How to Choose your Wedding Invitations
Choosing your wedding invitations can seem like a daunting task so take a look at these great tips to help you make the right choice for your big day.
Wedding invitations can vary in price enormously. A good starting point in choosing your wedding invitations is to set a budget for your wedding stationery, then break that down into your wedding invitations and any other items of stationery that you might need. Printed invitations are generally at the cheaper end of the market, although there are some beautiful invitations on offer. Handmade invitations are next in line and for those of you with a big budget, bespoke wedding invitations are the most expensive on the market. And don’t forget that postage costs can add up quickly if you are sending a lot of invitations, so, this should also be accounted for in your budget.
Keep in mind that your wedding invitations are the first glimpse that your guests will have of your wedding style. If you are having a beach wedding, it might not be as appropriate to have formal wedding invitations.
If you are having a particular colour or theme for your wedding, this will really help you narrow down your choice of invitations. Or reflecting your wedding flowers is also a great idea. There are some beautiful flower wedding invitations on the market in a vast array of colours and flower types.
Or you could choose wedding invitations that reflect your personal style rather than your wedding. You could choose to reflect your hobbies or pick a photograph that has special memories. Or if you have any children in your family, ask them to draw you a picture to copy onto the front of your invitations. Whatever you choose make sure that it is unique to you.
How to Decorate your Wedding Tables
Beautiful wedding table decorations can really add the extra wow factor to your wedding reception. Here are some top tips to decorate your wedding tables.
Fabulous wedding table decorations don’t have to cost a fortune. Buying a bag of wedding confetti looks great scattered over the tables or, paper rose petals are as effective and won’t break your budget.
Using your wedding favours as part of your table decorations is a great way to save some space on your tables. Placing them on a tiered cake stand will look beautiful.
There are some beautiful table cloths on the market these days so don’t just stick with white. If you choose a coloured or patterned cloth you can create the wow factor without adding any other table decorations. There are many sites where you can hire table cloths so you can be really adventurous in your choice.
Flowers arrangements make wonderful table centrepieces. But, you don’t have to stick to flowers to have a stunning centrepiece. Cookie bouquets are becoming fashionable and make a fantastic addition to your wedding table decorations. They are also edible so won’t go to waste! An arrangement of tall candles can also make wonderful table centrepieces. Candles can also double as wedding table decorations and wedding gifts for your bridal party.
Crackers don’t have to be just for Christmas. Crackers can be bought in a huge array of colours and patterns and make a beautiful addition to your wedding tables. Remember that not all the people on your wedding tables will know each other and crackers are a great way to get people talking.
Placecard holders also make great wedding table decorations. They can be sourced in all sorts of shapes and colours to match your wedding theme. Guests can also take them home to use as photo holders to help remember your big day.
With a bit of imagination you can easily create wonderful wedding table decorations whatever your budget.
Chic but Cheap Weddings
I’ve just read an interesting article in The Times with tips on producing a Chic but Cheap Wedding. I thought I’d share it with you for a bit of inspiration in these tough economic times:
Ahmed Boyer’s fiancée wanted it all and Boyer was getting desperate. His bride-to-be requested 500 guests and a brand new car for the short drive to the wedding service. She demanded a Chanel gown and a Caribbean honeymoon. Four bank robberies and a stolen £300,000 later, Boyer found himself not at the altar, but in court. “The wedding was costing a lot of money and I realised that I would never be able to pay for it,” the 36-year-old Austrian pleaded last month before being sentenced to prison. “The money from the first robbery went in a day so I just kept going.”
As this year’s wedding season approaches, many may be able to identify with Boyer’s plight. According to You & Your Wedding magazine, which has been calculating these things for more than a decade, for the first time in 2008 the average cost of a British wedding topped £20,000: the average dress cost £1,200, the average ring £2,090 and the average honeymoon a whopping £3,860.
Factor in the omnipresent credit crunch and the increasing number of couples – 53 per cent and growing – who now shoulder the brunt of the wedding costs without the help of parents, and you have a recipe for debt and disaster.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way. “I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by what we can get for our money,” says Laura Burgess, who has a budget of £8,000 for her marriage to Andrew Greenman, 34, in June. A wedding on a budget, she has discovered, does not have to be a budget wedding, and can be pulled off without a plastic tiara, fake flower or dodgy DJ in sight.
Instead, 27-year-old Burgess has cut costs by keeping things local and personal. The ceremony will be held in an old town hall in Woodbridge, Suffolk, and the reception in an ancient tithe barn. Both venues are owned by the local council or parish, and neither relies on weddings as their main source of income. More importantly, neither comes with the attached suppliers that rack up the bills at private halls and hotels.
