Styling a wedding – the simple touches and DIY details

It’s time for part three in my series of minimalist wedding posts this week – this one’s all about styling a wedding. You’ve seen the dream dress and the charming countryside setting, now let’s get down to the details!

When planning a wedding most people (quite sensibly) like to hand over the organising of it to the responsibility of someone else for a more stress-free experience, but I was the opposite. Being a perfectionist and someone who doesn’t like to delegate (typical Virgo), I wanted to do everything myself. I wanted to be there the day before styling the tables, tweaking the cutlery and making sure everything looked perfect because I enjoy that kind of stuff. If I could have done the flowers and cooked the food I probably would have as well! But it wasn’t just about being a control freak, the thing I was perhaps most looking forward to about planning a wedding (aside from all the lovey dovey stuff of course!) was that I could release my creativity. I have such an eye for detail and couldn’t wait to get stuck into all the beautiful styling touches that would bring the whole day together.

So this post is all about the finishing details that help set the scene, from the sign that first welcomes guests to the place settings that set the tone for the wedding dinner. Not to mention the 100 or so napkins I lovingly sewed weekend after weekend… Let’s dive in!

All imagery Tania Joy Gault

DIY wedding signage
First impressions count so I wanted to make sure that the signs welcoming guests played their part. You can spend a fortune on all the accessories and paraphernalia for a wedding, but we needed to cut some corners to keep in budget.

My mum and I made the wooden signs guiding guests into the church car park – I found some old planks of wood discarded on a street near my house (hurray, it was free!) and my mum painted them with stencils. Simple!

I also designed the minimalist signs for the wedding reception using InDesign, playing around with layouts until I was happy. The signs included a welcome sign, the order of the day and the seating plan, using a combination of Gill Sans and Baskerville fonts. I got them printed on A2 foam board at Online Reprographics in Islington, a printer I knew from my days as an architecture student. It cost me £60 to print all the signs, including some smaller signs with drinks menus.

I also designed the order of service booklets for the wedding ceremony using the same fonts to keep it consistent. I got them printed online at printed.com. It cost about £100 for 100 A5 booklets printed on high quality matte paper – I’d say you probably don’t need as many booklets as the numbers of guests, we could have got away with half that number with people sharing.

Styling the tables
For our venue, we needed to provide all the tableware and accessories for the dinner tables. I say needed, the caterer could have sourced everything, but there would have been no fun in that for me! Sourcing our own tables, crockery, glassware, cutlery, menus and napkins also again helped us cut some costs. It made things a bit more stressful and complicated but it was so worth it in the end when all the tables were beautifully laid just how I had first envisioned them.

Below you can see a quick mood board and mock up I made before the wedding. The vision was for a relaxed, nature-inspired scene, with wooden trestle tables, contemporary black cutlery, minimalist square cut glasses, wild foliage and striped linen napkins. You can see my Pinterest board with more inspiration here.

Making the linen napkins
Linen napkins are expensive (for good reason) – I found several beautiful designs on Etsy but I needed 100 and not for £5 or so a piece. During my search, I found another lovely company called Wonder Linen on Etsy [affiliate link] that sells washed linen fabric by the metre. Their Oeko-Tex linen is made in Lithuania and they have all sorts of colours to choose from. I chose the striped linen fabric [affiliate link] which is £15.49 a metre. I probably spent about £250 on fabric (and a little more on reels of thread) to make just over 100 napkins at 50 x 50 cm. And I still have some left that I’m planning to use to make cushions.

Once I got into the flow of cutting the fabric, ironing the seams down and running them through the sewing machine to make neat edge, it wasn’t too bad. I thought it was a breeze for perhaps the first 20 and then it got a bit more tiresome towards the end when I just wanted to get them all done. But by doing a couple each night and several at the weekend, the time flew quite quickly.

Instead of having wedding favours on the tables, what was lovely was that each guest could take home their napkin at the end of the evening. One family could therefore have a set of four, or a couple a set of two. By the end of the night, people were grabbing handfuls of the ones left over and we had to scrabble to save a few for ourselves! They went down a treat. I love the idea that they’re enjoying them everyday – it’s a nice little memory of the day.

The day before the wedding my bridesmaids helped me set out the tables and style the place settings. I showed them how to lay one setting and then we all got stuck in and added cutlery, menus and glassware, ready for the florist to lay the garlands on the day of the wedding. It was such a team effort and actually half the fun of the wedding is all the prep and anticipation!

The pale grey plates, black cutlery and the glasses were hired from Classic Crockery. The menus and place names were designed by Nat’s Paper Studio to match the wedding invites, with grey menus and black cards with each guest’s initials. The greenery by Worm London was designed to be wild and fragrant, running naturally along the centre of the table so as not to get in the way of the sharing plates being served.

If I’m being honest, I would have preferred different chairs, but that’s what the venue had and it wouldn’t have been worth the extra expense to hire other ones just for appearances. We also took down the red velvet curtains but we couldn’t remove the helmet, but you can’t have it perfect. It certainly didn’t matter on the day.

It was a bit of a squeeze to fit everyone in but I think it’s nice to have people closer together than further apart as it gives a cosy, intimate atmosphere. It was so lovely to see look across the room and see everyone enjoying the meal and noticing the little details I’d worked so hard on.

Later in the evening the sun came out and cast a magical golden glow over everything. We enjoyed our delicious, nature-inspired wedding cake by Scrumptious Catering – I didn’t want anything too ostentatious or the traditional ceremony of cutting the cake, instead it was an unfussy, simple affair, served on my grandma’s cake stand with a few sprigs of greenery. Half the wedding party being French, we also had to have a big cheese board. We chose a selection of French and English cheeses, including a brie that had been made in the UK using milk from French cows!

Guests could mingle around the rooms and later people gravitated towards the cosy library with the open fire and whiskey and sloe gin selection. At the library desk we also had a guest book (a simple brown paper photo album from Paperchase) that people could sign and leave us a message in.

We could supply our own drinks with no corkage fee, which greatly helped with costs. We ordered French wine and champagne from Vinatis but I also think that you can make an order at Majestic here in the UK and pick it up in Calais. The delivery was about £50, so we worked out that with the petrol there and back, it was easier to get it all delivered to the venue. For non alcoholic drinks and spirits, I kept an eye on deals on Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Tesco and ordered some bottles of gin and whiskey. For the tonic water, we had to make two orders, one on Ocado and one on Tesco, because they only allow you to purchase so many bottles at one time. We definitely over ordered, but it’s better to have too much than to run out of drinks. And now we have a supply of drinks for another year to come!

I hope that’s helped show that you can keep a wedding simple and stylish with a few thoughtful touches and DIY details. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing everything I’ve learnt from planning and styling a wedding, including where to save and where to splurge, and the things that are essential and the other things that you really don’t need. Thank you for reading and see you then!

Supplier details:
Reception venue: West Horsley Place
Photographer: Tania Joy Gault
Bride’s dress: Bon Bride
Groom’s Suit: Burberry
Bridesmaid dresses: Sézane
Flowers: Worm London
Caterer: Rhubarb
Cake: Scrumptious Catering
Menus: Nat’s Paper Studio
Napkin fabric: Wonder Linen
Table hire: Virginias Vintage Hire
Prop (tableware, glassware, cutlery) hire: Classic Crockery
Artificial candles: Amazon [affiliate link]
Drinks: Vinatis 
Sign printing: Online Reprographics