4

Aug

2014

Rebecca & Eve’s Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

Just the first image of this gorgeous couple pictured below, was enough for me to know today’s wedding was going to be special. Submitted by Jen Marino, Rebecca and Eve’s yurt wedding at La Campagna features two beautiful, made to measure gowns, two from-the-heart serenades, owls, apothecary paraphernalia and even the couples’ own-branded jam for favours. I think you’ll agree a whole lot of love and personality has gone into this wedding. Happy Monday everyone. 

“Beautiful and beyond our expectations. Our guests filled the house with love, laughter and a spirit of generosity that left us all in a Gunthorpe state of mind”

1 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino 3 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

Rebecca and Eve were married on 28th June at Gunthorpe Hall, Norfolk where they had their wedding ceremony, evening entertainment and archery and a BBQ on the Sunday. The wedding meal took place at La Campagna, Thornham Bay, Norfolk. “It’s a full-sized Mongolian yurt and has such a wonderful ambience. We stumbled across it due to a recommendation when we were holidaying in Norfolk last September. The owners, Marie & Jeremy permitted us to visit Gunthorpe at short notice and we fell in love with it at first sight. It’s a country home with a lot of character and personality.”

44 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

21 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

How they met
We met in London one evening. Eve was showing an American friend the nightlife and Rebecca was dragged out! We’re both grateful to Janet and Daljit. We’ve been together ever since and celebrate our 6th anniversary this November.

The proposal
We were away in Holmfirth, Yorkshire for a weekend that Rebecca had organised. She wanted to take Eve to see a vineyard that they had watched a TV show about. Sadly, it was closed already for the Autumn, but Rebecca still went ahead with a proposal on 10.10.10…………Eve said “yes”

5 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

7 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

8 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

9 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

11 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

12 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

13 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

How did you allocate your budget?
We planned “not to spend a lot” and be smart about keeping our costs low. However, our final estimate is that we spent close to £15,000 as some costs could not be avoided. Ooops! We wanted to create a weekend of festivities for all our guests so that it felt like a holiday for everyone. Most of our budget was spent on Gunthorpe Hall, the wedding meal and coaches.

How did you choose your photographer?
This was more a case of our photographer chose us! We were going to rely on our friends with good cameras as this was an affordable option. However, one night in the wee hours Rebecca was feeling wishful and came across Jen Marino’s gorgeous website. Fortunately, she was running a competition to win a wedding package. We entered the day before the deadline and were shortly announced as the winners. It was such an exciting moment for us. It has been an absolute delight to know and work with Jen. She is amazingly talented, professional and unobtrusive. Her gift for capturing the day as it unfolds is clear for all to see. We are incredibly grateful she picked us and now we have our photos we know we would have been mad not to have a photographer. Get in quick to book her.

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16 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

18 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

20 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

22 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

The wedding dress and accessories
We found the dresses online at JJsHouse and had them made to measure. Neither of us saw each other in our dress before the wedding. In terms of accessories, Eve wore blue Converse that she bought new and Rebecca wanted her shoes to “be something old” so sourced two vintage pairs on eBay; a dressy Bally pair for the daytime and some purple Converse for the evening. She paid £11 in total and was very impressed with her bargains. We wore jewellery we owned already, except some adorable bracelets that Eve’s sister Plume had made for the entire bridal party and gave to us at the wedding weekend. A huge thank you to our bridesmaids and Cat as they put all our hair and make-up together.

The bridesmaids
The six bridesmaids were scattered across the globe making it tricky to shop together. So we told them all, “find a long purple dress that is not one-shouldered”. They each picked such beautiful gowns and looked fabulous.

23 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

25 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

26 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

27 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

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30 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

31 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

The theme
The theme for our wedding meal was a mixture of all things musical and medical with a vintage twist to represent the two of us. Oh, and some owls, that were a recurring theme on our stationery, table centrepieces and jam. Our main colour was purple which came from a wish to have lavender for our bridesmaids’ bouquets.

The flowers
One of our bridesmaids, Anna knows a thing or two about this so we made use of that skill. We sourced the lavender for the bridesmaids from Lavender World and bought the rest of our flowers from a supermarket on the Friday. Anna put all the bouquets, buttonholes and flower arrangements together beautifully.

The decoration
Eve had the bright idea to use paper lanterns in the yurt. Her sister, Plume did a marvellous job of decorating the restaurant with them (kindly assisted by Cyrille!) Gunthorpe Hall looks great as all the rooms are very well presented.

