Laura & Steve

This outdoor wedfest wedding is an absolute riot of colour, fun and fantastic DIY decor. I wish I was there. Chalkney Water Meadows in Colchester owned by wedding & events planning brothers Browning Bros made the perfect backdrop for this festival themed wedding. Allowing this gorgeous couple to really put their stamp on the day. They've literally thought of everything. From fun Colin the Caterpillar Marks and Spencer wedding cakes to a silent disco after hours. I've been lucky enough to go to a wedding that included this entertainment and it was SO much fun. I can also vouch for the cake too. Nom Nom. I had to stop myself from including every single image of Laura and her all white bridesmaids in the slider above. Every picture taken by Kelsie Low Photography captures all the love and laughter these girls share, but also show off their unbelievably gorgeous boho dresses. Not to mention their stunning headdresses and organic bouquets. I haven't even mention that tipi and all those hanging paper lanterns and pom poms yet. Every last detail is just fabulous. Come see...

The Wedding

Laura the Bride: After 6 years together Steve finally popped the question on top of a mountain while we were skiing & snowboarding in Austria February 2016. Once we got back we started looking at wedding venues, we wanted a relaxed wedding full of fun, drinking & dancing, a festival wedding was perfect for us. We love going to Ibiza & dance music festivals here in the UK & wanted to incorporate this vibe into our wedding.

Venue

There really was only one venue in mind for our Wedfest, Browning Bros! The venue was perfect for us, guests could glamp or camp overnight, the venue has three giant tipis which were beautiful, hay bale seating for the humanist ceremony which took place on a pontoon, fairy lights strung up around the lake, fields & freedom to do what ever we wanted! We sent out our festival themed invites, we put our festival chic dress code on the back, with examples of what people could wear I.e. Beautiful bow ties & brogues etc.

Entertainment

Great music was very important to us, we searched high & low, eventually we found the incredible Brendan Mills, house & dance music with some beautiful saxophone! Perfection! He really did make the wedding & we can't thank him enough! Brendan finished at 11pm & we had a silent disco from here on which was supposed to finish at midnight, but went on until the early hours! It was hilarious & had everyone of all ages dancing & singing! We used The Silent Disco Company as they had superb headphones which changed colour depending on what channel of music you were listening too, which was great for dance offs! We created 3 playlists with pop, dance & old school R&B. Everyone loved it! We had lots of entertainment laid out for our guests including a beer pong table, bouncy castle, space hoppers, and a festival yourself booth with lots of fancy dress props, glow sticks, metallic tattoos & face jewels. It all went down a storm.

Photographer

Our photographer Kelsie Low, well what can we say! Her photos speak for themselves! Kelsie was professional, friendly and extremely talented. We didn't want too many formal photos, we wanted relaxed photos which captured everyone having a great time and that's exactly what we got!

Videography

We decided to use a GoPro to video the wedding, and entrusted steves ushers with this task, surprisingly the footage is brilliant... we have the ceremony, speeches and from there on progressively wobblier footage as the night went on. It was funny to keep seeing the GoPro on a stick bobbing up and down in the crowd!

Bridal Party Fashion

I wanted a relaxed bohemian look for the bridal party and didn't want anything too formal. I found my dream dress from the Spell & Gypsy bridal collection from Australia, it was comfortable and pretty! My headpiece was handmade by Bo & Luca, it was surprisingly comfortable & stayed in place all day, despite the dancing. I was fortunate that one bridesmaid is a makeup artist and another is a beauty therapist, so my make up, hair and nails were all sorted! I wanted my bridesmaids to be comfortable too & let them pick there own dresses from high street stores, they all looked stunning! I got their beautiful floral crowns from the Artisan Dried Flower Company, as I thought using dried floral crowns meant they could keep them as a reminder of the day! Steve got his blazer and all of the waistcoats from Ted Baker, the chinos were all from Next & the ties from TM Lewin.

Food & Drink

We used The English Hog Roast Company for our BBQ in the day & hog roast for the evening food, it was all scrummy & the team were lovely, plus all the meat was local and had a free range which was important to us. For dessert we had an ice cream cart from Hadleys Ice cream which was yummy and we provided marshmallows for our guests to toast on the fire in the evening. We had five giant Colin the caterpillar cakes from M&S as our wedding cake, which we were planning to decorate & do something extravagant with, but unfortunately we ran out of time, it still tasted amazing though! I wanted to be eco friendly, so we purchased plates made from naturally fallen palm leafs for the meal. These were from The Whole Leaf Company and the plates looked much nicer than plastic disposable plates; they were strong too. However the wooden cutlery from the same company was breaking all around me throughout the meal! Fortunately me & my guests got a good laugh out of this, but I would recommend hiring cutlery for anyone thinking about doing this. We hired a mobile bar called Swiggys which was one of the best decisions we made, the staff were brilliant and it was one less thing we needed to worry about on the day! Plus it definitely worked out cheaper, especially as they provided all the glass wear for the dinner!

Colour Scheme & Decor

We decorated the venue ourselves with the help of friends & family in the 2 days leading up to the wedding. The colour scheme was bright, mainly turquoise, pink, purple, orange and yellow. We strung 60+ paper lanterns from the tipi, our beautiful friend Siobhan made another 50+ pom poms which we tied around the dance floor. I had collected 100+ small glass bottles over the months leading up to the wedding, which we wrapped with colourful string & filled with flowers, it gave a brilliant effect and was cheap as chips. I bought all my flowers from the wholesaler for £300. For the wedding favours we bought personalised festival wristbands from icd band and we wrapped these around my DIY dip dyed napkins and laid them out on the tables.

Advice

While setting up the tipis was really good fun & exciting, we hugely underestimated how long this would take! Steve is so laid back he's horizontal & I'm not exactly known for my organisational skills, we finally finished setting up the venue at midnight the night before the wedding! DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE HOW LONG THIS WILL TAKE (like we did). It really was the best day of our lives! We loved every minute and the day flew by too quickly!