Katy and James' soft and elegant Chiddingstone Castle wedding

Being so chilly in the studio this morning, I decided we need to think ahead to warm early summer days and to remind us, here is the beautiful June wedding of Katy and James from last year.  Katy and I communicated by telephone and email and planned all her wedding flowers without meeting face to face and within a month of the wedding due to time constraints and logistics.   It's always a little nerve wracking not meeting my couples in advance, but I need not have been worried as they loved all their flowers on the day.

The brief was for a soft, elegant and romantic set of flowers in very muted shades of pink, cream and ivory.  Perfect for the gorgeous Chiddingstone Castle.  We designed Katy's bouquet to include roses, peonies, ammi, freesias, lisianthus and bouvardia with light aromatic foliage such as rosemary and eucalytpus.  We wrapped the stems with ivory ribbon with a small lace bow at the top to tie in with the lace overlay over her beautiful gown.

Katy's bridesmaids wore pewter grey knee length dresses and so we decided that a smaller version of Katy's bouquet would give a perfect pop of colour against the dresses.  For her 8 and 9 year old Flower Girls, we used the blowsiness of a single peony with light foliage as their bouquets.  Who thought a single stem could look so good!.

The boys wore elegant and classic rose and spray rose buttonholes with light foliage, with James' being ivory and the rest of the boys having a pale pink La Belle rose.  Mums' corsages matched the rest of the flowers with hints of pink to tie in with their outfits.  They also received thank-you bouquets to match the wedding flowers.

The top table in the Great Hall was dressed with a selection of mismatched vases and jugs filled with flowers to match the wedding as was the mantelpiece.

 

The guest tables had enamel or ceramic pitchers / jugs filled with bouquets and with additional smaller vases placed around the jugs to ensure several levels of flowers and texture.

We know that Katy and James had a wonderful day and we thank them for sending the photos across.  I now feel much warmer and have a craving for peonies!! 

Abbie and Ed's gorgeous Godmersham wedding

Earlier this month we provided the flowers for Abbie and Ed's wedding in the very pretty village of Godmersham.  They married in the church and then moved just up the road to a marquee on the lawns of the beautiful Godmersham House.  We met Abbie through a word of mouth recommendation, and once again were so lucky to be working with such a lovely couple.  Abbie wanted eveerything to be fairly natural and relaxed but pretty.  She also wanted to incorporate her favourite White Company candles on the tables.

The colour palette for the wedding was ivory, pale pink, lilac and grey / blue and we were blessed with fabulous peonies, O'Hara roses, La Belle roses, sweet peas, astilbe, waxflower, bouvardia, lisianthus, gypsophilia, freesias, veronica, rosemary, flowering mint and other gorgeous bluey grey foliages.  We were like children in a sweet shop surrounded by such prettiness!



Abbie's bouquet was a soft and textured hand-tied bouquet which smelt unbelievable!   Her bridesmaids also had textured hand-tied bouquets but we omitted the peonies and swopped O'Hara for La Belle roses.  The two Flower Girls were lucky enough to have gypsophilia crowns which I'm sure looked gorgeous on them, but are very difficult to photograph without a sweet Flower Girl!  Hence my challenge is to find creative ways to photograph them!

The boys had lovely textured buttonholes to tie in with the bouquets, with Ed's being particularly lovely with the O'Hara rose.

At the lovely spacious marquee, we dressed each table with a central pitcher filled with flowers and added lace wrapped jars and other pots around the outside along with Abbie and Ed's scented candles, fluted votives and tealights.  We were just supposed to be adding single flowers to the vases, but I'm sure they won't have minded us going a little further and adding more! We then finished the whole look by adding sprigs of gypsophilia to all the napkin ties.

We filled the length of the top table with a selection of vases, jars and pots filled with flowers, all wrapped in some way in lace.  We also added votives and scented candles to tie in with the rest of the tables.  It really did look and smell amazing!

Additional finishing touches included dressing Abbie and Ed's lovingly painted stepladder with jars of flowers to complement the "LOVE" letters.  We also added random jars to the cocktail bar (and were amazed to see absolute replicas of our two cats being the inspiration for the cocktails!) and we also dressed the scrummy looking chocolate cake.

Abbie and Ed's wedding day was lovely in every way, and everyone we met from the caterers, waitresses, fabulous candy cart girls to the actual marquee providers were great to work with.  It was a fab day for us and we were only setting up, so I can only imagine how much fun Abbie and Ed will have had on their special day!