We had all of our friends collecting jars for us, and spent an entire evening punching out hundreds of paper flowers to sprinkle around. The frogs are sweets that we found at last minute, and my mum brought along a bag of wooden lady birds which we added around the room.

Here’s a close up of the grass border with my favourite toadstool.

Oh, I almost forgot about the ‘washing line’. We were thinking of what else you get in gardens, and we thought of people hanging up their washing. So we strung up a line all around the room, and hung it with photographs from our time so far together, interspersed with quotes about love and marriage written out on clothes shaped paper we’d cut out, including socks and pants :-)

And finally, here’s our ‘guestbook’ tree after people had started adding their messages. After the wedding, we took a photograph of it before dismantling it ( I would have loved to hang it in our flat, but it measured over 2 metres tall!), then we stuck all the leaves in an album and the picture of the tree on the front. There were more pages in the album than we needed, so I added in some photos of our guests. I absolutely love our guest book. It’s so different.