Anna and Dave’s Weekend Long DIY Festival Wedding By Mia Photography

Happy Wednesday everyone, you have made it to the half way point of the week, well done! To spread a bit of mid-week love we have this fabulous DIY festival wedding for you, courtesy of Mia Photography. It’s a fun-filled wedding, with lots of fab entertainment, great decoration, loads of handmade projects, picnic boxes to feed the guests with and the most beautiful peony blooms. A wonderful array of colour, fun and love!

‘A relaxed festival themed weekend utilising one site for ceremony and celebration. Live music, cider and weekend only tickets with on site camping and accommodation’

Anna and Dave were married on 20th June 2015 at Holton Lee, Poole. ‘We wanted an outdoor venue, with a festival style, close to the sea and where we met with the flexibility to DIY with the lowest possible cost, (not a lot to ask!) We had a total of 80 guests and it took a total of 9 months to plan the wedding’

How they met
On a dating website! 5 years ago.

The Proposal
Dave asked me to marry him on the last evening of Glastonbury festival, on the top of Glastonbury hill watching the sunset over the site whilst listening to James Blake. After 3 days of no showers and welly blisters we celebrated with Arcadia, live comedy, massive attack and an early morning powder paint party.

How did you allocate your budget
Our budget was £15,000, Dave liked his spreadsheet! The total cost of the weekend was £13,000! We decided our priorities were music, food and drink after choosing live music and investigating caterers we decided to DIY as much as possible.

Where did you splurge and where did you save
Splurge: Music – 3 different bands/acts throughout the day and a silent disco at the end of the night.
Photographer – we wanted a lasting memory of our day and someone that could truly capture the feel of our wedding (we think we lucked out!)
The venue came with a marquee but to get the true festival feel we splurged on a giant tipi for dancing and live music, (lucky as it rained!)
Save: We self-catered our wedding breakfast using M&S food and our favourite local supplies. We made hamper boxes for each table.
Self stocked cider and ale tent allowing free drinks for our guests. No corkage fee so our favourite free flowing wine!
We charged our guests £10 to camp to make some money back on our venue.
Made lots of props, and collected stuff from charity shops and car boot sales, (crockery, rugs, blankets, suitcases).

How did you choose your photographer
We really wanted a photographer that could capture the style of the day without too many structured shots and without too much corniness! Anna was flicking through one of many wedding magazines and saw one of Mia’s photos, which was stunning. Realising it was a local wedding we looked her up and loved her gallery pics so got in touch.

The Dress
Dress was in the Phase Eight sale. I paid £80 to get it altered significantly to give it an empire-line. My shoes were from monsoon, (in the sale) and jewellery from accessorize. (Total cost under £350).

The Suit and Bridesmaids
The suit was Ted Baker, (significantly more than the dress ;)) with groomsmen in navy trousers and waistcoats from Next, page boys in waistcoats and converse trainers and bridesmaids in dresses from Dorothy Perkins (£15 in the sale) and shoes from New Look!

Theme or Colour Scheme
Coral and blue predominantly but we had 7 core colours which we used in paper lanterns, table numbers and boxes.

Flowers
Anna loves peonies and this and Dave’s hay-fever were 2 key components in deciding the time of year we got married. My flowers were even better than I expected and I absolutely loved the bouquets.

Decoration
We made festival style bunting for around the marquee and tipi, we had festoon lighting with paper lanterns inside the marquee and paper lanterns in trees, painted table numbers, food boxes, flowers in jars, old suitcases with candles

Food
For the wedding breakfast we had sociable hamper boxes on each table which included picnic style food – local cheese, chutney, ham, salad, pies, homemade mackerel pate, bread- from our favourite local baker, crisps and fruit. We self catered and hired a refrigerator van and compiled the boxes 2days before the wedding.
We had a cake table and asked for some of our guests to bring a cake with them
For the evening we had a table of leftover picnic food and jalopy’s pizza van.

Wedding Cake
We made a rice crispie wedding cake with 3 different tiers-marshmallow, mars bar and dark chocolate. This saved us a huge amount as only cost £7.50 to make!

Entertainment
Ben Dlugokecki, Skimmity Hitchers, Festival sons, Silent disco-for after music cut off!

The Stationery
We designed our own invites and got these printed independently and posted these in pocketfolds with stamped tags and material tie.

• Personal or Handmade Touches
  Message tree-we made note cards with ribbon ties and a scaffold board table for people to write messages and hang them on an old oak tree.
• ‘OWENS’ marquee sign that Dave made!
• Bongo booth-we made a photo booth out of our bongo van and had dressing up gear for people to wear,
• We had dress up photos of all our guests and attached these to a painted pallet as a table plan and used these same photos as place cards.
• Bonfire-blankets and marshmallows for a late night bonfire.
• Posters that used the same design as invites for order of service and programme.
• Festival bands for our guests on their arrival.
• Personalised M&M’s as wedding favours.
• We encouraged everyone to stay on site either camping or in on-site accommodation and we had a coffee van the next day and bacon sarnies for breakfast.

Special Moments
Actually getting married! Skimmity Hitchers and cider drinking, silent disco and having all our friends and family with us to celebrate and dance.
We would like to say thank you to our friends and family for helping and supporting us in our DIY style and for making our wedding weekend so special.

Advice to other couples
Think about what is important to you as a couple and prioritise these for your day. Start a Pinterest board if you haven’t already, (girls!) Enjoy the planning as well as the day, you only do it once! Spread it out, making a weekend of it meant we got a chance to hear the gossip from our own wedding rather than returning from honeymoon 3 weeks later! Take time to enjoy the day as a couple. If you are planning a DIY wedding make sure you can plan and delegate!

Biggest surprise
Dressing up as badgers during skimmity Hitchers and realising we had no accommodation, so spending the night in our bongo booth!

Supplier Shout Outs

• Florist – www.flowersbybecky.com
• Photographer – www.mia-photography.com
• Second Photographer – www.clarewestphotography.co.uk
• Band – www.skimmityhitchers.com
• Singer – www.dlugokecki.bandcamp.com/music
• Band – www.tailored-entertainment.com/festival-wedding-band-festival-sons
• Tipi – www.utopian-tent.co.uk
• Silent Disco – www.silentdiscodirect.co.uk
• Venue – www.holtonlee.org
• Food – www.marksandspencer.com
• Bread – www.artisanmark.com
• Cheeses – www.godminster.com
• Pizza – www.jalopypizza.co.uk

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

www.Mia-photography.com / www.mia-photography.com/weblog / [email protected] /  07891644228 / FACEBOOK / @Mia_Photo