Nat & Dom

I think I have a little bit of a girl crush on bride Nat. She is ridiculously cool and looks both stylish and elegant in her vintage bridal separates designed by Saldana Vintage. Made with the most beautiful lace, and including an adorable crop top and full length skirt with front split, it really is the stuff of bridal dreams. Completing her look is a greenery flower crown, and an oversized white flower & foliage bouquet. The perfect boho edge. The location for this contemporary wedding was the lovely Bell in Ticehurst, who will always have a special place in our hearts, first and foremost because of its epic neon "I will always love you my friend' neon sign, but also because of its ability to bring family and friends together in the most intimate and relaxing way. The fabulous Dale Weeks captures all the magic of this adorable wedding, including copious amounts of pictures of Nat's immense bridal look. Get ready to pin!

The Venue

Nat the Bride: As soon as we walked into The Bell in Ticehurst we were just in awe of the place, it had everything we wanted! It was just the right amount of informal with its quirky décor, a great big oak table in The Stables which is where we had our wedding breakfast and beautiful chandeliers in the Big Room where the ceremony and was held.

The Photographer

We booked Dale Weeks as our wedding photographer after obsessing over his work on Instagram as we both loved his documentary style of photography and the dark contrasty tones he photographs with. We had a pre-wedding photo shoot with Dale which really helped us feel totally relaxed on the wedding day being in front of the camera... In fact we hardly noticed he was there and many of the guests thought he was one of our friends which just shows you what an amazing photographer he is as well as such a lovely guy!

Dress

I must of tried on about 25 dresses in total and started to become a little overwhelmed by all of the choice there is! I never thought I would get that moment you hear about when a bride finds 'the one' and then I found Saldana Vintage on Etsy. I decided I wanted a two piece wedding dress after seeing one on their Instagram profile but it had already sold. I messaged them asking if they had any more in the pipe line, which they did and sent a picture of it. As soon as I saw it I knew this was the dress and brought it before they even had a chance to shoot it for their website! I took the plunge and brought a dress I had never tried on or even seen in the flesh before, it was simply stunning and everything I could of ever wanted... And custom made to fit me and being a one off piece made it even more special.

Accessories

I'm not a big jewellery wearer but one of my best friends brought me a rose gold bracelet with my new initials and also the date of the wedding engraved on it which was really lovely. I also handmade my garter as my something blue!

Grooms Attire

We found Dom's suit (well, myself and my maid of honour did!) at the National wedding show as part of Moss Bros new hire collection. As soon as I showed Dom a picture of it he loved it as he wanted a tweed green suit and to also wanted to be slightly distinguishable from the rest of the groomsmen. His trousers were from ASOS and his shoes were from Marks and Spencers and his tie match the Groomsmen's.

Colour scheme/ Decor

It was so nice to have a venue like The Bell as we really didn't need to do much in the way of decorating, we pulled elements from décor that was already used and only ended up buying tin and copper candle holders and brown bottles (we got though a lot of Purdey's for these bottles!). We had a beautiful 'Welcome to our wedding' made by one of Dom's old school friends and we made other things ourselves such as the photo booth back drop, wedding stationery and also the confetti.

Flowers

I didn't want anything too fussy in regards to flowers so kept it simple with green and white colours. I showed the florist (Alison from Art Bunch) a few pictures of what I had in mind and she totally exceeded expectations when they arrived in my hotel room on the big day, I was totally blown away! Both being quite obsessed with succulents we thought it would be nice to included them in our wedding by giving them as our wedding favours which also doubled up as name places, these were from Fayes Brighton.

Bridesmaid's and Flower Girls

It was my original plan to make the bridesmaid and flower girls dresses myself as I do sew in my spare time... However! After buying all of the fabric and making 3 of the dresses I decided that I hated them and just wanted my bridesmaids to be comfortable in what they were wearing on the day and asked them all to search for individual white dresses to wear... Two weeks before the wedding!The flower girls all wore matching white dresses from H&M and matching shoes from Matalan and each had a smaller version of the bridesmaids bouquets which were adorable!

Groomsmen

We decided that we wanted the groomsmen in a slightly different colour to Dom but still the same style and luckily Moss Bros had two different colours in their tweed two piece suits! They all wore shirts and trousers from Primark, the page boy's outfits were also from Primark and I made their bow ties from the same ties the groomsmen wore.

The Ceremony

Myself and Dom wrote our own vows to each other as we wanted to make it a little more personal for the both of us. We kept them secret from each other until we read them on the day and it was so special to hear Dom saying the vows he had put together, it it was quite funny that we had actually both included similar things in each of our vows! We didn't have any readings but we did have a special mention for my mum who passed away when I was 10 and we also had her picture in a brass frame which was sat on the mantelpiece on the same row as my dad, my sisters and my brother which was really lovely.

Entertainment

We had Brett from Hotsteppaz as our D.J for the evening who was brilliant! We asked our guests to send us their song requests as part of the RSVP's. Myself and my dad did a father – daughter dance to Holding Back the Years by Simply Red which was the song my dad and mum had as their first dance, we both got very emotional! I also managed to sneak in something Harry Potter related (I am pretty obsessed!) in the form of our last dance of the evening which was Magic Works by The Weird Sisters!

The Food

I don't know how it happened but Dom and I had become pretty obsessed with afternoon tea and we didn't want a 3 course formal sit down meal so thought, why don't we just have an afternoon tea with a twist! The chef at The Bell was amazing and even more excited than us with creating our vision for the wedding breakfast and the alternative afternoon tea was born! We hired the beautiful cake stands from Clair at Alice and The Tea Cup. Our wedding cake was made by my talented work friend Hannah and was the best carrot cake we have ever had!