32 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

33 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

34 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

35 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

38 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

39 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

40 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

The food and wedding cake
La Campagna created a tasty wedding meal. Starters were goats cheese tartlet or vegetable terrine, mains were mackerel risotto or a tagine with chickpeas, apricots and almonds and desserts were a dark chocolate torte or mixed berry brulée. It was all deliciously scrumptious. A big thank you to Jeni and Tiago. We love cheese and biscuits therefore bought a tower of cheese tiers from The Fine Cheese Company in Bath. They provided a fantastic service and delivered it to Gunthorpe Hall.

The entertainment
Eve and her friends are musicians so they provided some great entertainment for us. We really appreciate what the following people added to our day: Cat, Janet, Alex, Andrea, see below for their contact details.

41 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

42 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

43 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

45 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

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47 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

48 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

49 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

Buy or DIY your stationery?
We used Vistaprint to create all of our wedding invites and timeline postcards for the wedding weekend so guests knew when the key events were.

Personal touches
– We created our own wedding ceremony, together with our lovely friend and celebrant Sarah, mainly because the words in a legal service feel so impersonal to us. We followed the basic structure that you would expect to have in a ceremony but added a “ring warming” and “handfasting” section. The readings during our ceremony were, a passage from “The Irrational Season” by Madeleine L’Engle and “Mr Wrong” by Galway Kinnell.
– A postbox hired from 4weddings. Our invite used our initials E&R in the design and we quite liked having something novel for our guests to post any cards in and conveniently most postboxes have “E” and “R” on them.
– The seating plan – our tables were named after London train stations that are special to us. We searched for old train tickets on eBay and used them to design our display in a large photo frame. We had a working train set encircle the seating display during the meal which amused our guests, especially the children.
– We wanted to make our own wedding favours and decided on jam. Neither of us had ever made jam before and we thought it would be fun to learn as a couple. We came up with a ‘brand’: Owlways Jammin’ and in the month leading up to the wedding bought an awful lot of strawberries to make over 70 jars.
– Our table centrepieces were made up of a tower of books on each table that was topped with an ornamental owl. Surrounding the books were other vintage items and old apothecary bottles posing as vases. All of the books and items were picked because they related to our love, music and medicine theme. We sourced them from charity shops or eBay. This was definitely a fun part of the wedding process.
– We found a typewriter on eBay and used it as our guest book. We asked people to type us a message on cards we provided that we will open on our 5th anniversary.
– Flip flop hamper – this was an idea we saw on Pinterest. Guests really appreciated being able to slip into some comfortable shoes to get dancing.

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51 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

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54 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

55 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

56 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

57 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

Special moments
There were so many great moments the entire weekend, but here are a few:
– Eve’s moment – I had written my vows on an iPad, so found it funny when Rebecca pulled hers from a piece of paper in her shoe!
– Rebecca’s moment – Arriving at the ceremony in the garden and seeing Eve waiting with all the guests gathered. It felt overwhelming….in a good way! I also really loved hearing Eve’s personal vows that she had written.
– The whole ceremony itself was fantastic. Our friend and celebrant, Sarah ensured it was heartfelt and did a tremendous job, alongside guests who performed readings and sang songs.
– We were both touched by all the speeches that were made at the wedding meal. Here is also a good time to acknowledge how incredible our guests were. We did a lot of self-catering and DIY at Gunthorpe and this would not have been possible without everyone just mucking in and getting involved. They really made it such a unique and memorable weekend.

Advice to other couples
– You don’t have to spend huge amounts on what you think you HAVE to spend money on, for example, our two dresses, shoes, accessories and flowers all came to less than £500.
– Before spending anything consider asking your friends for help, it makes the day all the more special for everyone.
– Have a wedding weekend, we don’t know how others manage it all in a day!
– We know we won Jen, but if you’re able to, make room in your budget for a photographer. Photos do last forever!

Biggest surprise
Eve’s – Rebecca is not a musician. However, she performed a surprise song for me at the start of the evening that she had written with Andrea. Hear it here
Rebecca’s – Eve adapted the song, “ho, hey” by the Lumineers and sang it as a surprise with her bridesmaid, Andrea at the end of the ceremony. All the guests joined in, it was truly lovely. Hear their demo version here 

58 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

59 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

60 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

61 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

62 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

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64 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

65 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

66 Rebecca & Eve's Musical, Medical Yurt Wedding. By Jen Marino

Supplier Shout Outs:

 

For more information on Jen’s work please go to:

Website:  www.jenmarino.com
FACEBOOK
Twitter: @Jenjenmarino

I am based in Didcot, Oxfordshire but will travel anywhere for a wedding, UK and abroad. I think my style is very documentary and quite quirky. I like to capture the emotion and the natural moments throughout a wedding day. I like to be very unobtrusive when I shoot. I LOVE taking the B&G off for their couple portraits as the day is all about them celebrating their love for each other, I love capturing that.

 

 

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