We’ve been to quite a few weddings and big parties over the last few years, and one thing became painfully apparent after one or two – event DJs are absolutely, embarrassingly awful and there is no way that we were going to have one ruin our party. We’ve heard DJs consistently call the guest of honour by a wrong (but similar) name, play tracks they utterly hate, and totally ignore those cds of “special songs” that they really, really wanted to hear on the night. We’ve heard so much bad and inappropriate music at weddings that James and I even have a running list of Songs That Should Never Be Played At A Wedding Ever (which includes Toni Braxton “Unbreak My Heart”, 50 Cent “Candy Shop”, and Shaggy “It Wasn’t Me”, which we’ve all heard firsthand at weddings).

Now, really, I don’t say this lightly – we are both huge music lovers. We both worked in student radio for years (mostly to get the free cds!), and I’ve worked on the fringes of the music industry for the last eight years (remember the Glastonbury dress?). So not only do we love music, but we know good music, and we know instinctively what order and flow to put the music in over the course of an evening when you want to get the dancefloor going and keep it going. We know when to play obscure (but danceable) indie music, and when to throw in those nostalgic, floor-filling trashy hits (“Baby Got Back”, I’m looking directly at you!).

Mmm, cake, the sweetest decision to make for any wedding, yet one that’s all-too-easy to get horribly wrong (Unfortunately one wedding I attended years ago had a beautiful cake that was mouldy inside when cut into!!)

Luckily, we had Sarah at Maison Cupcake, a friend of a friend and an amaaaazing food blogger and baker, on our side. Honestly, she’s already in my RSS feed reader and I want to eat her whole site on a regular basis!! Like James’s Auntie Anne (who did our flowers), Sarah’s also a “keen amateur” and not usually a baker for hire. With the quality and detail in the cakes she made for us, though I’m sure she could make a living from this if she wanted to!

We mostly wanted cupcakes, both for ease of serving and the ability to taste more flavours, but we also opted to have a small cake for us to cut. All we stipulated is that we didn’t want a fruitcake (as is traditional for UK wedding cakes) and that we didn’t want to use a cake topper or have writing on it or anything. Sarah suggested something like this chocolate and booze-soaked cherry cake and we nearly bit her arm off! She topped it all with a delicious fondant icing, and yes, she made all those tiny flowers herself!!

One cost that can add up really quickly for a wedding are all the printed materials you need for the day. I’m not just talking about the invites (which can get ridiculously expensive if you go the letterpress, inner envelope, return card, RSVP envelope, etc route!), but also all the other bits of papery stuff that is forgotten until a few days before when you realise you actually do need them!

The illustration

The first step in our wedding design process was to commission a cartoon drawing of us from the illustrator John Allison (of Scary Go Round fame). James has been a big fan of his comic for ages now, and we both really liked his design style. So we sent him a photo of us, a brief description of James’s suit and my dress (at that point I was still thinking of that Vogue cowl-neck number) and to imagine 6 months’ more hair on my head. Which somehow he got eerily spot-on.

(Apologies for the awful jpg artifacting – I’ve not got the big version of the illustration in front of me to work from)

The wedding website

With the illustration in a nice, big file, we could then set about making our wedding website, which was to be the crux of our invitations. We both work in web developments, and absolutely everyone we know, right up to my grandparents, has an email address, so this way we could put the bulk of the information for both receptions on our site and be able to update it later, too. The RSVPs were all online, using a Google Spreadsheets form (easy to set up, easier for people to reply to than a trip to the post office, and we could both get access to the running tally), and all the usual venue info and registry links could be added without having to worry about word counts and layout.

I can now post a link to it for you to have a look at James’s standards-compliant coding prowess, because I don’t have to worry about you all messing up the RSVPs or gatecrashing or anything! The worst that can happen is that you decide to buy us some more insulation off our registry…

Invites

So with the website in place, all the invites really had to do was give folks the date, and point them towards the website. We ran up two sets of postcards from Moo.com (one set for the UK wedding and reception, and one for the Pennsylvania reception). And to set the tone, the wording was “James and Melissa are finally getting married!” ha!

To carry on with the rest of our DIY wedding (oh no, it didn’t end with the wedding dress!), the flowers were something we’d both thought about, but hadn’t really wanted to go overboard with, preferring instead for subtle and personal accents. My bridal bouquet of white roses, plus two bridesmaids’ bouquets, and a ton of rose buttonholes for the gents, were all made by James’s Auntie Anne, who is a keen amateur florist. She even sent me a self-addressed envelope to get fabric swatches of the bridesmaids dresses so she could best match their bouquets to their dresses!

How gorgeous is this centrepiece, too? I told her since we wern’t having “wedding colours” (ugh ugh ugh!) that she should either go for all colours, or just white. So she incorporated the bridesmaids’ dress colours into it and I just love it. I think it’s just stunning, and I’m glad we got to enjoy it during the ceremony and then again during dinner at the top table.