Wedding Day Advice | Wedding Planning

To personalise, means to put a bit of yourself into all elements of your wedding, which takes a lot of time and effort on your part. So the first and most important tip on having a gorgeous personalised wedding is-

Give yourself enough time

To successfully pull off the most important day of your life, you are going to need months to carefully plan each and every element of your wedding day.

Wedding Venue

The wedding venue is an excellent starting point for personalising your event. Book lovers and scholars will appreciate the ambience of a picturesque library or museum, while nature lovers might be happiest in a garden or park setting, an aquarium, or an indoor room with panoramic views of the outdoors. Hosting your reception at a favourite or meaningful hotel or restaurant is another option.

Wedding theme

Being limited to a white wedding is a thing of the past. Think out of the box here, find inspiration that is unique to you and you will find your wedding theme; it could be a single design element carefully intertwined into your wedding décor or an elaborate festival inspired extravaganza, a comic book animation theme or Shakespeare’s Midsummer night’s dream with fairy lights and all things magical.

Whatever theme is eventually decided on, just make sure it means something personal to both you and your fiancé.

Flowers

Make your wedding bouquet unique, by choosing flowers that have special meaning. You could also take it one step further and have each bridesmaid carry a bouquet made entirely of their favorite flower. Your bouquet could be a combination of all of their flowers.

Invitations

There are so many ways to incorporate your unique style into a wedding invitation design-

Simply by making the invitations yourself, you will be creating something unique and special to you. If DIY is not your thing, try including content in the invitation wording that has been personalised, for example a sweet, short summary of how you and your fiancé met, how he proposed and so on.

Use unexpected materials, like printing your invitation on a balloon, that when blown up will reveal the details of your wedding or silkscreen your design onto a handkerchief that doubles as a pocket square

Décor

Try get hold of old family wedding photos, going back as many generations as you can, place them in appropriate mix and match frames – it will provide a talking point for guests and create a lovely decorative feature.

Blackboards are a great way to communicate with your guests. Handwrite personal messages of endearment or famous love quotes like ‘Love is Sweet’ or ‘All You Need is Love’. You could write out your menu onto a larger blackboard instead of using the more conventional menu place-cards.

Give your guests sparklers, custom made pinwheels, mini-flags or balloons for the big send-off, instead of the normal rice confetti or rose petals.

Favours

DIY wedding favours that have been carefully thought out and created instead of manufactured, add a meaningful touch to the day, that’s why the ‘do-it-yourself’ approach is so popular with the modern bride.

Mini Terrariums, a personalised music soundtrack of your wedding day or delicious homemade tea or cookie mix, all make wonderfully personalised gifts for your guests.

Give your guests fancy-dress favours. Stick-on moustaches, silly glasses and hats, will definitely break the ice and give everybody something to talk about.

Photography

Ask your wedding photographer if they’ll be willing to do a pre-wedding photo shoot, if you are worried about ruining your dress before the actual wedding, then schedule a photo shoot for afterwards, perhaps when you get back from Honeymoon.

Decide on a suitable location; an Art Museum for an off-the-wall but sophisticated approach, the open field just down the road from your house for the outdoorsy, natural approach or even your grandmother’s outdated 80’s inspired kitchen for a ‘travel back in time’ vintage affair.

Bring along some selected elements from your wedding décor as well as additional props that might be appropriate, like some DIY hand painted signs or speech bubbles, soft flowing fabrics or balloons.

Entertainment

Ask all your guests prior to the wedding to choose 3 or 4 of their favourite songs (insist on up-beat dancing songs, if that is what you are going for), combine them into a playlist either for the wedding DJ to play or simply hook up an MP3 player. That way you can have music everybody wants to hear and the guests feel that they have contributed to the wedding planning.