One year Wedding Anniversary - Our Wedding Details & Suppliers

It’s been a year since Ollie and I got married and to be honest, the whole thing was so overwhelming that as soon as it was over I think I subconsciously avoided anything wedding-related and didn’t even stop to properly look at our photos until now! Anyway, I wanted to show my appreciation for our brilliant venue and ‘suppliers’ and share some ‘advice’ from me as someone who hates event organising. I thought this might be useful in case you are currently on your wedding organisation journey or simply wanted a wee nosy!

The Venue

House for an Art Lover in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow. This was the only venue we visited as we found it perfect for what we were looking for - modest but with style and personality. The building was designed by Scottish artist/designer/architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the early 20th Century but built posthumously in the 1990s.

We held both our ceremony and reception at the venue and wanted the surrounding of the park and gardens in case anybody needed to take some time out during the day. In the end, it rained a lot on our wedding day. In the run up I did worry about the weather but wish I hadn’t because it was the least of our worries on the day and is something that obviously cannot be controlled. Plus, hello, it’s Glasgow! The possibility of bad weather was a factor I took into consideration when choosing this venue as I thought that the brightness of the Music Room would help the mood on a grey day and that the moodiness of the Main Hall would compliment a dark, rainy afternoon.

The wedding organisation team at House for an Art Lover were lovely to deal with and looked after us well. We used the tables and chairs provided by the venue (even though there was the option to switch chairs out) because we thought that they were intended to compliment the interior decoration of the venue. Our food was catered by the venue and they were happy to accommodate a completely vegetarian menu. After some consideration, we made the decision to provide vegetarian meals only (with the exception of vegan and other dietary requirements) as we are vegetarian and it didn’t make sense to us to spend our money on meat (an ethical decision rather than a cost decision as the vegetarian food cost the same as the meat option). I thought the food was tasty (we had a menu-tasting beforehand) though I didn’t have much of an appetite on the day! I didn’t take any photos but my sister has kindly sent over some photos of the main and dessert:

Photographer

Olesja, the superstar behind In the Name of Love Photography, could not have captured our day more perfectly for us. I absolutely adore her ability to switch between modern relaxed wedding photography and a sharper, editorial/magazine style. I feel this gave us something a bit ‘different’ which I hesitate to say as a wedding is a wedding but she really did give us some stylish looking shots.

Despite having my photo taken a lot for the purposes of sharing and documenting my dressmaking, I am not keen on having my photo taken so thank goodness for Olesja pushing and directing us to make sure we did get lots of photos.

I have to also mention how amazingly she did on a supremely dark and rainy (mostly torrential) day?

Most of the photos in this piece are by Olesja or her assistant.

(I should mention that we paid an extra fee to Glasgow City Council to have our photos taken in the walled garden located beside the venue)

Celebrant

We wanted a Humanist ceremony and found the lovely Pamela Clocherty via the Humanist Society Scotland. We met up one Saturday in Linlithgow and after our chat knew that we wanted Pamela to help us on our big day. We have to say a huge thank you to Pamela as she was so kind and patient with us. Being quite overwhelmed with everything going on, we were a little more last minute in our ceremony preparations that we had hoped but Pamela stayed calm and guided us through everything which was a huge help. Thank you Pamela. (Pamela is a sewist by the way which is one of things that drew us to her initially!)

Flowers

The supplier of our gorgeous wedding flowers was Vanilla Rose who I understand works in Scotland and London. I cannot thank Rachael enough as I was honestly a bit clueless about flowers but roughly knew I wanted light, natural, wildflowers. I sent some inspiration photos to Rachael and what she came up with could not be more perfect. This was a situation where I put my trust in the professional without too much of my own input and it paid off.

Cake

I’m lucky to have a very talented mum, not only passionate about baking but also generous enough to offer to make our wedding cake. We were happy to pay someone else to do it to take the pressure off her but she insisted and it ended up being a very special part of our day. It was three tiered with different flavours - my favourite as always being the lemon - and decorated by her too. I am glad I regained enough appetite to enjoy some cake in the evening. Lots of our guests were delighted to take away some ‘breakfast cake’ for the next day!

Table favours

Sustainability was something very important to us in wedding planning and although we could have skipped table favours altogether, I did want to leave guests with a small token from the day. I’m not sure how I came up with the idea of soap but thought that it’s something practical with minimal waste.

I ordered the handmade cold-pressed soaps from Serendipity Naturals and worked with Desislava on the personalised paper wraps. I hand drew a rough idea of the design I wanted printing but Desislava suggested that it would be nice to use my drawing and writing so I neatened it up a little and that’s what we ended up using!

Ceilidh Band

Our ceilidh was a hit and we cannot thank the Ghillie Dhu ceilidh band (lead by our very cool and multi-talented friends Josh and Hannah!) enough for getting everyone on the dance floor. With a lot of English and some international guests, we weren’t sure how the ceilidh dancing would go down but we needn’t have worried as I think everyone got up and danced at least once. My mum claims that she did EVERY SINGLE DANCE which if you’ve ceilidh danced before will know is some feat.

I cannot not recommend enough some form of ceilidh or guided group dancing for your wedding as it’s an easy way of getting the dance floor filled and bring all round joy. The Ghillie Dhu band get a special mention for the option of more modern ceilidh dances and music as this made it more interesting for the seasoned ceilidh dancer.

Photo Booth

We had the brilliant McBooth and their ‘To the Nine’s’ photo booth at our wedding. Recommended to us by our sister in law, I thought the name McBooth was funny so reached out to them. Alastair asked to see our theme/wedding invitation and managed to produce this photo strip background based on the invitation. Wonderful! We got a photo album guest book and USB with all of the photos which were nice extras to have. All the photos taken at the event are provided to you digitally in both strip form and also as individual, single shots and GIFs.

Confetti

I chose pastel coloured paper confetti which I bought in bulk and then packaged into little glassine (paper) envelopes. We also had a couple of paper confetti canons (as recommended by our photographer Olesja) to ensure good confetti saturation in our photos (for the gram, am I right).

As a lovely surprise, Ollie’s mum had also collected and dried rose petals from her garden for extra confetti. This was such a special and luxurious touch though I would note that if you are wondering what works best in photographs, it is not petal confetti as that tends to be heavier and fall a lot more quickly than paper!

Guest Book

Our guest book was from Rifle Paper Co via the Paper Parlour.

Outfits & Styling

I made my dress and my sisters’ matching bridesmaids dresses both using the same heavily modified Vogue pattern. I was especially pleased with the bridesmaids dresses, loving the colour, fabric and shape. I made my headband using fabric leftover from my slip.

We did our own hair and makeup though in hindsight we probably should’ve got professional make up artists! I think my sisters look great but I definitely could’ve done with something more on the face I think, just to pop a bit more in photos.

My shoes are from Loeffler Randall. Earrings from Oliver Bonas. Invitations from Papier.

Ollie’s suit is a wool-blend from Savile Row Company which he then had fitted by a local tailor. His shoes are from M&S. A relatively inexpensive outfit which suited him fine as he changed into his family kilt outfit for the dinner and dancing.

Thank you for indulging me but also letting me thank all the wonderful people and businesses that helped us make our wedding the special day it was.

If you have any questions, I’d be happy to try and answer them!

G x