A Laid Back, Literary | Scrabble Themed: Real Wedding

I have an amazing, real wedding to share with you today full of lovely literary detail. Our laid back couple, Lauren and Isla added their own personal touches to their intimate Camden wedding. If you’re a lover of scrabble and literature, you’ll definitely be a lover of this awesome literary themed wedding! Words by Isla unless stated as Lauren :)

© 2013 Kat Forsyth Photography

Lauren proposed after she’d come back from a night out and had had a bit to drink so in the morning I thought I’d better double check whether she was serious!

That morning Isla drew a carrot on my finger as a stand in engagement ring (there were many groans when I explained to people I had a one carat ring).

We wanted a fun, informal day reflecting our absolute Scrabble and literary geekery (all the invitations were Penguin Classics styled!)

The literary / scrabble theme evolved from ease, really, rather than being a specific idea that we had from the start, though I guess it’s pretty much what you should expect from two English graduates.

Because we had the cake idea (which was suggested by my brother-in-law when we first announced our engagement) it made sense to use Scrabble tiles for place names, and when we were fretting about gifts for people it was logical that a Scrabble mug would be personal and remind them of the wedding.

The fact that Penguin Postcards came in a box of 100 made them easy to use as RSVP cards, so we did a Penguin invitation theme, then we had spare ones which turned into table names!

Occasional fairy lights and Eucalyptus leaves were used to decorate our venue. The flowers were in jam jars.

 

I loved that my wedding dress came from a member of Lauren’s family, it was a beautiful fit and complimented Lauren’s gown perfectly. Also, not paying for it meant I could afford nice shoes! Lauren chose her dress because of the thickness of the material and the way the folds fell.

Lauren got ridiculously excited about having a Routemaster bus between the registry office and venue. Or, more specifically, she got excited because the bus was called Olive and had been lovingly restored by a man named Gwyn.

We chose Prince Albert in Camden for the reception – fun, informal, clean, quirky, lovely staff, had a separate upstairs for the meal, an outside space, and we could hire the whole place for a minimum spend.

We didn’t think about it at the time, but in hindsight we also really like that it’s a place we can go back to, and we actually went there for Sunday lunch a few weeks ago.

We had white and dusky pink roses with bits of heather (for Lauren’s Scottish family) and small pink flowers alongside for me. Our florist was a fam8ily friend – Sarah Newman of Driftwood Flowers who nothing was too much trouble for. She was very good at offering suggestions when it became apparent how clueless we were.

We made everyone’s place name out of scrabble racks and tiles, which pretty much doubled up as favours. We got everything off ebay, and then invited people round for pizza and made them help glue everything together. As a thank you for our bridesmaids / ushers / readers / musicians we got Scrabble mugs with their initial on them.

As we are Scrabble nerds, we had a custom made Scrabble board with a stack of cupcakes beside it with scrabble tiles on. The cake was actually the first thing we sorted out, because we knew exactly what we wanted.

The cake / cupcake combination was really helpful in that we managed to get the chocolate cake Lauren and I wanted (the main cake!) and had different flavours for the cupcakes, as well as vegan options (obviously marked by the ‘V’ tile!). The vegan sponge was actually really amazing.

My wedding shoes were from Lucy Choi and Lauren’s were a pair of white Toms decorated by a friend of mine – a Harry Potter Marauders’ Map!

We chose Kat Forsyth as our wedding photographer as she is really just a lovely person. Fun and a bit geeky but best of all, she didn’t make you feel like you had the camera pointing at you all the time.

Kat was really friendly, chatty and went along with any mad scheme we could throw at her! Both of us are ridiculously nervous in front of a camera, and didn’t want all our photos to feel awkward and posed, so it was important to us that we had someone that we clicked with and who would just get on with things so we could pretend there were no photos being taken!

Our engagement rings came from sister shops in Brighton – I got mine from Regents and Lauren from Fidra. I love how delicate mine is, and when I saw Lauren’s in the shop window I knew it wasn’t the traditional style for an engagement ring, but just right for her.

Our wedding rings came from Hearts of London – they came the most highly recommended on TripAdvisor. We were particularly recommended Brett who was really professional and patient. Since both our engagement rings were quite unusual shapes the wedding bands had to be specifically shaped to go around them, which didn’t actually turn out to be as expensive as we feared!

If we could offer any advice to brides planning their weddings, we would say…

Don’t feel bad when planning – everything just isn’t that fun sometimes. I felt really pressured to find everything fun all of the time and well, bridesmaids’ dress shopping just, er, wasn’t. The one practical thing I‘d say is the more you can get the venue to arrange for you, the better. It was such a relief to know the pub we chose naturally had all the drinks and could do all the food on site – that’s so much sorted in one fail swoop.

I’m just going to echo everything Isla said. It was kind of a relief when things weren’t going to plan (oh god, the ridiculous steps I had to go through to get our printer to accept that we wanted to print our invitations onto A5 card without any streaks!) to just repeat to each other that, if the worst happened, we had the legalities sorted, there was going to be food and alcohol, and if there was nothing else then that was still enough to have a great party.

Also, I think we trusted a lot of people to know what they were doing, which (based on their reactions…) was actually unusual for a wedding. We didn’t have strong feelings about the flowers, and just basically asked our florist to do something that would look great with what everyone was wearing, and sort out the venue however she wanted. And everything she did was amazing. We knew the venue had catered for 80 odd people before, and if they said that a specific table layout was best then we were happy to go with it, and to follow whatever they recommended for food later in the evening.

We intentionally chose a photographer who would just take whatever photos she thought would be good (and didn’t make us feel ridiculous for thinking a playground was the best possible site for some photos). I think we knew the feeling of the day we wanted to create (geeky, informal, fun, free flowing alcohol) and didn’t get too hung up on the specifics, which really helped, as we avoided clichés such as “that is not rose that is dusty pink which is completely different!”

It really helped that neither of us had a specific idea of what our “Perfect Wedding” was, and that everything evolved organically from when we started planning. Of course, we ended up putting all the table names and place settings out the night before the wedding at a ridiculously late hour, I slept on a sofa because a bed mysteriously went missing at the place my family was staying, created a playlist for the reception drinks on my phone while getting my hair done in the morning and turned up at Marylebone registry office without any shoes because they had ended up at the wrong place (they were delivered by Isla’s best man as I was getting out the cab) so maybe slightly more organisation than we achieved would be good!

And our most memorable part of the day? The end, when we could sit back and realise what an awesome day we’d had.

Well this was definitely a wedding that just all came together. I’m totally loving all the creative details and I think Lauren and Isla made a fab decision in trusting their wedding suppliers to know their stuff and just get on with it. A scary decision, but one that definitely paid off for these gorgeous girls.

So all that’s left to say is a massive congrats to lovely Lauren and Isla on saying your ‘I Do’s’ and a big thank you to Kat from Kat Forsyth Photography for sharing with the Want That Wedding blog.

Now please do leave this lovely couple some blog lovin’ by telling us what your favourite bits of their Literary / Scrabble themed wedding are.

credits | photography: kat forsyth photography | wedding venue: marylebone town hall | wedding reception: prince albert | lauren’s wedding dress: house of frasier | isla’s wedding dress: ljudmilla taylor | lauren’s shoes: toms | isla’s shoes: lucy choi florist: driftwood flowers | cake: crumbs & doilies

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