Lace Sleeves & Floral Crowns, South Farm Wedding: Charlene & Ian

I’ve a totally gorgeous wedding to share with you today. Our lovely couple Ian & Charlene were inspired by their love of homely, understated rustic vintage and really wanted to create a day unique and personal to them.

Charlene cuts a striking figure and makes a stunning bride in her beautiful, long sleeved lace wedding gown and the hair wigs dainty floral crown – and I just love the candid way their talented photographer Marie Wootton captured their beautiful big day.

Words by Charlene. Images by Marie Wootton Photography.

My husband-to-be wanted me in sleeves, it’s his favourite style on me so as a surprise I wanted to include sleeves on my wedding dress.

I love pretty, delicate vintage looking styles so when I tried on this dress I immediately felt special and thought it was very different to a lot of the other dresses that I’d ever seen.

That was the theme throughout the wedding I wanted to make little touches that made our wedding unique and I had never seen a dress like this on anyone!

So it was the one!

Our chosen wedding venue was South Farm in Royston. It was simply the most beautiful place we came across and it instantly fitted our personalities and gave us the warm, homely, welcoming feeling we wanted our guests to have.

I decided to have a flower crown made – which I had some lovely photos with but decided not to wear with my veil. I wanted the option to be available to me on the day though which I was glad I did as the photos I have with the crown are some of my favourites.

I chose Ghost evening dresses for my bridesmaids. Each dress was uniquely picked by each of the bridesmaids themselves – I wanted them to pick a style they liked so that I knew they would feel great on the day.

I also felt that not every bridesmaid will suit the same dress so I wanted to be a little different! We managed to get most of the dresses from the Ghost outlet in Hatfield Galleries for almost a 1/3 of the original price!

They had little trains on them  – which I loved as they matched me! (Sort of!)

My shoes were from Rainbow Club – smaller heels and very comfortable! I didn’t feel them all day so they are highly recommended for being so comfortable.

I kept my bridal veil plain and long enough to cover my dress train (which was also quite long!). My dress had so much detail that keeping the veil plain worked well.

We had a beautiful 1934 White Rolls Royce for our wedding transport – It’s one of the rarer cars so it doesn’t even have a name/type. I specifically remember the distinct smell of diesel as we drove along the country roads back to South Farm from the church.

It was lovely to experience the old car, rattling along with its manual indicator flipping out from the side of the car – the car is the sort you dream of as a little girl! I loved it!

Ian wore a beautiful, made to order 3 piece tweed suit by Victor Valentine and a cute navy tie which we purchased from Debenhams – it had small mallards printed all over it. Ian and I have always shared a love of ducks!

My present to Ian on the wedding morning was a vintage wind up pocket watch, he also wore brown brogue style shoes from river island.

As we married in a church we kept the music traditional. My dad walked me down the aisle to the Bridal Chorus by Wagner, the recession was the Wedding March by Mendelssohn and both were played by the organist.

We met at my best friend’s 21st birthday party. I had to do all the pursuing at first but it was clearly worth it as we are still together 9 years later and as happy as ever!

Again what would I do without my best friend! (Without her we would never have met!) – Ian

We worked closely with our florist to go through the type of look we were trying to achieve. She listened to every little detail we wanted right down to what flowers we wanted to use in the button holes, head dresses etc to make them exactly as we had pictured.

Claire created a beautiful flower arch at the church which we were married underneath and all flowers used at the church were then taken to the venue and repositioned for the wedding breakfast.

This helped us save on costs by reusing the church flowers and made our venue look beautiful! We had a beautiful large flower heart positioned on the wall behind the top table as a centre point. The whole back barn wall was also decorated with draping flowers and candles.

Our absolutely amazing photographer was Marie Wootton, she is so unique and captures the best wedding photos I have ever seen! We can’t recommend her highly enough if you want something natural and a little alternative to the usual!

We wanted the emphasis to be on the photos of Ian and I (after all you only have one wedding day) but we also didn’t want to spend too much time away from our guests – and we got exact that, the best of both worlds, outstanding photos and not too much time spent away.

The table plan frame was hand-made by me and dad! I printed everyone’s names and cut them out on card with scalloped scissors and then pegged them to bits of string bound across the frame.

Each line was for one table of people to show them which table they were sitting on. The table names were on brown card and the guests names were on cream card.

I also hand-made the place names and table names. I purchased little wooden hearts online and I attached parcel string to them to make them into little hanging hearts. I printed names on card and individually cut them all out using scalloped scissors. That took a while!

Ian even helped me to stick the card hearts onto the wooden hearts (this was one of the few tasks he managed to get away with doing in the lead up to the wedding). I love arts and craft so I enjoyed hand-making the tags to create a unique touch.

The table name were larger scalloped hearts cut from card, again hand-made and we decided on types of ducks for the table names: mallard, harlequin, velvet, mandarin, teal, elder and the top table was of course ‘the nest’.

Place names were wrapped around the napkins and designed for people to take home as keep-sakes (people could hang them at home – which a lot of them have now done) and the table names were hung from the candelabras which were at the centre of the tables.

We managed to get a group on deal for our wedding cake! We had red velvet, chocolate and vanilla sponge tiers with a very simple design – daisy cut outs and a pearl drop design. We had a small flower posy to top the cake as well.

View the Gallery