Balloon Filled Festival Wedding At The George In Rye

This joyful, balloon filled festival wedding at The George In Rye is just full of fun and quirky decor ideas to recreate for your own big day. Balloons always add a gorgeous pop of colour and I love the rose gold shade that Katy has sourced. Like yesterday's bride Roxy, Katy also wears a high street gown, with it's gorgeous halter neck and slinky fabric, you'll never guess where it's from...

Balloon Filled Festival Wedding At The George In Rye

Katy & Chris: We fell in love with our venue, The George in Rye, the minute we saw it. We have a love of cobbled streets and quintessentially British charm, and the venue had a relaxed feel with the most beautiful ballroom where we would spend most of our special day - we could picture it unfolding as we wandered around! We had a two year engagement which meant there was time to plan the perfect day, I really wanted the decor to bring out the colours within the beautiful floral wallpaper in the ballroom and match the feel of the venue. From our invites using the wallpaper motif, created by my talented bridesmaid Keeley (an Art Director at Ogilvy London!) to Kate Temple who hand picked fabric that matched beautifully our colour palette of pastels and blush pink for the bespoke ties and bowties she made - we tried to make it all celebrate the style of the George! I decided that I wanted a hint of rose gold to go with the pastels, mainly as my wedding ring was rose gold - and I found the most amazing giant balloons and rose gold orbs by Bubblegum Balloons - they added a lot of style and drama! I ordered a lot of tassel garlands from candle and cake and made the place cards using luggage tags and the table plan was a frame from the Range where I hand wrote and drew the cards to go in each frame. It was great to see it all come together and do it all myself!

High Street Wedding Dress

My dress was never my focus, I just didn’t want to spend a lot of money on something I wore once, it was more important to me to have great food, music and an amazing day for us and our loved ones. I found the Ben de Lisi dress at Debenhams and used a talented local Seamstress Caroline Birmingham (Oh Sew Casbies on Facebook) to add a train, lower the back and add pearls and gems to match the detail around the neck - at some points we were scared it wouldn’t work but it turned out better than I could have hoped!

The Ceremony

Our Ceremony was really special as my two brothers Nick and Chris led the service, we had gotten married at the Rye Town hall the day before. It was so heartfelt and emotional and Chris and I had written our vows, I would urge other couples to do the same - it just made it so much more personal to write our own promises and even throw in a few jokes. I’m also so glad that I chose to have candles and rose petals along the aisle, it made the setting feel so romantic, even I was taken aback by how the ballroom was transformed as I made my way down!

The Photography

Our photographer to capture the whole day was Neda, from Storyett, she was so full of life, energy and helped to put us all at ease - and make us laugh. Having seen her photos on her website I knew her reportage, arty style, was exactly what we wanted - I didn’t want endless group shots - I wanted the detail and emotion of the day captured and she delivered just that!

The Food

The food at The George was sublime, everyone was impressed that this was mass catered but didn’t taste or look like it! We had canapés and Prosecco served in the sunshine as our jazz trio, Silk Street Jazz played bright summery tunes. For our wedding breakfast we had smoked duck salad to start, Lamb and ratatouille for main and rhubarb trifle for dessert. There wasn’t a shortage of food as I had also prepared a french cake table, with french treats such as madeleines, macarons and nougat! A close friend of ours made our wedding cake - it was three deep tiers, with buttercream and sugar peonies - they looked real! She also added rose gold drips around it and made two tiny porcelain cats to represent our two British blues who couldn’t make the wedding!

Confetti Canon

We ended the night in style with top Kent Wedding DJ - Choice DJ - we had Phil on the decks and one live percussionist with bongos, they stuck to the brief as we wanted a Kisstory vibe and ending with an Ibiza feel - it was amazing and the dance floor was never empty! Our first dance was very unusual - Out of Space, Prodigy, the dry ice and confetti canon added the drama - and our friends handed out the hundreds of glow sticks we’d bought to bring the party to life! We’re not really ones for forced romance and both have a love of dance music so thought we’d do something different, the DJ announced after that he didn’t think it would work but admitted it was amazing - no one will forget it in a hurry!