Wedding Tips start here...

davidegee

thanks very much, that looks great!

iz007

rvd_08 wrote: »

Anyone know of any funky favour ideas? So far thinking lottery tickets.

Just a suggestion - my brother got married last year and instead of traditional wedding favours, they made an equivalent donation to charity. We put scrolls on the tables telling everyone what we'd done and also the best man mentioned it in his speech. It was a personal touch as one of my brother's best friends died of a fit so they gave to a Diabetes charity. We also asked permission from my brother's best friend's family and they were really touched.

SarahOakley

My friend can't sing the praises of this wedding dress label enough.

www.sunkissedbrides.co.uk

Although they are mainly for beach weddings, they are just nice simple dresses (she had 'Trinidad' - it looked fab!). They are made in the UK so for UK brides there is less to worry about - I remember how nervous I was when waiting for mine to be delivered (I got it from Italy) and it was really late...thankfully it was O.K.

I mentioned it elsewhere on the forums, so apologies for a second mention, but I looked at the site earlier and they have a Sale on until the end of January.

hollyshayler

louisebbctlc wrote: »

Does any 1 know where i can get tall clear glass vases from cheap need them about 50-60cm tall??? They r 4 the centerpieces on my weddin tables.

Lou xx

Have you tried Asda or Tesco?

Holly x

hollyshayler

VictoriaElaura wrote: »

I cant recommend this enough, I went to the London one and the lady was lovely. She had more dresses than the wedding shops i had been to.
They were all beautiful and some were well under £100.

Mine is designer and worth nearly £8000 we got it for £600. (Mums a queen haggler:T )


I'm sure there are lovely dresses to suit ANY budget.:p

Another great place to go is Oxfam, some of them have special wedding sections, I got mine there for £220, it's only ever been worn on the cat walk and still had tags in

Holly xx

hollyshayler

My H2b and I are looking into setting up some kind of bank account for people to pay into instead of giving us presents, and have just been looking at some of the websites that do this kind of thing, does anyone know anyone who has used one, and are they any good?

Many Thanks

Holly (getting married May 2010)

Neeny82

Hi everyone, It's my first post on this site and unfortuantely not been able to get through the sheer volume of wedding tips so apologies if I repeat any tips that have already been mentioned.

I get married in August this year! Arrgh! And after a 2.5 year long engagement I am now panicking that the next few months are going to fly and I wont have enough time to get things organised!!!!!!

Ok just a couple of tips....

My friend got married late last year and rather than spending £50-£100 on a tiara that would be worn for a couple of hours she asked one of the other girls (who had got married the year before) if she could wear her tiara as her something borrowed! It saved her precious pounds and our other friend was pleased that her pretty tiara was getting a second outing!

For centre pieces, try 'Au Naturel' shops as they stock a range of different sized vases at reasonable prices. They also have artificaial flowers and other things to make professional looking centrepieces for a fraction of the price you would pay at a florist.

As far as invitations go, I am making my own and am having the inserts professionally printed by someone who works in the printing department of my mums work! Bonus.

I am having quite a large wedding so it is going to cost quite a lot for the reception but we have made some excellent savings elsewhere. I found a local company who do wedding cars and the owners wife is also a photographer! I went to look at her work and it is excellent and yet she charges significantly less than other photographers who I got quotes from. She has also recently started doing wedding flowers too, so I have got my cars, photography and flowers for the big day from the same company and all 3 have cost me less than £1500! :j

My mum is not a professional dressmaker but she didn't have much money growing up, so she used to make her own dresses for going out. She is now making my 6 bridesmaid dresses! The duchess satin, lining, boning, zips, etc etc cost me less than it would cost to buy ONE adult bridesmaid dress in a shop, and I must say that you cannot tell that her first attempt is not professionally made! It is amazing! I'm very pleased and have told her that she should take it up as a profession. She is now on a roll and working hard on the second dress. :T

My Auntie is making my cake as a present to us which has also saved us a lot of money and we are going to see one of our friends bands later this month to see if we would like them to provide the evening entertainment for us.

All in all plans are coming along nicely - hope you find some of this useful!

All the best to the brides & grooms to be this year!!!!

PeteW

A few tips I posted in a reply on another forum that might be useful to some here:

We're getting married in March this year and having just bought a house and had a baby, the budget is pretty small (about £6k).

We went for the tactic of making things as cheap as possible so we can invite as many people as we can. Although having a large family means we kind of had to really!

We have lived together for years, so don't need a wedding list of toasters and spoons - so we asked for Virgin Holiday vouchers for the honeymoon (I can use them with the ones I've converted from Tesco clubcard points!)

We're not religious, so have gone for a ceremony at a local Hilton hotel which is surprisingly nice. Having the ceremony and reception at one place seems to work out cheaper and you also avoid costs on fancy cars chauferring you about.

One of the main places you can cut costs seems to be food which gets stupidly expensive as soon as you mention the W word! Rather than a sit down meal, we went for a buffet as that was much cheaper and we're still having fairly nice stuff like thai green curry, chilli con carne, dressed salmon, stroganoff etc - not just sausage rolls and cheese on sticks! Because our ceremony is fairly late (4pm) the food won't get served till around 6ish so we won't have an evening buffet (nobody ever touches them anyway!) which saves a fair whack. Cake cutting will be done during evening ceremony so they can have some cake if they get peckish! If your venue has a bar, you can save on money by not providing alcoholic drinks with the meal yourselves, people could buy their own. Though we didn't do this in the end.

Costs in venues also vary massively so be sure to check out everywhere in your area!

Dresses can get stupidly expensive, for both bride and bridesmaids. We got all ours from here costing about £450 for 7 dresses delivered. That said you may find some of your bridesmaid offer to pay for their dresses, though we turned them down.

Cakes can cost hundreds, but M&S do good tiered ones for £80, or get your nan to do one for nowt!

And basically just keep your eye out for bargains over the next year or two, eg we got some nice invitations and thank you cards reduced in paperchase down to 49p a pack down from £10 or something. Got some nice sets of earrings reduced from £30 to £5 for the bridesmaid's presents and so on.

Weddings don't have to cost £20k+!

Good luck!

rvd_08

iz007 wrote: »

Just a suggestion - my brother got married last year and instead of traditional wedding favours, they made an equivalent donation to charity. We put scrolls on the tables telling everyone what we'd done and also the best man mentioned it in his speech. It was a personal touch as one of my brother's best friends died of a fit so they gave to a Diabetes charity. We also asked permission from my brother's best friend's family and they were really touched.

I think this is a lovely idea. I have been looking on the Oxfam web site and by the looks of things they will tailor some of their Oxfam Unwrapped Presents for wedding favours. This is such a fab idea thanks !!

xx

rvd_08

I'm looking around for wedding cars and shocked by the prices. I have found a guy who has his own website who owns a classic car because he loves it but wants to make good use of it so he hires it out with him as a chauffeur so other people can get enjoyment out of it!

I'm sure everyone has somebody local like this.

If you are in Shropshire this is the website I found...yet to try him though. http://www.glynjohnson.co.uk/default.htm or maybe a car enthusiasts society? They may have someone who wont mind driving you around in their car for a morning for £100???

xx