Shea Shoemaker May 18, 2016

DIY Wedding | Matt + Vicki

“As a wedding stationery designer, I have helped many couples achieve their vision of their perfect day. So when it came to my wedding, I was so excited that I could finally design something for myself! I got a bit carried away, and what started off as just creating my own wedding invites turned into learning quite a few new skills and becoming quite the DIY bride. I found someone locally to teach me how to letterpress so that I could actually print my own invitations. I also made my own table seating chart, wedding signs, guest book, centerpieces, place names, cake decor, dancing shoes and after quite a few YouTube tutorials, I even did all my own flowers! I loved creating so much for our wedding, it made the day truly unique and personal to us, plus it kept the all important costs down! My husband and I were lucky enough to have the most amazing venues, Colchester Castle for the ceremony and East Anglian Railway Museum for the reception. They are such iconic venues in our local area and have so much character and history, they certainly got everyone talking. There is even a viaduct near the railway museum that you can climb into. We we’re so pleased with the photos we got in there, they look epic {worth climbing up a stepladder in a wedding dress for}…

The color scheme was a really natural process for me. Rather than choosing one or two colors, I ended up choosing colors that were tonally similar. I chose a blush wedding dress in lace and tulle and the bridesmaids picked their own dresses as I didn’t want anything too traditional, and they ended up getting metallic dresses. The reverse of the material was slightly pink which actually showed through the gold and complimented the color of my dress. We then got our flower girls a gold and cream dress so that we were all in similar colors which worked out perfectly.

The more I bought for the wedding, the more the colors evolved into pinks, blushes and creams. It was never a conscious decision, just colors that worked with everything else! With all of these natural and feminine colors, tulle and lace it made me realize that I also wanted the look of the decorations to be natural and quite feminine too. It made the prospect of doing the flowers a whole lot easier! Out went the structured bouquet, in came the hand-tied gypsophila, lavender in jars and heather in pots.

For our centerpieces, to represent Mat’s love of music, we made pinwheels out of old music paper and put them in little milk bottles, we also used records for the table numbers. We loved the pinwheel idea so much that they featured heavily on our big day. They are so fun and whimsical. We made everybody a pinwheel for the place name and we used them to decorate our cake.” – Vicki, the bride