Decoration decisions

I’ve now started to think about the decorations for our wedding venue. The inside of the building is quite plain (a good thing, as there’s no dodgy art or colours to contend with), but the plainness does mean that all the decorations have to be arranged by me!
Our colour scheme is gold, brown and plum – all rustic, natural colours, which will go well with the cream walls and exposed beams inside the venue.

So far, we have bought some lovely gold candle sticks, which have sparkly berries wound round the neck of the candlestick as our table centrepieces, lots of gold, fragranced potpourri to scatter across the tables, and we’ve started collecting jam jars for tea lights.

But this on its own won’t decorate our entire venue. We need more.

I love bunting, but in the depths of winter it doesn’t really ‘go’. If we could have had an outdoors wedding (perhaps not in December!!), we most definitely would have. But unfortunately, marriage laws in England don’t stretch as far as woodland weddings! So if we can’t get married outside, I want to bring the outside in!!

I’d like everything to tie in well together; as most things in our wedding are nature based and our wishes were to have an outdoors wedding, I need to incorporate this into the venue decoration. I want to use wood and natural materials where possible (obviously no cutting down of trees purposely for this!), and make the venue look like a nature filled wonderland. If Kate Middleton can have trees in her wedding venue, so can I!!

I’m  collecting hundreds of pinecones to decorate the venue. I’d like to string them together with ribbon and make them into a garland to decorate the fireplace,a round the windows, and drape across the top table. Teamed with lengths of fairy lights, I think this would give a really magical look to the venue!

I’ve also found a company online who sells gold twig trees with little fairy lights in; I think this’d be perfect for placing either side of the doorway at the entrance of the venue, so I’m going to look into buying a couple of these!

As part of the venue decoration, I’m currently making a ‘welcome sign’ to be displayed in the entrance to the venue; I found an unused pinboard in my room, and converted it into a chalkboard by spraying it with special chalkboard paint. It took a few coats to cover the whole thing, but it does look good. For the welcome message, I’ve written in gold ink “welcome to Lauren and Dan’s wedding. 28.12.2013″. I’ve also decorated it with a few hearts, just to emphasise the romance of the occasion!! Its nothing spectacular or arty, but I thought it’d just give a nice welcoming feel to the guests who are joining us to celebrate our wedding day!


Then there’s outdoors.

Our venue has beautiful grounds; acres of land, with trees, wishing wells, a pond, swinging seats.. beautiful. So despite it being winter and it being quite unlikely people will want to spend time outside when its freezing cold, I want to give our evening guests a taste of whats to come by decorating outside a bit too.

I’d really love to put hanging tealight holders in the trees outside to make the trees look sparkly, and line the footpath with candles in jam jars. All of which I plan to DIY myself if I get the go-ahead from the venue owners! I’m hoping for a LIGHT dusting of snow in the hours leading up to the wedding, as this would just top the magical feel off! Okay, so I can’t control the weather, but I can still dream..!