“We went to see a private barn run specifically for weddings, but it cost £5,000 in the high season – just for the barn,” says Burgess. “And then on top of that, you had to use the owner’s selected caterer. But we wanted to use suppliers who we had a connection with and who would give us a good deal.” The tithe barn costs £500 to rent and Laura’s Suffolk-inspired, seasonal menu works out at £26 a head, or just over £2,000 for 80 guests.
Emma Dunscombe, 34, enjoyed a similarly cheap yet chic wedding by keeping things local in Devon last autumn. She and her husband, Ben, had spent their childhood summers on the South Coast and their families owned cottages there in tiny villages on either side of an estuary outside Salcombe. “The cottage we chose is very small and very basic, but I didn’t need a fancy hotel,” she says. “It was such a happy day.”
As she and her bridesmaids prepared, the groom and his family sailed across the water on a boat lent to them without charge by the local sailing club. It was a short walk to the church and then on to the village hall next door – £190 for 109 guests, including tables and chairs. The whole wedding cost around half the UK average. “We decorated the tables with accessories from the local market and tea lights,” says Dunscombe. “It was all a bit hodge-podge but it looked enchanting and it was never about being extravagant. We just wanted a meaningful wedding and the village church and hall was so sentimental for both of us.”
Perhaps she was inspired by her younger brother and his wife who, a month earlier, had carried off a feat of budget ingenuity to give themselves the wedding of their dreams. “We were thinking about having our wedding in London,” Robin Moscoso, 31, says. But, as for many couples, a city wedding, with the inflated prices that comes with it would have been prohibitively expensive. “So we asked ourselves, ‘If we could go anywhere, where would our perfect wedding be?’ We love surfing and the sea, so decided that it would be in a room overlooking the ocean.”
Moscoso and his wife, Carmel, found a room in a beach hotel in the small north Devon town of Woolacombe where they had spent many happy holidays together. They invited 35 of their closest family and friends (“It was easy not to invite people,” says Robin, “because most didn’t want to trek down to Devon anyway,”) and paid for everything – a pub dinner on Friday, a “real breakfast” in a café on Saturday morning, an afternoon group surfing lesson and a three-course dinner at a local restaurant that evening – for just over £6,000.
“We’d been to so many friends’ weddings in big venues that come with their own caterers and florists, all at a premium ‘wedding price’,” he says. “But we found every element of our wedding ourselves and used different people and businesses for each. It took a lot of effort, but that’s how you save the pennies.”
Other couples have found that an effective route to cost-cutting is to go green. “Planning an ethical wedding can definitely save you money,” says Ria Lockie, the founder of The Ethical Occasions Company. “It involves using local resources, skills and talents, dumping all the unnecessary trimmings, and working closely – and doing deals – with local businesses.”
Not only do you get more bang for your buck this way, says Lockie, but you get exactly what you want on the day. The proof is in 35-year-old Lockie’s eco-wedding to her husband, David, last June: a bespoke three-day extravaganza for just over £10,000.
The ceremony took place in a field belonging to Pekes Manor, just outside Lewes, East Sussex. The guests sat on long, wooden benches, and Lockie’s bouquet overflowed with bright blue cornflowers and other wild hedgerow flowers gathered by a local, professional forager. “I didn’t even know such a thing existed,” admits Lockie. “But I knew what I wanted and I knew it had to be out there. The internet should be your best friend when planning a wedding.” She suggests that an even cheaper option for flowers, usually one of the most expensive aspects of a wedding, would be to approach a landowner directly, ask for permission to pick flowers, and then enlist the guidance of a local agricultural college student.
The reception was held in three open marquees hired from a carbon-neutral company at considerable cost. Although they used the tents for myriad parties and meals over the long weekend, Lockie was determined to make up for the indulgence, giving pots of herbs as wedding favours, creating place-names out of pebbles and a gold pen, and filling old wine bottles with home-made elderflower cordial for the tables. As the celebrations continued into the night, Lockie and her husband let off flying paper lanterns – biodegradable, of course – at a fraction of the cost of fireworks.
But the ultimate saving came on food. Apart from the main wedding lunch, the food over the three days was brought almost entirely by the guests in a series of bring-your-own barbecues and picnics. “We wanted our guests to feel like they were a part of the whole thing,” Lockie explains, “and we felt the best way to do that was to make people feel like they had a role in it.”
Alternatively, some have gone to the other extreme and cut most guests out altogether, travelling abroad with a selected few to places with guaranteed good weather, sandy beaches and none of the bloated prices that so mar the British wedding industry.
Andreas Palikiras, the marketing director of Ionian Weddings, a London-based Greek Islands specialist, says that the company has seen a 60 per cent increase in bookings over the past few months. “Many couples are coming to us because the cost of a UK wedding is spiralling out of control,” he says. He describes a wedding on Lefkada island in May that will cost only€1,600 (£1,452) for a beach ceremony, boat reception and 20 guests.
Jaine Fleetwood, 29, went even farther. She and her fiancé are living temporarily in Australia but decided that they could save money by marrying there rather than coming home. They have paid just A$400 (£182) for a ceremony in a corner of the Sydney Botanic Gardens and their guests, a few friends, no family, will be bringing their own picnics.
“It’s probably the cheapest wedding you’ll ever hear of,” says Jaine. “Cheap but still very chic.”
Party Supplies
I hope you had a great easter break and the wedding plans are progressing well. If you’re planning a party this summer, whether it be for the kids or the adults, we have just launched a great range of party products in our Ebay shop. Take a look at http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/Verbena-Wedding-And-Party-Pieces__W0QQ_armrsZ1 Do let us know what you think. Any feedback would be gratefully received. We’ve not neglected the wedding side of things in the meantime. There are some great new products on the Verbena site so do take a look. Happy wedding and party planning! Kate
Wedding Affiliate Programme
I hope you are all enjoying your wedding planning.
Just thought I would let you know about our affiliate programme that we have just launched. If you want to make 10% commission from your website it’s really easy to put in place, all you need to do is place a link to our site from your own including your unique partner code, and everyone who clicks through and buys will register a commission for you automatically.
Even better, if they don’t buy the first time, their computer gets logged against your name so if they come back and buy later down the line then you’ll still get the commission!
You could potentially generate a tidy sum in these tough times for doing absolutely nothing – every little helps after all.
If you want any more info then visit:
http://www.verbenastationery.co.uk/affiliates/index.php?req=newaccount&pid=1
Or call on 0844 736 1872.
Until next time
Kate
Free Shipping Until the end of February 2009
Just letting all you readers know that we are offering free shipping until the end of February. You only have a few days to take us up on this great offer which expires on Saturday. Have a look at the homepage for further details, http://www.verbenastationery.co.uk
I hope all of your wedding planning is coming along. Do let us know how you are getting on with things.
Until next time
Kate
Flower Wedding Invitations
We’ve been working really hard this last week to get a new range of stationery on the site. Do take a look and let us know your comments. It is a really fresh range of beautiful flower photographs. All of the invitations have matching items so all of your wedding stationery can be co-ordinated. And the best thing is that they are really cheap and that’s something you don’t hear often in the wedding market!
Our diary for this year is rapidly filling up so do let us know if you would like any wedding invitation samples to be sure of getting your stationery in plenty of time.
Any comments on the new range would be really appreciated.
Until next time
Kate
Snow Themed Wedding Favours
I hope that you have all been keeping warm this week in the snowy weather. Our delivery driver had a terrible day on Monday with snowy tracks to overcome with every delivery. He looked very fed up by the time he arrived at our office after 4pm. Our office is in a hilly Lancashire town and the views were wonderful this week. For those of us who didn’t have to travel anywhere is has been a beautiful week.
We have a few brides getting married this weekend and providing they make it to the ceremony without too much disruption they will be set for a wonderful day. The snowy themed wedding favours they have brought from us will really sparkle with the weather like this. The mini lanterns have proved to be really popular at this time of year. http://www.verbenastationery.co.uk/index.php?cmd=9&pr=331 So, good luck to those of you getting married this weekend. Stay warm! Until next time Kate
New Kate Aspen Products
The ever inventive, Kate Aspen, has just launched a fantastic new range of wedding candles, placecard holders and favours. There are beautiful floating orchid candles, golf ball candles and placecard holders for all you sporting fans, wine cork placecard holders, black mini lanterns and much more besides. You can view all the new products on-line now at http://www.verbenastationery.co.uk/index.php?cmd=2&CID=41
They are already proving to be popular!
And in this ever uncertain economic climate we have decided to help one lucky couple, once again, by giving away £200 worth of wedding invitations. Sign up on our homepage to be in with a chance of winning.
Do let me know how your wedding plans are coming along. We are now getting into wedding season mode with full planning under-way for lots of brides and grooms to-be.
Until next time
Kate
